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Book Club Kits Updated September 2020 |
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Book club kits can be checked out for a 6 week period. Each kit includes 8 copies of a title, 1 discussion guide, and some also include an audio book. New titles are added frequently.
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How to be an antiracist
by Ibram X. Kendi
A best-selling author, National Book Award-winner and professor combines ethics, history, law and science with a personal narrative to describe how to move beyond the awareness of racism and contribute to making society just and equitable.
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The stationery shop
by Marjan Kamali
"Roya is a dreamy, idealistic teenager living in 1953 Tehran who, amidst the political upheaval of the time, finds a literary oasis in kindly Mr. Fakhri's neighborhood book and stationery shop. She always feels safe in his dusty store, overflowing with fountain pens, shiny ink bottles, and thick pads of soft writing paper. When Mr. Fakhri, with a keen instinct for a budding romance, introduces Roya to his other favorite customer--handsome Bahman, who has a burning passion for justice and a love for Rumi's poetry--she loses her heart at once. And, as their romance blossoms, the modest little stationery shop remains their favorite place in all of Tehran. A few short months later, on the eve of their marriage, Roya agrees to meet Bahman at the town square, but suddenly, violence erupts--a result of the coup d'etat that forever changes their country's future. In the chaos, Bahman never shows. For weeks, Roya tries desperately to contact him, but her efforts are fruitless. With a sorrowful heart, she resigns herself to never seeing him again. Until, more than sixty years later, an accident of fate leads her back to Bahman and offers her a chance to ask him the questions that have haunted her for more than half a century: Why did he leave? Where did he go? Howwas he able to forget her? The Stationery Shop is a beautiful and timely exploration of devastating loss, unbreakable family bonds, and the overwhelming power of love"
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The second mountain : the quest for a moral life
by David Brooks
The best-selling author of The Road to Character presents a thought-provoking exploration of the qualities of a meaningful life, drawing on inspirational examples to offer advice about personal philosophies, a vocation, faith, relationships and community life
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530 p. c2014 A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast. By the award-winning author of About Grace. |
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347 p. c 2013
The bestselling author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café presents a hilarious new mystery that, spanning decades, generations and America in the 1940s and today, centers around five women who worked in a Phillips 66 gas station during the WWII years. |
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c1971 The classic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel traces the lives and fortunes of four generations of one family as they attempt to build a life for themselves in the American West.
may be available in audiobook/mp3 |
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227 p. c2009
An evocative memoir of family and growing up in the tough, violent world of Baltimore in the 1980s chronicles the relationship between the author and his father, a Vietnam vet and Black Panther affiliate, and his steadfast, if sometimes eccentric, campaign to keep his sons from falling victim to the seductive temptations of the streets. 40,000 first printing. |
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278 p. c2015
We first met the likeable Los Gatos P.I., Grady Prescott, in Hobo Ashes, as he struggled to quit the bottle, regain his self-confidence, and resolve a long-standing murder case. Now Grady runs a fast-paced race toward resolving a complicated set of crimes that stack on top of each other with the plot and character twists that begin and end near the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Grady’s fiancée, Hazel, sticks right by his side through murder and muggings—or does she? |
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c2002
When fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold accompanies his grandmother on an expedition to find a humanoid beast in the Amazon, he experiences ancient wonders and a supernatural world as he tries to avert disaster for the Indians.
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322p. c2016
A five-decade saga tracing the impact of an act of infidelity on the parents and children of two Southern California families traces their shared summers in Virginia and the disillusionment that shapes their lasting bond. |
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Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine : a novel
by Gail Honeyman
The story of a quirky yet lonely woman whose social misunderstandings and deeply ingrained routines could be changed forever—if she can bear to confront the secrets she has avoided all her life. But if she does, she’ll learn that she, too, is capable of finding friendship—and even love—after all.
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Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
Rene is the concierge of a Parisian apartment building. She is passionate about culture and the arts. Several floors up, 12-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous future laid out for her. But unknown to them both, the sudden death of one of their privileged neighbours will dramatically alter their lives forever.
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The friend
by Sigrid Nunez
Becoming the guardian of her late best friend's enormous Great Dane, a grieving woman is evicted from her no-pets apartment and forges a deep bond with the equally distraught animal in ways that initially disturb her friends. By the award-winning author of Salvation City.
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462 p. c2016 includes audiobook
Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin, where he endures life in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history unfold. By the best-selling author of Rules of Civility. |
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c2009
The descendant of a seventeenth-century master glassblower who sold secrets on how to make mirrors, Corradino leaves her unhappy life in London behind to follow in her ancestor's footsteps in Venice |
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264 p. c2016 includes audiobook
Shares the poignant story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author, a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle-class life and the collective demons of the past. 25,000 first printing. |
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The immortalists
by Chloe Benjamin
After getting readings from a psychic reputed to be able to tell customers when they will die, four siblings from New York's Lower East Side hide what they learn from each other before living five decades of experiences shaped by their determination to control fate. Reprint. A New York Times best-seller.
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c2014
Traces more than three decades in the lives of a wealthy Charleston debutante who longs to break free from the strictures of her household and pursue a meaningful life; and the urban slave, Handful, who is placed in her charge as a child before finding courage and a sense of self. By the best-selling author of The Secret Life of Bees.
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303 p. c2014
College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. |
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Little Bee
by Chris Cleave
The Somerset Maugham Award-winning author of Incendiary presents a tale of a precarious friendship between an illegal Nigerian refugee and a recent widow from suburban London, a story told from the alternating and disparate perspectives of both women. A best-selling novel.
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337p. c2014 includes audiobook
A curmudgeon hides a terrible personal loss beneath a cranky and short-tempered exterior while clashing with new neighbors, a boisterous family whose chattiness and habits lead to unexpected friendship |
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331 p. c2012
A modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. |
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The namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
An incisive portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life, in a debut novel that spans three decades, two continents, and two generations. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies. Reprint.
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Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A reunion with two childhood friends--Ruth and Tommy--draws Kath and her companions on a nostalgic odyssey into the supposedly idyllic years of their lives at Hailsham, an isolated private school in the serene English countryside, and a dramatic confrontation with the truth about their childhoods and about their lives in the present. 100,000 first printing.
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Quiet : the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking
by Susan Cain
Demonstrates how introverted people are misunderstood and undervalued in today's culture, charting the rise of extrovert ideology while sharing anecdotal examples to counsel readers on how to use introvert talents to adapt to various situations and empower introverted children.
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Red at the bone
by Jacqueline Woodson
As Melody celebrates a coming of age ceremony at her grandparents’ house in 2001 Brooklyn, her family remembers 1985, when Melody’s own mother prepared for a similar party that never took place in this novel about different social classes. (general fiction). (This book was listed in a previous issue of Forecast.)
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c2013
A socially awkward genetics professor who has never been on a second date sets out to find the perfect wife, but instead finds Rosie Jarman, a fiercely independent barmaid who is on a quest to find her biological father.
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324 p. c2011A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a Greenwich Village jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults witty Wall Street secretary Katey Kontent into the upper echelons of New York society, where she befriends a shy multi-millionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well and a single-minded widow.
may be available in audiobook/mp3 |
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The secret diary of Hendrik Groen
by Hendrik Groen
The riotous journal of an octogenarian who is far from reaching the end of his life traces a year in his care home in Amsterdam, revealing the ups and downs of his misadventures with the anarchic "Old-But-Not-Dead Club" and a crush whom he courted to devastating effect.
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c2011 A researcher at a pharmaceutical company, Marina Singh must step out of her comfort zone when she is sent into the heart of the Amazonian delta to check on a field team that has been silent for two years--a dangerous assignment that forces Marina to confront the ghosts of her past.
may be available in audiobook/mp3
may be available in e-book |
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c2011 Describes the love story between a developmentally disabled young white woman and an deaf African American after being institutionalized in 1968, in this new novel from the author of Riding the Bus With My Sister.
may be available in audiobook/mp3 |
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c2013
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
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The tenth muse : a novel
by Catherine Chung
Determined to conquer the Riemann hypothesis in the face of cultural discrimination against women intellectuals, a genius mathematician uncovers a mysterious theorem's unexpected World War II link to her family. 75,000 first printing.
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c2010
Dispatched to the influential Japanese port of Dejima in 1799, ambitious clerk Jacob de Zoet resolves to earn enough money to deserve his wealthy fiancée, an effort that is challenged by his relationship with the midwife daughter of a samurai.
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The water dancer : a novel
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Virginia slave narrowly escapes a drowning death through the intervention of a mysterious force that compels his escape and personal underground war against slavery. By the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me. (historical fiction).
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Where the crawdads sing
by Delia Owens
Viewed with suspicion in the aftermath of a tragedy, a beautiful hermit who has survived for years in the marsh becomes targeted by unthinkable forces. A first novel by the New York Times best-selling author of Cry of the Kalahari
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Where'd you go, Bernadette : a novel
by Maria Semple
When her notorious, hilarious, volatile, talented, troubled and agoraphobic mother goes missing, teenage Bee begins a trip that takes her to the ends of the earth to find her. By the author of This One is Mine.
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c2007
Hired as a housekeeper to work on the early 1900s Montana homestead of widower Oliver Milliron, the irreverent and perpetually whistling Rose and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris, endeavor to educate the widower's reluctant sons while witnessing local efforts on a massive irrigation project.
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White chrysanthemum
by Mary Lynn Bracht
Having spent her entire youth under Japanese occupation, a young woman in World War II-era Korea follows in her mother's footsteps as an elite female diver only to be forced into prostitution in order to save her beloved younger sister, who decades later resolves to find healing and closure from the ghosts of the past.
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c2014
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet . . . So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue—in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party.
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includes mp3 audiobook
369 p. c2011
Stranded on Mars by a dust storm that compromised his space suit and forced his crew to leave him behind, astronaut Watney struggles to survive in spite of minimal supplies and harsh environmental challenges that test his ingenuity in unique ways. A first novel.
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c2014
Close to aging out of the foster care system, Molly Ayer takes a position helping an elderly woman named Vivian and discovers that they are more alike than different as she helps Vivian solve a mystery from her past
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c2014
When his most prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, is stolen, bookstore owner A. J. Fikry begins isolating himself from his friends, family and associates before receiving a mysterious package that compels him to remake his life.
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Alpha girls : the women upstarts who took on Silicon Valley's male culture and made the deals of a lifetime
by Julian Guthrie
"Alpha Girls is reporter Julian Guthrie's powerful account of four women pioneers in the field of venture capital who bucked the system and found ways to survive and thrive in the cutthroat, high-stakes, male-dominated world of Silicon Valley. The closed-doors investment decisions made by venture capitalists have the power to fund new startups and shape our economy, our technology, and our world. They have enabled the very existence of many of the world's most profitable companies. Known for their risk-taking and prescient investments, the VC community has reaped tens of billions of dollars and has become the envy of Wall Street. Yet thanks to the "bro-grammer culture" that rules the VC world, it is a cabal that is almost a foreign country for women. A mere 6 percent of general partners at VC firms are women; roughly 80 percent of VC firms have never had a woman general partner. But there are a few. Armed with unprecedented access to the secretive VC universe, Guthrie uncovers one of the great untold stories of the digital era. Against all odds, a small cadre of women--pioneers who Guthrie calls the "alpha girls"--have determinedly made their way despite harassment, second-class citizenship, and men stealing the credit and the rewards, to become powerhouses of the finance world. Through their grit and smarts and determination, they helped to launch the IPOs of some of the biggest tech firms. In Alpha Girls, Guthrie tells their story"
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c2015 Traces the story of an American rowing team from the University of Washington that defeated elite rivals at Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics, sharing the experiences of such contributors as their enigmatic coach, a visionary boat builder and a homeless teen rower. By the author of Under a Flaming Sky.
may be available in audiobook/mp3 |
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Educated : a memoir
by Tara Westover
Traces the author's experiences as a child born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, describing her participation in her family's paranoid stockpiling activities and her resolve to educate herself well enough to earn an acceptance into a prestigious university and the unfamiliar world beyond.
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Becoming
by Michelle Obama
An intimate and uplifting memoir by the former First Lady chronicles the experiences that have shaped her remarkable life, from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago through her setbacks and achievements in the White House.
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c2011
An account of mid-19th-century botanist Robert Fortune's mission to travel to China's remote Wu Yi Shan hills to steal closely guarded secrets of tea horticulture and manufacturing describes his encounters with pirates, threatening weather and unethical people.
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c2004
A thought-provoking re-evaluation of Genghis Khan's rise to power sheds light on the revolutionary reforms the conqueror instituted throughout his empire--including religious freedom, diplomatic immunity, and the creation of the Silk Road free-trade zone--as well as on his uniting of the East and West, which set the foundation for the nation-states and global economic systems of the modern era. 50,000 first printing.
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c2009 Documents the story of how scientists took cells from an unsuspecting descendant of freed slaves and created a human cell line that has been kept alive indefinitely, enabling discoveries in such areas as cancer research, in vitro fertilization and gene mapping.
may be available in audiobook/mp3 |
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Inheritance : a memoir of genealogy, paternity, and love
by Dani Shapiro
The acclaimed author of Hourglass describes her staggering recent discovery that she is not biologically related to her father, tracing her efforts to uncover the truth from a half-century web of family secrets to reestablish her sense of identity
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c 2015
Recounts the author's life and career, sharing his experiences as a neurologist in the early 1960s, his obsession with motorcycles and speed, and finding a long-forgotten illness in the wards of a New York chronic hospital
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c2012
A Harvard-trained neurosurgeon shares the near-death experience he had after an extremely rare illness attacked his brain, sending him into a deep coma from which he awakened with a new belief in heaven, God and the soul.
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c2009
Recounts the activities of John Drewe, who manipulated struggling artist John Myatt and other unwitting accomplices to become prolific art forgers whose works Drewe successfully passed off as legitimate pieces.
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You don't have to say you love me : a memoir
by Sherman Alexie
The National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian presents a literary memoir of poems, essays and intimate family photos that reflect his complicated feelings about his disadvantaged childhood on a Native American reservation with his siblings and alcoholic parents.
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164 p. c2017
When you take away the habits of your life, you get to the question of Who am I? And if you sit with that, you get to the question of How far am I willing to go to find the answers? If you are Anne Heffron, someone who had no idea where she was the first ten weeks of her life, you'll give away almost everything you own, pack what's left, and head for the city of your birth on a voyage you call Write or Die with the pledge you won't go home until you find what's real about yourself. And that's when miracles happen. |
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Zeitoun
by Dave Eggers
Documents the story of a long-time New Orleans resident who was forced to stay behind during Hurricane Katrina while the rest of his family evacuated, describing how he spent days after the storm traveling by canoe to feed abandoned animals before he was inexplicably arrested.
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c2011
The author discusses his time spent 10,000 feet above ground as a fire lookout in a remote part of New Mexico, a job where he witnessed some of the most amazing phenomena nature has to offer.
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c2009 The author offers a novel based on the life of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who learned to break horses in childhood, journeyed 500 miles on a pony as a teen to become a teacher, and ran a vast ranch in Arizona with her husband while raising two children, including Rosemary Smith Walls, portrayed in the author's acclaimed The Glass Castle.
may be available in additional audiobook/mp3 |
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c2011 Follows the author's incarceration for drug trafficking, during which she gained a unique perspective on the criminal justice system and met a varied community of women living under exceptional circumstances.
may be available in additional audiobook/mp3 |
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320 p. c2015 Chronicles the story-behind-the-story about the Wright brothers, sharing insights into the disadvantages that challenged their lives and their mechanical ingenuity |
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