ALL THE KINGS MEN by Robert Penn Warren Date: November 03, 2008
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
This landmark book is a loosely fictionalized account of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, one of the nation's most astounding politicians. The award-winning book (Pulitzer Prize, 1947) is a play of politics, society and personal affairs, all wrapped in the cloak of history.
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SUITE FRANCAISE by Irene Nemirovsky Date: December 01, 2008
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
A best-selling author in France prior to WWII, Nemirovsky, a Russian-born Jew, was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, cutting short her plans to write a quintet of novels about life in France under the Nazis. The two novellas she managed to complete are featured in Suite Francaise, a book that has been hailed as a masterpiece and a milestone of WWII literature.
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LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER by Stewart O’Nan Date: January 05, 2009
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
The story follows manager Manny DeLeon as he juggles disgruntled cooks, a waitress he’s recently and reluctantly ended an affair with, and unreasonable patrons over one last shift before the restaurant is closed down.
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THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neale Hurston
(THE BIG READ) Date: February 02, 2009
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
An enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams.
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HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster Date: March 02, 2009
7:00 pm - 8:45 pm
In Edwardian England, two well educated sisters, full of life, each find different ways to deal with the constraints of society.
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THE GOOD EARTH by Pearl Buck Date: April 06, 2009
7:00 pm - 8:45 pm
A Chinese peasant overcomes the forces of nature and the frailties of human nature to become a wealthy landowner.
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THE WORLD WITHOUT US by Alan Weisman Date: May 04, 2009
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
A study of what would happen to Earth if the human presence was removed examines our legacy for the planet, from the objects that would vanish without human intervention to those that would become long-lasting remnants of humankind. Check the Catalog
STONE DIARIES by Carol Shields Date: June 01, 2009
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
From her birth in rural Manitoba, to her journey with her father to southern Indiana, to her years as a wife, mother, and widow, to her old age, Daisy Stone Goodwill struggles to find a place for herself in her own life.
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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID: A MEMOIR by Bill Bryson Date: July 06, 2009
7:00 pm - 8:45 pm
The best-selling author of A Walk in the Woods describes his all-American childhood growing up as a member of the baby boom generation in the heart of Iowa, detailing his rich fantasy life as a superhero known as the Thunderbolt Kid and his his remarkably normal 1950's family life. Check the Catalog
CHESAPEAKE by James Michener Date: September 14, 2009
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
A panoramic narrative of human and animal life on Maryland's Eastern Shore focuses on a ten-square-mile area at the mouth of the Choptank River and the families that settle there, from the early seventeenth century to the present day.Check the Catalog
FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley Date: October 05, 2009
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
The classic gothic novel presents the story of young Dr. Victor Frankenstein and his obsessive experiment that leads to the creation of a monstrous and deadly creature and unleashes a terrible series of events that destroys everything he loves. Check the Catalog
AMERICAN LION: ANDREW JACKSON IN THE WHITE HOUSE by Jon Meacham Date: November 02, 2009
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Chronicles the life and career of Andrew Jackson, a self-made man who went on to become a military hero and seventh president of the United States, analyzing Jackson's seminal role during a turbulent era in history. Check the Catalog
MY FATHER'S TEARS AND OTHER STORIES by John Updike Date: December 07, 2009
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
A collection of short fiction includes tales set in the author's native Pennsylvania, the New England suburbs, and foreign countries, all depicting different facets of the American experience from the Depression through the aftermath of 9/11. Check the Catalog
THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PIE SOCIETY by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows Date: January 04, 2010
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation. Check the Catalog
A LESSON BEFORE DYING by Ernest J. Gaines Date: February 01, 2010
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
The story of two African American men struggling to attain manhood in a prejudiced society, the tale is set in Bayonne, La. in the late 1940s. It concerns Jefferson, a mentally slow, barely literate young man, who, though an innocent bystander to a shootout between a white store owner and two black robbers, is convicted of murder and sentenced to death, and the sophisticated, educated man who comes to his aid. Check the Catalog
Future Readings:
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS by Ernest Hemingway Date: September 10, 2007
7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal… "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.
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TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf Date: October 01, 2007
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
'I am making up "To the Lighthouse" - the sea is to be heard all through it' Inspired by the lost bliss of her childhood summers in Cornwall, Virginia Woolf produced one of the masterworks of English literature in To the Lighthouse. It concerns the Ramsay family and their summer guests on the Isle of Skye before and after the First World War. As children play and adults paint, talk, muse and explore, relationships shift and mutate. A captivating fusion of elegy, autobiography, socio-political critique and visionary thrust, it is the most accomplished of all Woolf's novels. On completing it, she thought she had exorcised the ghosts of her imposing parents, but she had also brought form to a book every bit as vivid and intense as the work of Lily Briscoe, the indomitable artist at the centre of the novel. -- Amazon
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MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather Date: November 05, 2007
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Published in 1918. Her best known work, it honors the immigrant settlers of the American plains. Narrated by the protagonist's lifelong friend, Jim Burden, the novel recounts the history of Ãntonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants who settled on the Nebraska frontier. The book contains a number of poetic passages about the disappearing frontier and the spirit and courage of frontier people. Many critics consider My Ãntonia to be Cather's finest achievement. -- Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature
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THE LAST GENTLEMAN by Walker Percy Date: December 03, 2007
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Williston Bibb Barrett, the last gentleman of the story, is a displaced Southerner who has dropped out of Princeton owing to a nervous condition that his psychoanalyst associates with an inability to fit into groups. While living in New York City, our wayfarer-hero falls in love with a young woman he spies through a telescope...and sets out on a cross-country odyssey in search of home, identity, and the meaning of contemporary life.
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PNIN by Vladimir Nabokov Date: January 07, 2008
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. This novel brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity.
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AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton Date: February 04, 2008
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Wharton's story of the upper classes of Old New York, and Newland Archer's impossible love for the disgraced Countess Olenska, is a perfectly wrought book about an era when upper-class culture in this country was still a mixture of American and European extracts, and when "society" had rules as rigid as any in history. --Amazon
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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee Date: March 03, 2008
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
"One of the best-loved classics of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many distinctions since its original publication in 1960. It has won the Pulitzer Prize, been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and been made into an enormously popular movie. Most recent, librarians across the country gave the book the highest of honors by voting it the best novel of the century." -- Library Journal Check the Catalog
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by by Carson McCullers Date: April 07, 2008
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
With the publication of this first novel, Carson McCullers became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece. Check the Catalog
THE SNOW LEOPARD by Peter Matthiessen Date: May 05, 2008
7:00 pm - 8:45 pm
Published in 1978, The Snow Leopard is rightly regarded as a classic of modern nature writing. Guiding his readers through steep-walled canyons and over tall mountains, Matthiessen offers a narrative that is shot through with metaphor and mysticism, and his arduous search for the snow leopard becomes a vehicle for reflections on all manner of matters of life and death.
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A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS by Khaled Hosseini Date: June 02, 2008
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Tells the wonderful, intensely moving story of how two modern Afghan women overcome the great challenges that have faced women in Afghanistan and rise above their victimization.
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THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder Date: July 07, 2008
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
The Bridge of San Luis Rey opens in the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy--a tiny foot-bridge in Peru breaks, and five people hurtle to their deaths. For Brother Juniper, a humble monk who witnesses the catastrophe, the question in inescapable. Why those five? Suddenly, Brother Juniper is committed to discover what manner of lives they led--and whether it was divine intervention or a capricious fate that took their lives.
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MAYFLOWER: A STORY OF COURAGE, COMMUNITY AND WAR by Nathaniel Philbrick Date: September 08, 2008
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
National Book Award winner Philbrick…now gives us a story of both heartbreaking misery and driving determination as he relates the Pilgrims' historic journey from Europe and their hardscrabble work to establish the Plymouth Colony... a jaw-dropping epic of heroes and villains, bravery and bigotry, folly and forgiveness. -Library Journal
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BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S by Truman Capote. Date: October 06, 2008
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
A valentine of love, fashioned by way of reminiscences to one Holly Golightly. Capote makes unique reading. - The New York Times Book Review
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