Our Shelf Indulgence Book Discussion Group gathers to discuss books that feature strong female characters or explore topics significant to women.
This group meets in two restaurants, depending on the day of the week. On Tuesdays, the meeting place is Sweet Basil Italian, 17610 Midway Rd, Dallas 75287. We gather at 6:30 p.m. to order our individual meals and begin discussion by 7:00 p.m.
For the Saturday discussion, we meet at Eggs Up Grill, 3427 Trinity Mills Road, Dallas 75287 at 9:00 a.m. in a room to the side of the main dining room.
Guests are always welcome to attend.
Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024 6:30 p.m. Sweet Basil Restaurant
Remarkable Creatures, Tracy Chevalier
On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, poor and uneducated Mary learns that she has a unique gift: “the eye” to spot ammonites and other fossils no one else can see. When she uncovers an unusual, fossilized skeleton in the cliffs near her home, she sets the religious community on edge, the townspeople to gossip, and the scientific world alight. After enduring bitter cold, thunderstorms, and landslips, her challenges only grow when she falls in love with an impossible man.
Discussion Leader: Jane Henry
Saturday, November 23, 2024 9:00 a.m. Eggs Up Grill
A Fever in the Heartland, Timothy Egan
The Roaring Twenties–the Jazz Age–has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.
Discussion Leader: Kari Gould
Tuesday, January 28, 2025 6:30 pm. Sweet Basil Restaurant
The Good Lord Bird, James McBride
Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1856–a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces–when legendary abolitionist John Brown arrives. When an argument between Brown and Henry’s master turns violent, Henry is forced to leave town–along with Brown, who believes Henry to be a girl and his good luck charm.
Discussion Leader: Viccy Kemp
Tuesday, March 25, 2025 6:30 pm. Sweet Basil Restaurant
Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class, Blair L.M. Kelley
Spanning two hundred years―from one of Kelley’s earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the Covid-19 pandemic―Black Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking jobs white people didn’t want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision and largely beyond white knowledge. As millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West, these networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike and laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights.
Discussion Leader: Jan McDowell
Saturday, May 24, 2025 9:00 a.m. Eggs Up Grill
Medgar and Myrlie, Joy Ann Reid
Myrlie Louise Beasley met Medgar Evers on her first day of college. They fell in love at first sight, married just one year later, and Myrlie left school to focus on their growing family. Medgar became the field secretary for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, charged with beating back the most intractable and violent resistance to black voting rights in the country. In this groundbreaking and thrilling account of two heroes of the civil rights movement, Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie’s relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today.
Discussion Leader: Bessie Dorsey Davis
