On the last Monday of most months, members gather at City Club Commons to discuss books that deal with civic issues. Led by guest moderators — often the authors themselves — these small-group discussions offer a way for bibliophiles to share their passion for literature and public life.

Upcoming Citizens Read Selections

Sometimes a Great Notion
by Ken Kesey

Monday, March 31 & April 28; 7:00 PM
City Club Commons
901 SW Washington
Free and open to the public
RSVP to 503-228-7231 or
Kim

Citizens Read will meet twice – on March 31 & April 28 – to discuss a great American novel Sometimes a Great Notion – by Oregon’s own Ken Kesey. This selection is designed to coincide with the world theatrical premier of Sometimes a Great Notion at Portland
Center Stage.

According to the publisher, Kesey’s novel is a “wild-spirited and hugely powerful tale of an Oregon logging clan. A bitter strike is raging in a small lumber town along the Oregon coast.
Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers: Henry, the fiercely vital and overpowering patriarch; Hank, the son who has spent his life trying to live up to his father; and Leland, Henry’s bookish younger son, who returns to his family on a mission of vengeance – and finds himself fulfilling it in ways he never imagined. Out of the Stamper family’s rivalries and betrayals, Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy.”

Purchase copies of these books from the City Club office and 10 percent of your purchase benefits City Club of Portland! Copies available during regular business hours at City Club office (901 SW Washington St.) or at our weekly Friday Forums.

Future Selections:

April 28: Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

Past Citizens Read Selections

• A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
  (in partnership with Multnomah County Library's Everybody Reads)
• Strange as this Weather has Been by Ann Pancake, January 2008
• Portland Red Guide: Stories from Portland's Radical Past by Michael Munk, November 2007
• Community and the Politics of Place by Daniel Kemmis, October 2007
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver & Plenty by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon, September 2007
• Having Everything Right: Essays of Place by Kim Stafford, June 2007
• The Place You Love is Gone: Progress Hits Home by Melissa Holbrook Pierson, May 2007
• The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, April 2007
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, March 2007
• Midnight at the Dragon Cafe by Judy Fong Bates, February 2007
• Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, January 2007
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, November 2006 
• Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee, October 2006
• Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, September 2006
• Storm Riders by Craig Lesley, July 2006
• City Limits, by David Oates, June 2006
• Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West, by Carl Abbott, May 2006
• Field Notes from a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert, April 2006
• American Vertigo, Bernard-Henri Lévy, March 2006
• The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, February 2006
• Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape and/or The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, by James Howard Kuntsler, December 2005/January 2006
• Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, by Morris P. Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope, November 2005
• Freakonomics, by by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, October 2005
• To the Flag, by Richard Ellis, September 2005
• Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck, August 2005
• Saturday, by Ian McEwan, July 2005
• The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth, June 2005
• The United States of Europe, by T. R. Reid, May, 2005
• Collapse, by Jared Diamond, April 2005
• The Portland Edge, edited by Connie Ozawa, March 2005
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, February 2005
• Bobos in Paradise, by David Brooks, January 2005
• No selection for December 2004
• What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank, November 2004
• The Values Divide, by John White, October 2004
• Resistance, by Barry Lopez, September 2004
• Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature, by David Oates, August 2004
• Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, July 2004
• Birth of the Chaordic Age, by Dee Hock, June 2004
• The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg, May 2004
• The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida, April 2004
• Portland: People, Politics and Power: 1851-2001, by Jewel Lansing, March 2004
• Better Together, by Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein, February 2004
• Oregon's Promise, by David Peterson Del Mar, January 2004