Program Description
Event Details
Join us for the Pacific Beach Library's monthly book discussion! Our group meets in a hybrid format, so you can choose whether you'd prefer to join us in-person in the PB Library's Community Room or virtually (please send an email to cwainwright@sandiego.gov for this year's Teams login info).
Description: 2014 : At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife's birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, 'A Corona for Vivien'. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery. 2119 : Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, 'A Corona for Vivian'. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem's discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well. What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
If you'd like to check out a print copy of the book, they are available 1 month before each discussion at the Pacific Beach Library's Circulation Desk. Please call 858-581-9934 x0 before coming to pick it up so that staff may confirm availability.
Book Discussion Calendar
- January 8, 2026: Select titles to discuss in 2026
- February 12: James by Percival Everett
- March 12: The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See
- April 9: The Feather Thief : Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson
- May 14: Feeding Ghosts by Tess Hulls
- June 11: The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
- July 9: The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson
- August 13: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
- September 10: Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach
- October 8: What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
- November 12: One Book, One San Diego selection (to be announced)
- December 10: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
- January 14, 2027: Select titles to discuss in 2027
- February 11, 2027: An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin