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If you belong to a book discussion group or would like to start one, you're invited to check out our selection of book discussion kit titles provided by the Friends of the Longmont Public Library .
Each book bag contains ten copies of a title selected specifically for book discussions by our librarians, along with a notebook with discussion questions and information about the author.
Book in a Bag Basics (Adobe .pdf file, 63kb)
Book in a Bag Brochure (.pdf file, 110kb)
In addition to our own collections, the Longmont Library is now partnering with the Colorado State Library to provide Colorado Library Connection Book Bags, which can be borrowed through inter-library loan. There are more than 115 titles to choose from. One difference is that the Colorado Library Connection Book Bags don't have study guides. For more information about this new program, see the brochure on the link below. Descriptions of the titles that are available are available on the link below.
Colorado State Library brochure (.pdf file, 74kb)
Colorado State Library book descriptions (.pdf file, 215kb)
Selections
by Rick Bragg
A celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter turns his investigative attention to his own past: growing up poor and making his way from rural Alabama to the top of his profession. Bragg, who was born in 1959, is poetic and convincing on his family's poverty and how it chipped away at their dreams. His father, violent and an alcoholic, figures here, as do his siblings, but this is above all a son's story of love and respect for a mother who picked cotton, cleaned houses, and took in washing and ironing, determined to secure for her children the chance at a successful life that poverty had denied her.
by Garth Stein
A heart-wrenching but funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty and hope, The Art of Racing in the Rain is a look at the wonders and absurdities of human life as only a dog could tell it. Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television, and by listening very closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver. Through Denny, Enzo has gained tremendous insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing, isn't simply about going fast. Using the techniques needed on the race track, one can successfully navigate all of life's ordeals.
by Nick Arvin
In this story of an 18-year-old sent to Omaha Beach in August 1944, first-novelist Arvin captures the horror, chaos, and waste of war and the fear of those who fight. Fear is the overriding emotion felt by George Tilson of rural Iowa, known as "Heck". Before he controls his fear, Heck cowers in a hole and falls behind his unit, sustains a minor non-combat injury and doesn't try to get back to the front, and deliberately draws enemy fire to get out of combat, all the while surrounded by death and destruction, with soldiers blown up beside him, and the memory of an encounter with a French girl as counterpoint.
by Ian McEwan
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives brings about a crime that will change all their lives. As it follows that crime’s repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every level.
by Jonathan Raban
Jonathan Raban has written a vivid social history of the homesteading movement in eastern Montana that went boom and bust during the first three decades of this century. It is the story of a dream turned sour that still echoes in the western American consciousness. Lured by free land from the government and a deceptive publicity campaign mounted by the local railroad, thousands from all over the eastern United States and northern Europe went to Montana to make their fortune as farmers. Raban follows the stories of several families, many of which end in heartbreak.
Beautiful Boy: a father’s journey through his son’s addiction
by David Sheff
From as early as grade school, the world seemed to be on Nic Sheff's string. Bright and athletic, he excelled in any setting and appeared destined for greatness. Yet as childhood exuberance faded into teenage angst, the precocious boy found himself going down a much different path. Seduced by the illicit world of drugs and alcohol, he quickly found himself caught in the clutches of addiction. Beautiful Boy is Nic's story, but from the perspective of his father, David. It chronicles the betrayal, pain, and terrifying questions that haunt the loved ones of an addict. His journey provides those in similar situations with a commodity that they can never lose: hope.
by John Shors
Shors's debut novel tells the story of the eldest daughter of the 17th-century emperor who built the Taj Mahal. Jahanara recalls the devotion her parents, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, had for each other. Although Jahan is the emperor and has many wives, Mumtaz (he calls her Taj) is his soul mate, a constant companion and wise political consultant. She even travels with him into battle, where she eventually dies. Fortunately, she’s had the foresight to begin preparing Jahanara, by instructing the girl in the arts of influence and political strategy. Thus the young woman is able to pick up where her savvy mother left off. Shors give a real sense of the times, bringing the world of imperial Hindustan and its royal inhabitants to vivid life.
by Michael Lewis
This is the inspirational story of Michael Oher, a homeless black teen taken under the wing of the Touhys, a wealthy white Memphis family. Oher’s size and speed on the football field bring him accolades. But learning the game’s strategy and making it as a student take the help of his new family, coaches, and tutor.
Blink: The power of thinking without thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
How do we think without thinking, seem to make choices in an instant — in the blink of an eye — that actually aren’t as simple as they seem? Gladwell's conclusion, after studying how people make instant decisions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police work, is that we can make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses to focus on the most relevant facts, and that less input (as long as it's the right input) is better than more.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao*
by Junot Diaz
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tells the story of Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the fukú the ancient curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and ill-starred romance. Oscar, still dreaming of his first kiss, is only its most recent victim until the fateful summer that he decides to be its last.
* Please note that this book has some explicit content.
by Charles Frazier
Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learn to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away.
by Edwidge Danticat
Danticat's novel focuses on the lives affected by a "dew breaker," or torturer of Haitian dissidents under Duvalier's regime. Each chapter reveals the titular man from another viewpoint, including that of his grown daughter, who learns the secret of his violent past.
by Lyndsay Faye
From the gritty streets of nineteenth century London, the loyal Dr. Watson offers a tale unearthed after generations of lore: the harrowing story of Sherlock Holmes's attempt to hunt down Jack the Ripper. Holmes is unwavering in his quest to capture the killer. When Holmes is wounded during an attempt to catch the savage monster, the press launches an investigation of its own, questioning the great detective's role in the very crimes he is so fervently struggling to prevent. Stripped of his credibility, Holmes is left with no choice but to break every rule in the desperate race to find the madman before it is too late. From the gritty streets of nineteenth century London, the loyal Dr. Watson offers a tale unearthed after generations of lore: the harrowing story of Sherlock Holmes's attempt to hunt down Jack the Ripper. Holmes is unwavering in his quest to capture the killer. When Holmes is wounded during an attempt to catch the savage monster, the press launches an investigation of its own, questioning the great detective's role in the very crimes he is so fervently struggling to prevent. Stripped of his credibility, Holmes is left with no choice but to break every rule in the desperate race to find the madman before it is too late.
by Elizabeth Gilbert
Gilbert pens an irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life. Driven to despair by a punishing divorce and an anguished love affair, Gilbert flees New York for sojourns in the three Is. She goes to Italy to learn the language and revel in the cuisine, India to meditate in an ashram, and Indonesia to reconnect with a healer in Bali. As Gilbert switches from gelato to kundalini Shakti to herbal cures Balinese-style, she ponders the many paths to divinity, the true nature of happiness, and the boon of good-hearted, sexy love.
by Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver and Priscilla Warner
Ranya Idliby is a Palestinian Muslim; Suzanne Oliver, an ex--Catholic now in the Episcopal Church; and Priscilla Warner, Jewish. Initially, the idea behind establishing a faith club was simple--the three women would collaborate on an interfaith children's book emphasizing the connections among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that would reinforce the common heritage the three religions share. Almost from the start, differences that culminated in conflict emerged. All three agreed that to work together they had to be brutally candid, "no matter how rude or politically incorrect." Eventually--and as they make abundantly clear, not easily--conflict and anger gave way to a special kind of understanding and respect.
Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
by Ruth Reichl
Reichl focuses on her life as a food critic, dishing up a feast of fabulous meals enjoyed during her tenure at The New York Times. As a critic, Reichl was determined to review the "true" nature of each restaurant she visited, so she often dined incognito--each chapter of her book highlights a new disguise, a different restaurant, and a fresh culinary adventure. As Reichl metes out her critical stars, she gives a remarkable account of how one's outer appearance can influence one's inner character, expectations, and appetites.
by Jeff Talarigo
Set on China's fraught, ruggedly beautiful border with North Korea, Talarigo's tense, atmospheric novel dramatizes the human faces behind political oppression. A middle-aged Chinese man—whose mother was Chinese and father was Korean—maintains a quiet life gathering the valuable ginseng root. In strict adherence to family traditions, he takes only a single root a day. Once a month he stays overnight in the city of Yanji, at Miss Wong's bordello. On one such trip, he spends the night with a young North Korean refugee who tells a harrowing story of oppression. Alternating with her story is the tale of a North Korean mother and young daughter who are forcibly separated during famine; the daughter washes up tragically at the gatherer's door, while the mother might or might not be the refugee prostitute.
by Jeannette Walls
In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex uprooted their kids time and again, the children were left largely to their own devices. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing to the horrific. Though the author has earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. On the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them resonates from cover to cover.
by Marilynne Robinson
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer
Winding up her book tour promoting her collection of lighthearted wartime newspaper columns, Juliet Ashton casts about for a more serious project. Opportunity comes in the form of a letter she receives from Mr. Dawsey Adams. Adams is a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—no ordinary book club. Rather, it was formed as a ruse and became a way for people to get together without raising the suspicions of Guernsey’s Nazi occupiers. Written in the form of letters, this novel has loads of charm, especially as long as Juliet is still in London corresponding with the society members. Juliet finds in the letters not just inspiration for her next work, but also for her life.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life.
After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a renunciation of wealth and return to nature. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death.
Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia
by Carmen Bin Ladin
In the early 1970’s, Swiss-born Carmen fell in love with Yeslam bin Ladin, Osama's older brother, and the two married in Saudi Arabia. By Saudi Wahhabi custom, women are usually confined to the home. Only Carmen's daughters, occasional international trips and her understanding husband helped her cope. Then Carmen's husband reverted to a more orthodox lifestyle in 1979. In 1988, Yeslam divorced Carmen, but by bringing charges against her in Saudi Arabia, made certain she feared for her life if she ever again entered an Islamic country.
The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers
by Harry Bernstein
When Bernstein, who is in his 90s, was a boy, his older sister Lily was in love with Arthur. This would not have been a problem except that Arthur was Christian and Lily was Jewish, and in their pre-Great War mill town in northern England, an invisible wall ran down their street, separating them. Barriers were finally broken as Lily refused to give up either Arthur or her mother. A groundbreaking story of family secrets and forbidden love told in plain, beautiful prose through the eyes of a young Jewish boy.
Kabul Beauty School
by Deborah Rodriguez
In 2002, just months after the Taliban had been driven out of Afghanistan, Rodriguez, a hairdresser from Michigan, joined a small aid organization on a mission to the war-torn nation. That visit changed her life. In Kabul, she chronicles her efforts to help establish the country's first modern beauty school and training salon; along with music and kite-flying, hairdressing had been banned under the previous regime. Rodriguez was entranced with the delightful personalities that emerged when her students removed their burqas behind closed doors, but her book is also a tale of empowerment, both for her and the women.
by Khaled Hosseini
The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul , and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever.
by Elizabeth Gilbert
Eustace Conway discovered nature's wonders as a boy growing up in South Carolina during the 1960s. Miserable at home, a born perfectionist and fanatic, he took to the woods and developed wilderness skills unknown to most modern Americans. By the time he finished high school and moved into a teepee (his abode for 17 years), he was convinced that only encounters with "the high art and godliness of nature" could help save American society from its wasteful habits and trivial pursuits.
by Yann Martel
The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a cargo ship, along with their zoo animals. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his companions a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a Bengal tiger. Martel's potentially unbelievable plot line soon demolishes the reader's defenses, cleverly set up by events of young Pi's life that almost naturally lead to his biggest ordeal.
by Chris Cleave
Little Bee, a young Nigerian refugee, has just been released from the British immigration detention center where she has been held under horrific conditions for the past two years, after narrowly escaping a traumatic fate in her homeland of Nigeria. Alone in a foreign country, without a family member, friend, or pound to call her own, she seeks out the only English person she knows. Sarah is a posh young mother and magazine editor with whom Little Bee shares a dark and tumultuous past.
They first met on a beach in Nigeria, where Sarah was vacationing with her husband, Andrew, and their brief encounter has haunted each woman for two years. Now together, they face a disturbing past and an uncertain future with the help of Sarah's four-year-old son, Charlie, who refuses to take off his Batman costume. A sense of humor and an unflinching moral compass allow each woman, and the reader, to believe that even in the face of unspeakable odds, humanity can prevail.
The Long Walk: The true story of a trek to freedom
by Slavomir Rawicz
In 1941, the author and six other fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk--a camp where enduring hunger, cold, untended wounds, untreated illnesses, and avoiding daily executions were everyday feats. Their march--over thousands of miles by foot--out of Siberia, through China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India is a remarkable statement about man's desire to be free.
by Lisa Scottoline
Ellen Gleeson was balancing life as a single mother and a reporter as well as could be expected. She had taken on single parenthood voluntarily, having fallen in love with her adopted son, Will, now three, when he was a sick infant. A have-you-seen-this-child postcard featuring a child who could be Will’s twin catches Ellen’s attention, and she becomes obsessed with the missing child and with pursuing more details about Will’s background. Her questions multiply when she learns that, just after she adopted Will, the attorney who handled the proceedings killed herself. Where is the birth mother, and why doesn’t her family know that she was pregnant? The answer only leads to danger, but Ellen, is hell-bent on finding the truth, no matter the cost.
The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken
by Laura Schenone
The author undertakes a quest to retrieve her great grandmother's ravioli recipe, reuniting with relatives as she goes. In lyrical prose and delicious recipes, Schenone takes the reader on an unforgettable journey from the grit of New Jersey's industrial wastelands to the dramatically beautiful coast of Liguria—the family's homeland—with its pesto, smoked chestnuts, torte, and, most beloved of all, ravioli, the food of celebration and happiness.
The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
Sebold's novel is a small but far from minor miracle. Sebold has taken a grim, media-exploited subject and fashioned from it a story that is both tragic and full of light and grace. The novel begins swiftly. In the second sentence, Sebold's narrator, Susie Salmon, announces, "I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." Susie is taking a shortcut through a cornfield when a neighbor lures her to his hideaway. The description of the crime is chilling, but never vulgar, and the author maintains this delicate balance as she depicts the progress of grief for Susie's family and friends. Sebold's most dazzling stroke is to narrate the story from Susie's heaven, providing the warmth of a first-person narration and the freedom of an omniscient one. In Susie's every observation and memory is the reminder that life is sweet, funny and surprising.
by Geraldine Brooks
Brooks’s novel imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. An idealistic cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves. His narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to prevent and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier. The author's beautifully written novel drives home the horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering.
The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards
David Henry's life was turning out as he hoped. He was a doctor, married to a beautiful woman, Norah, with a baby on the way. But everything changed overnight because of one fateful decision. On a winter evening in 1961, a blizzard brewing, Norah goes into labor. Due to the weather, they could only make it to the clinic, not the hospital, and only Caroline, the nurse, arrived to help deliver the baby. David delivers his own child, a perfectly healthy son. But when Norah continues her labor, David realizes she is carrying twins; and the second child, a girl, is born with Down syndrome. Wanting to protect his wife from the devastating news, David gives the child to Caroline to take to an institution, asking her never to reveal the secret. Caroline takes the baby and disappears. The Memory Keeper's Daughter explores deception, family secrets, the influence of the past on the present, and the tenuous nature of human connections.
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress
by Rhoda Janzen
Not long after Rhoda Janzen turned forty, her world turned upside down. It was bad enough that her husband of fifteen years left her for Bob, a guy he met on Gay.com, but that same week a car accident left her injured. Needing a place to rest and pick up the pieces of her life, Rhoda packed her bags, crossed the country, and returned to her quirky Mennonite family's home, where she was welcomed back with open arms and offbeat advice.
by John Grogan
John and Jenny were young and in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wiggly yellow furball of a puppy—and their life would never be the same. Marley quickly grew into a barreling, ninety-seven-pound steamroller of a Labrador retriever who crashed through screen doors, flung drool on guests, stole women's undergarments, devoured couches and fine jewelry, and was expelled from obedience school. Yet Marley's heart was pure, and he remained a steadfast model of love and devotion for a growing family through pregnancy, birth, heartbreak, and joy, right to the inevitable goodbye.
by Sue Monk Kidd
This is the soulful tale of Jessie Sullivan, a middle-aged woman whose stifled dreams and desires take shape during an extended stay on Egret Island , her childhood home, where she is caring for her troubled mother. While Kidd places an obvious importance on the role of mysticism and legend in this tale, including the mysterious mermaid's chair at the center of the island's history, the relationships between characters is what gives this novel its true weight.
Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee
by Charles Shields
The twentieth-century's most widely read American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, has sold more than thirty million copies. Yet despite the book's popularity, its creator, Harper Lee has become a mysterious figure. Now, after years of research, Charles Shields has brought to life the warmhearted, high-spirited, and occasionally hardheaded woman who gave us two of American literature's most unforgettable characters —Atticus Finch and his daughter, Scout. Mockingbird is the first book ever written about Harper Lee. This is an evocative portrait of a writer, her dream, and the place and people whom she made immortal.
by Tracy Kidder
Tracy Kidder is a Pulitzer Prize winner and has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the "master of the non-fiction narrative." This book shows how one person can make a difference, as Kidder tells the true story of a gifted doctor who is in love with the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it.
by Abraham Verghese
Nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town of Johnson City saw its first AIDS patient in August 1985. Working in Johnson City was Abraham Verghese, a young Indian doctor specializing in infectious diseases who became, by necessity, the local AIDS expert. Out of his experience comes a startling, ultimately uplifting portrait of the American heartland.
by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge , Massachusetts , where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting old ways in a new world.
by Elie Wiesel
A watershed memoir first published in 1958, Elie Wiesel's Night has become widely recognized as a masterpiece. In eloquent, unflinching scenes, Night recalls Wiesel's survival as a teenager in Nazi death camps. Each chapter raises questions that have haunted the world since Hitler's rise: How could such a staggering number of innocents have lost their lives at the command of one regime? What does it take to survive when body, mind, and spirit are brutalized for months, even years? Why does God seem to forsake those who suffer?
by Tricia Tunstall
Tricia Tunstall explores the enduring fascination of the piano lesson. Even as everything else about the world of music changes, the piano lesson retains its appeal. Drawing on her own lifelong experience as a student and teacher, Tunstall writes about the mysteries and delights of piano teaching and learning. What is it that happens in a piano lesson to make it such a durable ritual? In a world where music is heard more often on the telephone and in the elevator than in the concert hall, why does the piano lesson still have meaning in the lives of children?
Obsessive Genius: the inner world of Marie Curie
by Barbara Goldsmith
Through family interviews, diaries, letters, and workbooks that had been sealed for over sixty years, Barbara Goldsmith reveals the Marie Curie behind the myth—an all-too-human woman struggling to balance a spectacular scientific career, a demanding family, the prejudice of society, and her own passionate nature. Obsessive Genius is a dazzling portrait of Curie, her amazing scientific success, and the price she paid for fame.
by Leona Rostenberg
Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern's charming bibliocentric memoir is as much about relationships as it is about books. The two recount the stories of their lives in alternating sections. And oh, what lives they've had! From identifying some of Louisa May Alcott's previously anonymous early writings to traveling the world in search of rare volumes and pamphlets, they have done and seen it all. Successful antiquarian book dealers Rostenberg and Stern undoubtedly are, but as this memoir makes clear, their greatest accomplishment just might be that rarer commodity of friendship that lasts a lifetime.
by Per Peterson
In this quiet, compelling novel, Trond Sander, a widower nearing seventy, moves to a bare house in remote eastern Norway, seeking a life of quiet contemplation. A chance encounter with a neighbor—the brother, as it happens, of his childhood friend Jon—causes him to ruminate on the summer of 1948, the last he spent with his adored father. Trond’s recollections center on a single afternoon, when he and Jon set out to take some horses from a nearby farm; what began as an exhilarating adventure ended abruptly and traumatically. Loss is conveyed with all the intensity of a boy’s perception, but acquires new resonance in the brooding consciousness of the older man.
by Jane Austen
Jane Austen's perfect comedy of manners features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues.
by Richard Yates
April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous suburb in the mid-1950s. However, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America.
by Homer Hickam
In 1957, 14-year-old Homer Hickam decided to build his own rockets. They were his ticket out of Coalwood, West Virginia, a mining town that everyone knew was dying -everyone except Sonny's father, the mine superintendent and a company man so dedicated that his family rarely saw him. Hickam's mother wanted her son to become something more than a miner and, along with a female science teacher, encouraged the efforts of his grandiosely named Big Creek Missile Agency.
by Irene Spencer
Irene Spencer did as she felt God commanded in becoming the second wife to her brother-in-law Verlan LeBaron. When the government raided their community-the Mormon village of Short Creek, Arizona-seeking to enforce the penalties for practicing polygamy, Irene and her family fled to Verlan's family ranch in Mexico. Here they lived in desolate conditions with Verlan's six brothers, one sister, and numerous wives and children. This astonishing autobiography has captured the attention of readers around the world.
by David Guterson
San Piedro Island is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries--memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and a Japanese girl. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.
by Sandra Dallas
Soon after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government rounded up Japanese residents of the West Coast and shipped them off to "internment camps" for the duration of the war. One of the camps is Tallgrass, based on an actual Colorado camp. The discomforts and indignities these (mostly) American citizens had to endure are viewed through the clear eyes of a young girl who lives on a nearby farm, Rennie Stroud. Rennie's love of family slowly extends itself to the Japanese house and field helpers the Strouds receive permission to hire. An ugly murder is central to this compelling historical novel, but the focus is on the appealing Stroud family.
by Annie Proulx
Bob Dollar is a young man from Denver trying to make good in a bad world. Out of college and aimless, Dollar takes a job with Global Pork Rind, scouting out big spreads of land that can be converted to hog farms. Soon he's holed up in a two-bit Texas town called Woolybucket, where he settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Café, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old Texas ranch owners will hold on to their land, even when their children want no part of it.
by Zora Neale Hurston
An enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. Hurston's masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today as when it was first published.
by Tim O’Brien
They carried malaria tablets, love letters, 28-pound mine detectors, dope, illustrated Bibles, each other. And, if they made it home alive, they carried unrelenting images of a nightmarish war that history is only beginning to absorb. Since it was first published, The Things They Carried has become an unparalleled Vietnam testament, a classic work of American literature and a profound study of men at war that illuminates the capacity, and the limits, of the human heart and soul.
by Greg Mortenson
In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time--Greg Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.
by Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird is the story of the early childhood of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, chronicling the humorous trials and tribulations of growing up in Maycomb, Alabama, from 1933 to 1935. Maycomb's small-town Southern atmosphere contributes to the security of Scout's world, just as pervasive forces of racism threaten to unsettle it. Scout's devotion to her older brother, and her hero-worship of her father, the defense attorney Atticus Finch, infuse this story with an uncommon intimacy and affection. When Atticus is assigned a case defending a local black man who has been unjustly accused of rape by a poor white woman from a family of ill-repute, Scout explores her beliefs, her father's moral obligations, and the dynamics of her community. As the untroubled realm of her childhood collides with the adult world of the courthouse, Scout discovers that redemption -- salvation, even -- can come from unexpected sources.
by Carol Shields
Reta Winters lives with her physician husband and three daughters in a farmhouse outside Ontario. Well, all three of Reta's daughters used to live there; Norah, now 19, currently spends her time in silent contemplation, holding a begging bowl on a Toronto street corner. During the course of her anguish over her daughter's renunciation of her middle-class upbringing, Reta, a writer, tries to put life back into reasonable order in the pages of her new novel. Her need to bring her daughter back within the family fold arises from the very wellspring of motherhood, and the reader witnesses her attempted retrieval of happiness with open-hearted understanding.
Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen
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. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her.
by Peter Godwin
When journalist Peter Godwin learns that his father is gravely ill, he flies home to Zimbabwe. Godwin seizes this opportunity to get to know both his father and his country better. He finds Zimbabwe in a sad state in the late 1990s. Disgruntled veterans of the Rhodesian war and mobs of young men are terrorizing and sometimes killing white farmers and seizing their land with the tacit approval of Robert Mugabe's government. On the personal front, Godwin's mother reveals a surprising secret: his father's real name is Jerzy Goldfarb, and he is actually a Jew born in Poland before World War II.
by Ivan Doig
"Can't cook but doesn't bite." So begins the ad offering the services of an "A-1 housekeeper" that draws the attention of widower Oliver Milliron in the fall of 1909. And so also begins the unforgettable season that deposits the noncooking, nonbiting, ever-whistling Rose Llewellyn and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias Coulee, Montana. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is pressed into service, setting the stage for the "several kinds of education"--none of them of the textbook variety. Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three sons, and the rambunctious students in the region's one-room schoolhouse.
The Worst Hard Time
by Timothy Egan
Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague. "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster—the Depression—and natural disaster—eight years of drought—resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity.
by Diane Ackerman
Diane Ackerman tells the remarkable WWII story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, and his empathetic wife, Antonina. With courage and coolheaded ingenuity, these individuals sheltered 300 Jews and Polish resisters in their villa and in animal cages and sheds. Using Antonina's diaries, other contemporary sources and her own research in Poland, the author takes us into the Warsaw ghetto and the 1943 Jewish uprising and also describes the Poles' revolt against the Nazi occupiers in 1944.
last revised 07/19/10
