Rough Drafts Book Club
Exploring literature with an emphasis on masculinity, fatherhood, history, and adventure.
First Wednesdays. 7pm discussion at the Library, optional (but encouraged!) 8pm social hour at Tecumseh Tavern.
March 4th’s book is: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway’s most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal — a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.
I
March 2026
TDL Evening Book Club, March 16, 2026 at 6:30 pm
TDL Afternoon Book Club, March 18, 2026 at 3:00 pm
Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant
by Curtis Chan
Nineteen eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone—from the city’s first Black mayor to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to elderly Jewish couples—could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, or American-born Chinese; where he navigated the divided city’s spiraling misfortunes; and where—between helpings of almond boneless chicken, sweet-and-sour pork, and some of his own, less-savory culinary concoctions—he realized just how much he had to offer to the world, to his beloved family, and to himself.
Rough Drafts Book Club
Exploring literature with an emphasis on masculinity, fatherhood, history, and adventure.
First Wednesdays. 7pm discussion at the Library, optional (but encouraged!) 8pm social hour at Tecumseh Tavern.
April 1st’s book is: Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day’s sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic’s heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization.
I
April 2026
TDL Evening Book Club, April 15, 2026 at 6:30 pm
TDL Afternoon Book Club, April 20, 2026 at 3:00 pm
The Story She Left Behind
by Patti Callahan Henry
In 1927, eight-year-old Clara Harrington’s magical childhood shatters when her mother, renowned author, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, vanishes off the coast of South Carolina. Bronwyn stunned the world with a book written in an invented language that became a national sensation when she was just twelve years old. Her disappearance leaves behind not only a devoted husband and heartbroken daughter, but also the hope of ever translating the sequel to her landmark work. As the headlines focus on the missing author, Clara yearns for something far deeper and more insatiable: her beloved mother.
By 1952, Clara is an illustrator raising her own daughter, Wynnie. When a stranger named Charlie Jameson contacts her from London claiming to have discovered a handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language. Clara is skeptical. Compelled by the tragedy of her mother’s disappearance, she crosses the Atlantic with Wynnie only to arrive during one of London’s most deadly natural disasters—the Great Smog. With asthmatic Wynnie in peril, they escape the city with Charlie and find refuge in the Jameson’s family retreat nestled in the Lake District. It is there that Clara must find the courage to uncover the truth about her mother and the story she left behind.
May 2026
TDL Evening Book Club, May 18, 2026 at 6:30 pm
TDL Afternoon Book Club, May 20, 2026 at 3:00 pm
The Collected Regrets of Clover
by Mikki Brammer
From the day she watched her kindergarten teacher drop dead during a dramatic telling of Peter Rabbit, Clover Brooks has felt a stronger connection with the dying than she has with the living… Clover spends so much time with the dying that she has no life of her own, until the final wishes of a feisty old woman send Clover on a rip across the country to uncover a forgotten love story — and perhaps her own happy ending.