This week, The New York Times debuted its Big City Book Club with a lively discussion of Colum McCann’s National Book Award-winning novel, Let the Great World Spin:

From the Times:

We begin with “Let the Great World Spin,” Colum McCann’s award-winning 2009 novel, a portrait of the city in perhaps its most vivid period of decline. Set in the 1970s, the book is a 9/11 narrative by implication, Mr. McCann’s idea being that New York is, fundamentally, a place where wondrous things rise from the ashes. We can argue (and I hope we will) about whether or not he is right in his assessment, but I think it is fair to say that above all, “Let the Great World Spin’’ is an enormously hopeful book.

We love getting new books from our speakers here at Lavin. This week, we saw the arrival of Know the Past, Find the Future, a book on the New York Public Library’s 100 year anniversary. It features work from our speakers Kwame Anthony Appiah, Reza Aslan, and Colum McCann. Flanking it are David Eagleman’s neuroscience mind-bender, Incognito and John Elder Robinson’s collection of personal stories illustrating autistic thinking, Be Different.