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Adult Book Discussion Group
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Reading List for 2010
The Book Discussion Group meets the second Thursday of the month.
The meetings take place from 7:30-9:00 p.m. in the Mary Atwood Hall.
Each month copies of the selected title are available at the Main Desk.
A second session of the J.V. Fletcher Library Adult Book Discussion Group will also meet at the Cameron Senior Center. While the Center is under contruction, the meetings will temporarily take place at the Library. The meetings are on held the Monday after the Thursday night session. The meetings take place at 10 a.m. Please see the schedule below for specific dates. Copies of the current discussion book are available at the Library.
Bring your title Recommendations to the December Meeting!
If you have any questions, please contact Kristina Leedberg, Head of Information Services.
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Date | Title & Author |
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Thursday, January 14, 2010
Cameron Senior Center Meeting Friday, January 15, 2010(rescehduled from 1/ 18/10 Martin Luther King holiday).
| Mistress Bradstreet: the Untold Life of America's First Poet, by Charlotte Gordon
From the Publisher-Though her work is a staple of anthologies of American poetry, Anne Bradstreet has never before been the subject of an accessible, full-scale biography for a general audience. Anne Bradstreet is known for her poem, "To My Dear and Loving Husband," among others, and through John Berryman's "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet." With her first collection, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, she became the first published poet, male or female, of the New World. Many New England towns were founded and settled by Anne Bradstreet's family or their close associates—characters who appear in these pages.
By Charlotte Gordon
(Non-Fiction)
| Thursday, February 11, 2010
Cameron Senior Center Meeting, Friday, February 12th (rescheduled from Monday, February 15th, President's holiday). | The Coral Thief: a Novel, by Rebecca Stott
In her virtuosic debut, Ghostwalk, Rebecca Stott unfolded an extraordinary and true mystery involving Isaac Newton and set in seventeenth-century Cambridge. The Coral Thief is another intriguing mystery and love story, centering on pre-Darwinian theories of evolution and set in Paris right after Napoleon's surrender at Waterloo.
Upon his arrival in Paris, where he has come to study anatomy, Daniel Connor, a young medical student from Edinburgh, finds that his letters of introduction and precious coral specimens have been stolen by the beautiful woman with whom he shared a stagecoach. But when he begins searching for his lost items---and the alluring woman who stole them---Daniel is thrust into a tumultuous, underground world of philosopher thieves obsessed with the emerging theories of evolution. As he is pulled into their plot to steal a precious jewel from the Jardin des Plantes, and as he falls in love with the mysterious coral thief, Daniel is introduced...
| Thursday, March 11, 2010
Cameron Senior Center Meeting, Monday, March 15, 2010 | My Life in France, by Julia Child
From the publisher- Julia Child single handedly awakened America to the pleasures of good cooking with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she didn't know the first thing about cooking when she landed in France.
Indeed, when she first arrived in 1948 with her husband, Paul, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever. Julia's unforgettable story unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as as a cook and teacher and writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years. | Thursday, April 8, 2010
Cameron Senior Center Meeting, Monday, April 12, 2010 | The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley
From the Publisher- In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950—and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia’s family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”
| Thursday, May 13, 2010
Cameron Senior Center Meeting, Monday, May 17, 2010 | Wildflower: an Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death in Africa, by Mark Seal
From the Publisher- Wildflower is a compelling work of narrative nonfiction in which the shocking death of a dedicated environmentalist becomes a broader story of a beautiful, breathtaking country in peril.
In January 2006, Joan Root, a sixty-nine-year-old naturalist, Oscar-nominated wildlife filmmaker, and staunch conservationist, was murdered by two masked men armed with an AK-47 shortly after midnight in her bedroom on the shore of Kenya’s beautiful Lake Naivasha. Was it a random robbery gone bad, as the local police seemed to think, or was it a cold-blooded contract killing carried out at the behest of enemies Root had made in her efforts to protect Kenya’s wildlife? Veteran journalist Mark Seal set out to investigate this gripping real-life murder mystery–and instead found an unforgettable story not only of a tragic death but of the remarkable life that preceded it.
| Thursday, June 17th (rescheduled from the 10th)
Cameron Senior Center Meeting (this group meets first this month) Monday, June 14th
| Handle with Care, by Jodi Picoult
From the Publisher- Every expectant parent will tell you that they don't want a perfect baby, just a healthy one. Charlotte and Sean O'Keefe would have asked for a healthy baby, too, if they'd been given the choice. Instead, their lives are made up of sleepless nights, mounting bills, the pitying stares of "luckier" parents, and maybe worst of all, the what-ifs. What if their child had been born healthy? But it's all worth it because Willow is, well, funny as it seems, perfect. She's smart as a whip, on her way to being as pretty as her mother, kind, brave, and for a five-year-old an unexpectedly deep source of wisdom. Willow is Willow, in sickness and in health.
Everything changes, though, after a series of events forces Charlotte and her husband to confront the most serious what-ifs of all. What if Charlotte should have known earlier of Willow's illness? What if things could have been different? What if their beloved Willow had never been born? To do Willow justice, Charlotte must ask herself these questions and one more. What constitutes a valuable life?
| Thursday July 8, 2010
Cameron Senior Center Meeting, Monday, July 12, 2010
| The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls
From the Publisher- Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.
Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.
| Thursday, August 12, 2010
Cameron Senior Center Meeting, Monday, August 16, 2010
| The Family Man, by Elinor Lipman
From the publisher- A hysterical phone call from Henry Archer’s ex-wife and a familiar face in a photograph upend his well-ordered life and bring him back into contact with the child he adored, a short-term stepdaughter from a misbegotten marriage long ago. Henry is a lawyer, an old-fashioned man, gay, successful, lonely. Thalia is now twenty-nine, an actress-hopeful, estranged from her newly widowed eccentric mother—Denise, Henry’s ex. Hoping it will lead to better things for her career, Thalia agrees to pose as the girlfriend of a horror-movie luminary who is down on his romantic luck. When Thalia and her complicated social life move into the basement of Henry’s Upper West Side townhouse, she finds a champion in her long-lost father, and he finds new life—and maybe even new love—in the commotion.
| Thursday, September 9, 2010
Cameron Senior Center Meeting, Monday, September 13, 2010
| The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon, by Robert Whitaker
From the Publisher- The year is 1735. A decade-long expedition to South America is launched by a team of French scientists racing to measure the circumference of the earth and to reveal the mysteries of a little-known continent to a world hungry for discovery and knowledge. From this extraordinary journey arose an unlikely love between one scientist and a beautiful Peruvian noblewoman. Victims of a tangled web of international politics, Jean Godin and Isabel Gramesón’s destiny would ultimately unfold in the Amazon’s unforgiving jungles, and it would be Isabel’s quest to reunite with Jean after a calamitous twenty-year separation that would capture the imagination of all of eighteenth-century Europe. A remarkable testament to human endurance, female resourcefulness, and enduring love, Isabel Gramesón’s survival remains unprecedented in the annals of Amazon exploration.
| Thursday, October 14, 2010
Cameron Senior Center Meeting, Monday, October 18, 2010 | The Lace Reader, by Brunonia Barry
From the publisher
From the Publisher- Look into the lace . . . When the eyes begin to fill with tears and the patience is long exhausted, there will appear a glimpse of something not quite seen... In this moment, an image will begin to form . . . in the space between what is real and what is only imagined.
Can you read your future in a piece of lace? All of the Whitney women can. But the last time Towner read, it killed her sister and nearly robbed Towner of her own sanity. Vowing never to read lace again, her resolve is tested when faced with the mysterious, unsolvable disappearance of her beloved Great Aunt Eva, Salem's original Lace Reader. Told from opposing and often unreliable perspectives, the story engages the reader's own beliefs. Should we listen to Towner, who may be losing her mind for the second time? Or should we believe John Rafferty, a no nonsense New York detective, who ran away from the city to a simpler place only to find himself inextricably involved in a psychic tug of war with all three generations of Whitney women? Does either have the whole story? Or does the truth lie somewhere in the swirling pattern of the lace?
| Wednesday, November 10, 2010 (rescheduled from 11/11, Veteran's Day holiday)
Cameron Senior Center Meeting,Monday, November 15, 2010
| Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Greg Mortenson
From the Publisher- In this dramatic first-person narrative, Greg Mortenson picks up where Three Cups of Tea left off in 2003, recounting his relentless, ongoing efforts to establish schools for girls in Afghanistan; his extensive work in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan after a massive earthquake hit the region in 2005; and the unique ways he has built relationships with Islamic clerics, militia commanders, and tribal leaders even as he was dodging shootouts with feuding Afghan warlords and surviving an eight-day armed abduction by the Taliban. He shares for the first time his broader vision to promote peace through education and literacy, as well as touching on military matters, Islam, and women—all woven together with the many rich personal stories of the people who have been involved in this remarkable two-decade humanitarian effort.
Since the 2006 publication of Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson has traveled across the U.S. and the world to share his vision with hundreds of thousands of people. He has met with heads of state, top military officials, and leading politicians who all seek his advice and insight. The continued phenomenal success of Three Cups of Tea proves that there is an eager and committed audience for Mortenson’s work and message.
| Thursday, December 9, 2010
Cameron Senior Center Meeting, Monday, December 13, 2010
| The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson
From the Publisher- The electrifying follow-up to the phenomenal best seller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ("An intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller" —The Washington Post), and this time it is Lisbeth Salander, the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker, who is the focus and fierce heart of the story.
Mikael Blomkvist—crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium—has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government.
On the eve of publication, the two reporters responsible for the story are brutally murdered. But perhaps more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander.
Now, as Blomkvist—alone in his belief in her innocence—plunges into his own investigation.
| Thursday, January 13th, 2011
Cameron Senior Center Meeting, Friday, January 14 (rescheduled from Jan. 17, Martin Luther King holiday) | The Worst Hard Time: the Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan
From the Publisher- The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prizea "winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod huts to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out.
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