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

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

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

by Tracy Kidder

Catalog

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.