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Books for Book Clubs August 2019
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Did you know? The High Plains Library District offers many services to support you and your book club! Book Club Bags: Each book club bag includes 12 copies of the book and a discussion guide, and best of all it comes with a 6-week checkout period! Book-a-Librarian for Book Clubs: Set up a face-to-face appointment for your book club with a librarian. From tips on running a successful discussion to presentations on hot new books, we're here to help! Just follow the link and select "Reading Advice" from the list of options. Personalized Reading Lists: If you'd like the personalized help from a librarian without the face-to-face meeting, this is the option for you! Simply fill out the survey, letting us know about the books your group loved (and loved to hate), and we'll send you a list of suggestions picked just for you! Books for Book Clubs Newsletter: Subscribe to this newsletter for monthly picks that are great for discussion, as well as notification of upcoming events and programs suited for book clubs.
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Fiction - Picks under 250 Pages
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Although sometimes it can seem like book club selections are chosen by how much they weigh, it is perfectly possible to find short books that are meaty enough to support good discussion. Here are four picks that should spark lots of questions, and not one of them passes the 250 page mark!
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Tin Man
by Sarah Winman
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award, a heartbreaking celebration of love in all its forms gradually reveals a fallout between two longtime friends and Oxford students over the course of a decade marked by the marriage of one and the disappearance of the other. By the author of When God Was a Rabbit.
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News of the World: A Novel
by Paulette Jiles
A live news reader traveling the antebellum south is offered $50 to bring an orphan girl, who was kidnapped and raised by Kiowa raiders, back to her family in San Antonio in this new novel from the author of Enemy Women.
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The Story of Arthur Truluv: A Novel
by Elizabeth Berg
Making daily visits to the grave of his beloved late wife, Arthur forges unexpected relationships with a nosy neighbor and a troubled teen who dubs him "Truluv" before the trio discovers healing and family together. By the best-selling author of Open House.
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Another Brooklyn: A Novel
by Jacqueline Woodson
Torn between the fantasies of her youth and the realities of a life marked by violence and abandonment, August reunites with a beloved old friend who challenges her to reconcile past inconsistencies and come to terms with the difficulties that forced her to grow up too quickly. Reading-group guide available. By a National Book Award-winning author.
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Non-Fiction - Picks under 250 Pages
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Even thought-provoking books of memoir, current events, or exploration can come in compact packages. Below are three examples of weighty non-fiction book club picks that won't weigh you down.
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The White Darkness
by David Grann
The #1 New York Times best-selling author of Killers of the Flower Moon traces the South Pole expedition of a decorated British special forces officer, an admirer and descendant of Ernest Shackleton's expedition, who in 2015 risked his life to walk across Antarctica alone.
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The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq
by Dunyā Mīkhā'īl
Describes the harrowing stories of women who escaped the Islamic State, all of whom said their hero was a beekeeper who used his knowledge of local terrain and a wide network of helpers and smugglers to get them to safety.
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Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
by Valeria Luiselli
Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin-American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman's essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction of the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants with the reality of racism and fear--both here and back home.
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Heart Berries: A Memoir
by Terese Marie Mailhot
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father-an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist-who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.
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High Plains Library District 2650 W. 29th St. Greeley, Colorado 80631 1.888.861.7323
www.mylibrary.us/ |
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