Clubs

The Sherrod Library Book Club provides an opportunity for the ETSU community to engage in materials they may not otherwise come across. Participants are asked to register, and will then be given a free copy of the semester's chosen title. The group meets twice a semester, during which time they are given the opportunity to discuss and digest content with other readers.

 The Fall 2025 read is The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (2019)

From the publisher: 

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.