Books By The Lake
This book discussion group combines the enjoyment of reading a single title and the desire to share insights, observations, and feelings about that one book with others who have read it. So many novels create a need in some readers to share their reactions about the book with others, as well as an opportunity to personally grow from the discussions of related themes and common experiences.
The next gathering of Beebe Library's book discussion group, Books By the Lake, is on May 21, 2008 when the book group will discuss Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.
Ever want to run away to the circus? This is a compelling story of a 23-year-old-man who does just that, following a searing personal loss and the numbness that distances his sorrow and panic. Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope. This is a coming-of-age tale, with a bit of danger, romance, and sadness laced through the realistic account of human spirits struggling to survive the only way they know how—day by day.
Book Discussions are planned for the third Wednesday of the month September through June at 7:30pm. All adult patrons enthusiastic about reading and talking about what they have read are invited to attend as often as they can. The conversations are lively, intelligent, and insightful--come and join us!
There are some copies of each title available at the Beebe Library, so reserve and pick up your copy as soon as possible.
If you are looking for information on starting or sustaining a Book Discussion Group, try The Nuts and Bolts of Book Groups or So You Want to Start a Book Discussion Group... Information Page.
September 2006 to June 2007.
Those group members who attended the meetings in February through April 2007 voted for the following titles for September 2007 through June 2008:
The first selections are read over the summer and discussed:
The story of Anne Elliot and the love she once had for a naval officer drives Austen's Persuasion. Anne had been persuaded by her family that he was not suitable. And regretfully, she lets him slip away. Years later, they meet again. In Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, six Californians get toegether to for a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, as their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love. In Horowitz's first novel, The Family Fortune, Jane, the sensible middle daughter in an old-guard Boston Brahmin family whose once enormous fortune has vanished, finds herself the sole support of her family until love turns her life upside down. This stunning novel reveals the interconnected lives, loves, and relationships of different generations of the McLeod family over the course of three crucial summers in stunning prose. (2002).
This is a gripping tale about two men -- one a creative genius, the other a mass murderer -- who turned the 1893 Chicago World's Fair into their playground. Set against the dazzle of a dream city whose technological marvels presaged the coming century, this real-life drama of good and evil unfolds with all the narrative tension of a fictional thriller. (2003)
Gilbert, author of Stern Men, chronicles her intrepid quest for spiritual healing, and her sensuous and audacious spiritual odyssey is found here to be as deeply pleasurable as it is enlightening. (2006)
In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twins during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from their baby daughter's affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child. (2006)
Conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Kate begins to question her moral obligations in light of countless medical procedures and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body. (2004)
In this Booker Prize Winner, in a crumbling house in the remote northeastern Himalayas, an embittered, elderly judge finds his peaceful retirement turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai.
(2006)
As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets. (2004)
Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope. (2006)
An astonishingly rich re-creation of the land of Oz, this book retells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who wasn't so wicked after all. Taking readers past the yellow brick road and into a phantasmagoric world rich with imagination and allegory, Wicked just might change the reputation of one of the most sinister characters in literature. Also a Broadway musical. (1995)
Jane Austen's Persuasion, Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, and Laurie Horowitz's The Family Fortune.
Meeting 4th week due to Thanksgiving previous week.
Holiday Potluck begins at 7:00pm
Meeting in Trustees’ Room
Title suggestions for 2007-2008 season due.
Ballots due.
Meeting in Trustees’ Room
End-of-Year Potluck begins at 7:00pm.
The Group Leader brings copies of the next title to each meeting.
"Metaphors matter to me, especially perfect ones," Yale historian Eire writes in this beautifully fashioned memoir, as he recounts one of many wonderfully vibrant stories from his boyhood in 1950s Havana. (2002).
In a novel of alternative history, aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, negotiating an accord with Adolf Hitler and accepting his conquest of Europe and anti-Semitic policies. (2004)
During his senior year at an elite New England prep school, a young
man who had struggled to fit in with his contemporaries finds his life unraveling due to the school's obsession with literary figures and their work. (2003)
This is the story of one man’s experiences inside the intrigue, greed, corruption and little-known government and corporate activities that America has been involved in since World War II, and which have dire consequences for the future of democracy and the world. (2005)
Rand's magnum opus is a philosophical thriller, the story of a society's slow collapse as the men of ability go on strike against the creed that treats them as sacrificial animals. From the blast furnaces of a steel mill to the drawing rooms of high society, from the classrooms of philosophers to the decks of a pirate ship, Ayn Rand portrays the role of reason in Man's life. (1957)
Traveling from India to New England and back again, the stories in this debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. (1999)
The novel chronicles the journeys of three Brahmin women as they follow divergent paths from their home in Calcutta and a rigid Indian society to seek new lives for themselves on two separate continents. (2002)
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, two boys are sent to the country for reeducation, where their lives take an unexpected turn when they meet the beautiful daughter of a local tailor and stumble upon a forbidden stash of Western literature. (2001)
Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old son of a man killed in the World Trade Center attacks, searches the five boroughs of New York City for a lock that fits a black key his father left behind. (2005)
At the center of this book stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life’s calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. This magnificent book shows how radical change can be fostered in situations that seem insurmountable, and it also shows how a meaningful life can be created, as Farmer—brilliant, charismatic, charming, both a leader in international health and a doctor who finds time to make house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti—blasts through convention to get results. Discussion will be lead by Group member.(2003)
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become compatriots. (2002)
In a world where one can literally get lost in literature, Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection, tries to stop the world's Third Most Wanted criminal from kidnapping characters, including Jane Eyre, from works of literature. (2002)
The story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who, under the auspices of the U.S. government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians. The covert and controversial "Brides for Indians" program, launched by the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, is intended to help assimilate the Indians into the white man's world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time. (1998)
A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover—these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. (1984)
The true story of what it was like growing up in Mao's China, where the soul was secondary to the state, beauty was mistrusted, and love could be punishable by death. Newsweek calls Anchee Min's prose "as delicate and evocative as a traditional Chinese brush painting.” (1995)
Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son, in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy to the atrocities of the present day. (2003)
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother. (2003)
While leading their lives in their gated hilltop community in Los Angeles, Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher accidently meet Mexican illegal aliens and their encounter brings them together in a relationship of error and misunderstanding. (1995)
After her "stand-in mother," a bold black woman named Rosaleen, insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens joins Rosaleen on a journey to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters. (2002)
A vivid, deeply felt, and meticulously researched account of the disastrous encounter between two disparate cultures: Western medicine and Eastern spirituality. In this case, the Lees, a Hmong refugee family in Merced, CA and their daughter Lia who was seven years old and, in the eyes of her American doctors, brain dead. In the Lees' view, Lia's soul had fled. (1997)
Meet thirty-three-year-old Clara Hutt: irreverent, sometimes unkind, always self-deprecating. Clara is a part-time magazine writer with a perpetually mysterious husband and two small boys, and some days she wakes up with the feeling that her life isn't all it should be. With razor-sharp wit and a healthy dose of insight into married life, India Knight takes readers on a continually entertaining ride through one woman's bumpy search for fulfillment. (2001)
Cross combines legend with historical fact in a novel about Joan of Ingelheim, the female pope. Born in 814 to an English missionary father and a Saxon mother, Joan is frustrated by the limitations imposed on her life because she is a girl. After disguising herself as a boy in order to get the education she seeks, she eventually makes her way to Rome, where her gifts as a healer enable her to become the confidante of two popes. In the midst of vicious papal politics, Joan becomes pope herself. (1996)
Ten different novels are interwoven into one. Each chapter begins a new book, a new plot, and a different writing style--stories of menace, spies, mystery, and premonition--with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and the Other Reader try to reach, and read, each other. (1981)
The major events of Booker Prize winner McEwan's novel occur one day in the summer of 1935. Briony Tallis, a precocious 13-year-old with an overactive imagination, witnesses an incident between Cecilia, her older sister, and Robbie Turner, son of the Tallis family's charwoman. Already startled by the sexual overtones of what she has seen, she is completely shocked that evening when she surreptitiously reads a suggestive note Robbie has mistakenly sent Cecilia. It then becomes easy for her to believe that the shadowy figure who assaults her cousin Lola late that night is Robbie. Briony's testimony sends Robbie to prison and, through an early release, into the army on the eve of World War II. Gradually understanding what she has done, Briony seeks atonement first through a career in nursing and then through writing, with the novel itself framed as a literary confession it has taken her a lifetime to write. (2002)
The story of a century lived in the mythic village of Macondo, somewhere in South America. The Buendia family struggles to create a life in a place where everything is larger than life and the rain never stops. (1971)
In this intimate and poignant history of a sprawling century-old summerhouse on Cape Cod, Colt reveals not just one family's fascinating story but a vanishing way of life. Faced with the sale of the treasured house where he had spent forty-two summers, Colt returned for one last August with his wife and young children. The Big House, the author's loving tribute to his one-of-a-kind family home, interweaves glimpses of that elegiac final visit with memories of earlier summers spent at the house and of the equally idiosyncratic people who lived there over the course of five generations. (2003)
Meet Pi Patel, a young man on the cusp of adulthood when fate steps in and hastens his lessons in maturity. En route with his family from their home in India to Canada, their cargo ship sinks, and Pi finds himself adrift in a lifeboat -- alone, save for a few surviving animals, some of the very same animals Pi's zookeeper father warned him would tear him to pieces if they got a chance. But Pi's seafaring journey is about much more than a struggle for survival. It becomes a test of everything he's learned -- about both man and beast, their creator, and the nature of truth itself. (2002)
Spanning 70 years and three generations, this is an eloquent and profoundly moving tale of family, race, and redemption. In the early years of this century, Nathan Walker and his fellow sandhogs daily risk their lives burrowing beneath New York City's East River to build the tunnels that will one day connect Manhattan and Brooklyn. Years later, Nathan's descendant, a homeless man who calls himself Treefrog, is driven by guilt and a shameful secret to eke out a marginal existence in these
same tunnels. (1999)
This classic describes the clash between Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter of a country gentleman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a rich and aristocratic landowner. Austen reverses the convention of first impressions: "pride" of rank and fortune, and "prejudice" against Elizabeth's inferiority of family, hold Darcy aloof; while Elizabeth is equally fired both by the pride of self-respect and by prejudice against Darcy's snobbery. Ultimately, they come together in love and self-understanding. (1813)
The intensely affecting story of family, tribulation, and tenacity, is set on the High Plains east of Denver where in the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher struggles to raise his two sons alone. (1999)
A bookish, lonely child, his crush on the Bard's work became love when, as an alienated teenager, he joined the American Shakespeare Theatre as Hamlet's dresser. In time he would dress other characters, perform in small roles, become a coach and a watcher, and eventually lead senior citizens' groups in Shakespeare-appreciation courses. But this ecstatic marriage was haunted by his sad, contorted childhood. (2003)
This funny and courageous novel is about a professor whose sense of humor is tested by the cosmic joke. Hank Devereaux, Jr., failed novelist, creative writing teacher, and estranged son of one of academe's stars, is a hero whose cynicism must be mitigated by his love for family, friends and, ultimately, knowledge itself. (1998)
Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives. A Science Fiction classic that has often been a Banned Book. (1993)
In this much-lauded novel, Enid faces the disappointments in her life as her husband's health deteriorates, including her three grown children. This wry book about family dysfunction from city to city was never discussed on the Oprah Show because of the author's wishes. (2001)
When Bob Greene went home to central Ohio to be with his dying father, it set off a chain of events that led him to knowing his dad in a way he never had before, thanks to a quiet man who lived just a few miles away and changed the history of the world. In 1945, Paul Tibbets had piloted a plane called Enola Gay to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where he dropped the atomic bomb. (2000)
When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated mountain village, a housemaid emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through her eyes, we follow the story of the plague year, 1666, as her fellow villagers make an extraordinary choice. Convinced by a visionary young minister, they elect to quarantine themselves within the village boundaries to arrest the spread of the disease. (2001)
Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring
Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue.
And...if you can find & fit them in:
Harriet Scott Chessman's Lydia Cassat Reading the Morning Paper
Katharine Weber's
The Music Lesson.
Previous titles discussed in 1998 were Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve, and Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison.
If you have any questions, please contact Leane Ellis at the Reference Desk (Extension 102) or leave a message on her voice mail at 246-6334, #204.
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