The Year of Living Biblically

by A.J. Jacobs

January 25

Catalog

Summary: Documents the author's quest to live one year in literal compliance with biblical rules, from being fruitful and multiplying to growing a beard and avoiding mixed-fiber clothing. 

The Offer: Stan Pickering Meets the World

by Arthur Ford, who will be at the discussion!

February 22

Catalog

Summary: The Offer is a novel of travel. Just as he is becoming disenchanted with academics, Stan Pickering, a middle-fifties professor of English at a small college in Ohio, receives an unexpected gift of travel and a bequest to deliver packets at various stops around the world.

The Glass Castle

by Jeanette Walls

March 29

Catalog

Author's memoir of life with nomadic parents, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains, and retreating to a dismal West Virginia mining town. Walls documents her childhood with an alcoholic father and unattentive mother. As family disfunction escalated, Walls and her siblings had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.    

The Red Tent

by Anita Diamont

April 26

Catalog

Summary: The story of Dinah, a tragic character from the Bible whose great love, a prince, is killed by her brother, leaving her alone and pregnant. The novel traces her life from childhood to death, in the process examining sexual and religious practices of the day, and what it meant to be a woman.     

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

by Mary Ann Shaffer

May 24

Catalog

Summary: As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton discovers her next subject in a book club on Guernsey--a club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.

March

by Geraldine Brooks

Thursday, February 4

Catalog

Summary: In a story inspired by the father character in "Little Women" and drawn from the journals and letters of Louisa May Alcott's father, a man leaves behind his family to serve in the Civil War and finds his beliefs challenged by his experiences.

Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster

by Pope Brock

Tuesday, February 9

Summary: Recounts the career of America's most infamous con man, John Brinkley, who parlayed sales of worthless patent cures into a career as a famed surgeon specializing in the restoration of male virility, and details the decades-long efforts to bring him down.

The Forger's Spell

by Edward Dolnick

Thursday, March 4

Catalog:

Summary: Describes how a small-time Dutch painter conned a reviled Nazi leader by creating works that impersonated those of Jan Vermeer, a seven-year deception during which the forger hid his mediocre abilities through psychologically manipulative practices.

Beat the Reaper

by Josh Bazell

Tuesday, March 9

Catalog

Summary: The carefully orchestrated life of Manhattan emergency room doctor and witness-protection program participant Peter Brown unravels in the course of a day that begins with a mugging and a new patient who knows him from his previous existence.

The Year of Living Biblically

by A.J. Jacobs

Thursday, April 1

Catalog

Summary: Documents the author's quest to live one year in literal compliance with biblical rules, from being fruitful and multiplying to growing a beard and avoiding mixed-fiber clothing. 

The Day Wall Street Exploded

by Beverly Gage

Tuesday, April 13

Catalog

Summary: Just after noon on September 16, 1920, as hundreds of workers poured onto Wall Street for their lunchtime break, a horse-drawn cart packed with dynamite exploded in a spray of metal and fire, turning the busiest corner of the financial center into a war zone. Thirty-nine people died and hundreds more lay wounded, making the Wall Street explosion the worst terrorist attack to that point in U.S. history. In The Day Wall Street Exploded, Beverly Gage tells the story of that once infamous but now largely forgotten event.

Wolf Hall: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

(Man Booker Prize)

Thursday, May 6

Catalog

Summary: This novel won the highly-coveted Booker Prize in 2009.

Set in the 1520s, the novel is about the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the Tudor court of King Henry VIII.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

Tuesday, May 11

Catalog

Summary: A handsome dissolute man who sells his soul for eternal youth is horrified to see the reflection of his degeneration in the distorted features of his portrait.

South of Broad

by Pat Conroy

Thursday, June 3

Catalog

Summary: Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar.     

The Help

by Kathryn Stockett

Thursday, July 1

Catalog

Summary: In Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another.   

Mountains Beyond Mountains : The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

by Tracy Kidder

Thursday, August 5

Catalog

Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Dr. Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that "the only real nation is humanity" - a philosophy that is embodied in the small public charity he founded, Partners In Health. At the heart of this book is the example of a life based on hope, and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains": as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

by Jamie Ford

Thursday,
September 2

Catalog

Summary: This debut novel tells a heartwarming story of fathers and sons, first loves, fate, and the resilient human heart. Set in the ethnic neighborhoods of Seattle during World War II and Japanese American internment camps of the era, the times and places are brought to life (Jim Tomlinson, author of "Things Kept, Things Left Behind").

Hot, Flat and Crowded : why we need a green revolution -- and how it can renew America

by Thomas Friedman

Tuesday,
September 14

Catalog

Summary: Friedman's bestseller "The World Is Flat" has helped millions of readers to see globalization in a new way. Now the author brings a fresh outlook to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy.     

A Reliable Wife

by Robert Goolrick

October 12

Catalog

Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife." But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" that Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by greed.

People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

November 9

Catalog

Summary: In 1996, Hanna Heath, a young Australian book conservator is called to analyze the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a priceless six-hundred-year-old Jewish prayer book that has been salvaged from a destroyed Bosnian library.The story of the book's journey unfolds as Hanna discovers a series of artifacts in the centuries' old binding.

Triangle : the fire that changed American

by David Von Drehle

December 14

Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen

January 26

Catalog

Summary: In 18th century Bath, a girl bursting with freshness and passion for macabre Gothic novels experiences intrigue, adventure, and romance, especially when the romantic Henry Tilney invites her to his ancestral home.     

Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat Who Touched The World

by Vicki Myron and Bret Witter

February 23

Catalog

Summary: The charming story of Dewey Readmore Books, the beloved library cat of Spencer, Iowa. 

3rd Degree

by James Patterson

**March 23

Catalog

Summary: Detective Lindsay Boxer, Assistant D.A. Jill Bernhardt, and the other members of the Women's Murder Club try to find out who is responsible for a series of violent incidents, all with links to political terrorism and the sinister "August Spies."

Great Expectations

by Charles Dickens

April 27

Catalog

Summary: The orphan, Pip, and the convict, Magwitch, the beautiful Estella, and her guardian, the embittered and vengeful Miss Havisham, the ambitious lawyer, Mr. Jaggers -- all have a part to play in the mystery.

Kitchen Privileges

by Mary Higgins Clark

May 25

Catalog

Summary: In a memoir of growing up in the Bronx during the Depression, the author recalls her father's death in 1939, her family's financial woes, and her mother's creation of a rooming house, bringing in tenants who would change their lives.

Leaves of Grass

by Walt Whitman

**June 22 

Catalog

Summary: Presents Whitman's classic collection celebrating himself and the American experience.

Bridges of Madison County

by Robert James Waller

July 27

Catalog

Summary: The story of Robert Kincaid, a world-class photographer, and Francesca Johnson, an Iowa farm wife. When he drives through the heat and dust of an Iowa summer and turns into her farm lane looking for directions, they are joined in a passionate, deeply moving encounter.     

Three Musketeers

by Alexandre Dumas

August 24

Catalog

Summary: In seventeenth-century France, young D'Artagnan initially quarrels with, then befriends, three musketeers and joins them in trying to outwit the enemies of the king and queen.     

Ethan Frome

by Edith Wharton

**September 28

Catalog

Summary: A New England farmer must between his duty to care for his invalid wife and his love for her cousin.

One Book, One Community Title TBA

October 26

Twenty Wishes

by Debbie Macomber

November 23

Catalog

Summary: Thirty-eight-year-old widow Anne Marie Roche, the owner of a successful Seattle bookstore, creates a list of twenty wishes, and, while acting upon her wishes, encounters an eight-year-old girl named Ellen who helps her complete her list--with unexpected results.  

December

No meeting.  Happy holidays!

The Other Boleyn Girl

by Philippa Gregory

January 25

Catalog

Summary: The daughters of a ruthlessly ambitious family, Mary and Anne Boleyn are sent to the court of Henry VIII to attract the attention of the king, who first takes Mary as his mistress, in which role she bears him an illegitimate son, and then Anne as his wife.

The Pearl Diver
by Jeff Tularigo

February 8

Catalog

Summary: In 1948, a nineteen-year-old pearl diver's dreams of spending her life combing the waters of Japan's Inland Sea are shattered when she discovers she has leprosy. By law, she is exiled to an island leprosarium, where she is stripped of her dignity and instructed to forget her past.   

Galileo's Daughter
by Dava Sobel

March 8

Catalog

Summary: Presents a biography of the scientist through the surviving letters of his illegitimate daughter Maria Celeste, who wrote him from the Florence convent where she lived from the age of thirteen.

The Devil in the White City
by Erik Larson

May 10

Catalog

Summary: An account of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 relates the stories of two men who shaped the history of the event--architect Daniel H. Burnham, who coordinated its construction, and serial killer Herman Mudgett.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
by David Wroblewski

June 14

Catalog

Summary: A tale reminiscent of "Hamlet" that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to find the cause of his father's death, after his paternal uncle returns and implants himself into the family.  

Soldier's Heart :
reading literature through peace and war at West Point

by Elizabeth D. Samet

July 12

Catalog

Summary: In this personal account of her ten years teaching English at West Point, Samet writes eloquently of students' ideas about what they read, the literary side of military life, and the effects of literature on those who know they will go to war.

The Inheritance of Exile :
stories from South Philly

by Susan Muaddi Darraj.

Catalog

Summary: Darraj pens a collection of stories that follow Palestinian-American immigrant families in South Philadelphia. Four friends, Nadia, Aliyah, Hanan and Reema, each comes from a family with its own story of exile.

The Life of Pi

by Martell, Yann.

Catalog

Summary: This brilliant fabulist novel combines the delight of Kipling’s “Just So Stories” with the metaphysical adventure of “Jonah and the Whale,” as Pi, the son of a zookeeper, is marooned aboard a lifeboat with a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger.

The Color of Water : a black man's tribute to his white mother

by James McBride

Catalog

Summary: The true story of James McBride and his mother—a rabbi’s daughter, born in Poland and raised in the South, who fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a church, and put 12 children through college.

A Bend in the River

by V.S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man—an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

The Milagro Beanfield War: A Novel

by John Nichols

Summary: The day Joe Mondragon illegally irrigated his parent’s beanfield was the day change came to the small southwestern town of Milagro. How a small town of disenfranchised people came to rally over Joe’s beanfield and reclaim their own lost rights is a story that remains funny, fresh, and inspiring. 

Message in a Bottle

by Nicholas Sparks

Catalog

Summary: Divorcee Theresa Osborne thinks she is done with love, but when she plucks a message from a bottle found on the beach, she becomes obsessed with finding the man who had written a tender love letter to Catherine.

Heart of Darkness

by Joseph Conrad

Catalog

Summary: Marlow, Conrad’s famous maritime wanderer and narrator, spins a story with a mysterious thread: how he shipped on a steamer bound for Africa; how he landed on the banks of the “the big river”; and how he first heard the name Kurtz, the enigmatic figure at the heart of darkness.

The Water is Wide

by Pat Conroy

Catalog

Summary: The first-person account of the year spent by the author teaching black children on an impoverished island off the South Carolina coast.

A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

by Michael Dorris

Catalog

Summary:Moving backward in time, Dorris’s critically acclaimed debut novel is a lyrical saga of three generations of Native-American women beset by hardship and torn by angry secrets.

Robinson Crusoe

by Daniel Defoe

Catalog

Summary:The diary of an Englishman shipwrecked for almost thirty years on a small isolated island where, using wit and industry, he manages to build life anew.

Like Water for Chocolate

by Laura Esquivel

Summary: Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit.

Water for Elephants

by Sara Gruen

Catalog

Summary: When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town.

Skinny Dip

by Carl Hiaasen

Summary: Joey Perrone takes revenge on her husband after he tries to kill her and she learns that he’s been part of a scam that is polluting the Everglades.

A River Runs Through It

by Norman McClean

Catalog

Summary: Based on Norman Maclean’s childhood experiences, A River Runs Through It has established itself as one of the most moving stories of our time with vivid descriptions of life along Montana’s Big Blackfoot River and its near-magical blend of fly fishing with the troubling affections of the heart.