The Book Club for Adults meets on first Thursday of each month (except January) at 6:30 pm in the Michigan Room at the library. Books are selected by the participants and the current and past lists are displayed behind the Information Desk at the library.
The August 5, 2010 Club selection is Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. Subtitled “A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together,” this is a nonfoction account of the growing friendship of two men who met on opposite sides of the serving line at a soup kitchem. The story is told in the alternating voices of Denver and Ron. Check out the book’s web site.
September 2, 2010 Club selection is The Postmistress by Sarah Blake. Weaving together the stories of three very different women loosely tied to each other, debut novelist Blake takes readers back and forth between small town America and war-torn Europe in 1940. Single, 40-year-old postmistress Iris James and young newlywed Emma Trask are both new arrivals to Franklin, Mass., on Cape Cod. While Iris and Emma go about their daily lives, they follow American reporter Frankie Bard on the radio as she delivers powerful and personal accounts from the London Blitz and elsewhere in Europe. While Trask waits for the return of her husband–volunteer doctor stationed in England–James comes across a letter with valuable information that she chooses to hide. Blake captures two different worlds–a naive nation in denial and, across the ocean, a continent wracked with terror–with a deft sense of character and plot, and a perfect willingness to take on big, complex questions, such as the merits of truth and truth-telling in wartime. from Publishers Weekly.
October 7, 2010 Club selection is The Secret Scripture by Sebastain Barry. In The Secret Scripture, Barry revisits County Sligo, Ireland, the setting for his previous three books, to tell the unforgettable story of Roseanne McNulty. Once one of the most beguiling women in Sligo, she is now a resident of Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital and nearing her hundredth year. Set against an Ireland besieged by conflict, The Secret Scripture is an engrossing tale of one woman’s life, and a vivid reminder of the stranglehold that the Catholic church had on individuals throughout much of the twentieth century. from Amazon.com review.
November 4, 2010 Club selection is Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles–and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined. from Amazon.com review.
December 2, 2010 Club selection is A Long Way From Chicago by Richard Peck. Set in the 1930′s the book follows Joe and Mary Alice Dowdel as they make their annual August trek to visit their grandmother who lives in a sleepy Illinois town somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis. A woman with plenty of moxie, she keeps to herself, a difficult task in this small community. however, Grandma Dowdel uses her wit and ability to tell whoppers to get the best of manipulative people or those who put on airs. She takes matters into her own hands to intimidate a father who won’t control his unruly sons, and forces the bank to rescind a foreclosure on a elderly woman’s house. from School Library Journal
February 3, 2011 Club selection is The Girl with Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Once you start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there’s no turning back. This debut thriller–the first in a trilogy from the late Stieg Larsson–is a serious page-turner. Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch–and there’s always a catch–is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues. Little is as it seems in Larsson’s novel, but there is at least one constant; you really don’t want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo. –Dave Callanan, Amazon
March 3, 2011 Club selection is Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. Thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle’s mother has disappeared. While tracing her steps on a car trip from Ohio to Idaho with her grandparents, Salamanca tells story to pass the time about a friend named Phoebe Winterbottom whose mother vanished and who received secret messages after her disappearance. One of the read, “Don’t judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.” Despite her father’s warning that she is “fishing in the air”, Salamanca hopes to bring her home. By drawing strength from her Native American ancestry, she is able to face the truth about her mother. Walk Two Moonswon the 1995 Newbery Medal. from Amazon.com review.
