Fall Reading Group
AIPCT is pleased to announce its fall reading group, beginning September 17, and running Wednesday nights until November 19. We will read Isabel Allende‘s classic work, The House of Spirits, led by Odessa “Katrina” Colombo. The reading schedule is below. The group is free and open to the public.
We will meet in person at 7:00 pm central time, at the AIPCT, 411 N. 9th Street in Murphysboro. It is possible to join the discussion online. Send a request for a link to personalist61@gmail.com. We will use Teams. Typically the discussion will last until 9. Light snacks and drinks are provided, but participants may bring their own snacks to share, and their own favored beverage for themselves.
The edition of the book we will use is here. Atria Books edition, 2015.
Reading Schedule:
September 17, 2025 Chapter 1
September 24, 2025 Chapter 2 & 3
October 01, 2025 Chapter 3 & 4
October 08, 2025 Chapter 5
October 15, 2025 Chapter 6
October 22, 2025 Chapter 7
October 29, 2025 Chapter 8 & 9
November 05, 2025 Chapter 10 & 11
November 12, 2025 Chapter 12 & 13
November 19, 2025 Chapter 14 & Epilogue
About the Group Leader
Odessa (aka) “Katrina” Colombo is a Senior Business Manager at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She holds a B.S. in Finance, a B.A. in philosophy and earned her M.A. in philosophy (2011) from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her interest in philosophy consists of the history of philosophy, Eastern philosophy, and existentialism. She is particularly focused on the epistemology of faith and cultural narratives. She led the AIPCT reading group on Women Who Run with the Wolves in Spring 2019.
About the Book
A best seller and critical success all over the world, The House of the Spirits is the magnificent epic of the Trueba family — their loves, their ambitions, their spiritual quests, their relations with one another, and their participation in the history of their times, a history that becomes destiny and overtakes them all.
We begin — at the turn of the century, in an unnamed South American country — in the childhood home of the woman who will be the mother and grandmother of the clan, Clara del Valle. A warm-hearted, hypersensitive girl, Clara has distinguished herself from an early age with her telepathic abilities — she can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, the fabled Rosa the Beautiful, Clara has been mute for nine years, resisting all attempts to make her speak. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon.
Her husband-to-be is Esteban Trueba, a stern, willful man, given to fits of rage and haunted by a profound loneliness. At the age of thirty-five, he has returned to the capital from his country estate to visit his dying mother and to find a wife. (He was Rosa’s fiance, and her death has marked him as deeply as it has Clara.) This is the man Clara has foreseen — has summoned — to be her husband; Esteban, in turn, will conceive a passion for Clara that will last the rest of his long and rancorous life.
We go with this couple as they move into the extravagant house he builds for her, a structure that everyone calls “the big house on the corner,” which is soon populated with Clara’s spiritualist friends, the artists she sponsors, the charity cases she takes an interest in, with Esteban’s political cronies, and, above all, with the Trueba children…their daughter, Blanca, a practical, self-effacing girl who will, to the fury of her father, form a lifelong liaison with the son of his foreman…the twins, Jaime and Nicolas, the former a solitary, taciturn boy who becomes a doctor to the poor and unfortunate; the latter a playboy, a dabbler in Eastern religions and mystical disciplines…and, in the third generation, the child Alba, Blanca’s daughter (the family does not recognize the real father for years, so great is Esteban’s anger), a child who is fondled and indulged and instructed by them all.
For all their good fortune, their natural (and supernatural) talents, and their powerful attachments to one another, the inhabitants of “the big house on the corner” are not immune to the larger forces of the world. And, as the twentieth century beats on…as Esteban becomes more strident in his opposition to Communism…as Jaime becomes the friend and confidant of the Socialist leader known as the Candidate…as Alba falls in love with a student radical…the Truebas become actors — and victims — in a tragic series of events that gives The House of the Spirits a deeper resonance and meaning.
It is the supreme achievement of this splendid novel that we feel ourselves members of this large, passionate (and sometimes exasperating) family, that we become attached to them as if they were our own. That this is the author’s first novel makes it all the more extraordinary. The House of the Spirits marked the appearance of a major, international writer.
About the Author
Isabel Allende is one of the most widely read authors in the world, having sold more than seventy-seven million books. Born in Peru and raised in Chile, Isabel won worldwide acclaim in 1982 with the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Since then, she has authored more than twenty-six bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including Daughter of Fortune, Island Beneath the Sea, Paula, and The Wind Knows My Name.
In 1996, following the death of her daughter, Paula, Allende established a charitable foundation in her honor. The foundation has awarded grants to more than one hundred nonprofits worldwide, delivering life-changing care to hundreds of thousands of women and girls.
In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded Allende the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and in 2018 she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. Allende lives in California.