NSL Bluestockings
Upcoming Books:
January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September / October / November / December
January (Jan 19th)
Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks check ebook/audio availability here
historical fiction/17th century
Set in the 17th century on Martha's Vineyard, a new novel from Geraldine Brooks tells the tale of a Puritan family - and one daughter's relationship with the son of a Wampanoag chieftain who become the first Native American to graduate from Harvard.
MEET:
Every 3rd Thursday 10:30ish to 12ish
WHERE: Library Conference Room (upstairs in Business Office )unless otherwise noted
BOOKS: Fiction and non-fiction books are typically selected at least 6 months in advance. Books are chosen by group members
RESPONSIBILITIES OF MEMBERS: To have read the book (or at least attempted) and participate in the discussion. Food items are also a nice treat.
What we're about:
We are a casual group that likes to get together to talk about books in addition to our discussion about the book of the month. The books we choose to read are varied in subject matter and emotional depth. We try to choose books that will incite discussion. If this sounds like the group for you grab our book of the month and join us.
Books We've Read:
Check out our bookshelf at LibraryThing
Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks check ebook/audio availability here
historical fiction/17th century
Set in the 17th century on Martha's Vineyard, a new novel from Geraldine Brooks tells the tale of a Puritan family - and one daughter's relationship with the son of a Wampanoag chieftain who become the first Native American to graduate from Harvard.
Bossypants by Tina Fey check ebook/audio availability here
biography/memoir
Bossypants is short, messy, and impossibly funny (an apt description of the comedian herself). From her humble roots growing up in Pennsylvania to her days doing amateur improv in Chicago to her early sketches on Saturday Night Live, Fey gives us a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of modern comedy with equal doses of wit, candor and self-deprecation.
Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay check ebook/audio availability here
historical fiction/holocaust
De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself.
In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson check ebook/audio availability here
historical/Germany/holocaust/biography
The bestselling author of "Devil in the White City" turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler's rise to power. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
adventure/literary fiction
Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2011: In State of Wonder, pharmaceutical researcher Dr. Marina Singh sets off into the Amazon jungle to find the remains and effects of a colleague who recently died under somewhat mysterious circumstances. But first she must locate Dr. Anneck Swenson, a renowned gynecologist who has spent years looking at the reproductive habits of a local tribe where women can conceive well into their middle ages and beyond. Eccentric and notoriously tough, Swenson is paid to find the key to this longstanding childbearing ability by the same company for which Dr. Singh works. Yet that isn’t their only connection: both have an overlapping professional past that Dr. Singh has long tried to forget. State of Wonder is a multi-layered atmospheric novel that is hard to put down. --Jessica Schein
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones check ebook/audio availability here
With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon is a bigamist,” Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and the teenage girls caught in the middle. Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s families– the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered.
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain check ebook/audio availability here
biographical fiction
Set during a remarkable time, the same period as Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises, Paula McLain's The Paris Wife brilliantly captures the voice and heart of Hadley Hemingway as she struggles with her roles as a woman—wife, lover, muse, friend, and mother—and tries to find her place in the intoxicating and tumultuous world of Paris in the twenties.
The White Tiger: a Novel by Aravind Adiga
Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life -- having nothing but his own wits to help him along.
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow check ebook/audio availability here
This debut novel tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I. who becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy. With her strict African American grandmother as her new guardian, Rachel moves to a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty bring mixed attention her way. Growing up in the 1980s, she learns to swallow her overwhelming grief and confronts her identity as a biracial young woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white. Meanwhile, a mystery unfolds, revealing the terrible truth about Rachel's last morning on a Chicago rooftop.
Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys check ebook/audio availability here
Sepetys' first novel offers a harrowing and horrifying account of the forcible relocation of countless Lithuanians in the wake of the Russian invasion of their country in 1939. In the case of 16-year-old Lina, her mother, and her younger brother, this means deportation to a forced-labor camp in Siberia, where conditions are all too painfully similar to those of Nazi concentration camps. Lina's great hope is that somehow her father, who has already been arrested by the Soviet secret police, might find and rescue them. A gifted artist, she begins secretly creating pictures that can--she hopes--be surreptitiously sent to him in his own prison camp. Whether or not this will be possible, it is her art that will be her salvation, helping her to retain her identity, her dignity, and her increasingly tenuous hold on hope for the future.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron
In post-World War II Barcelona, young Daniel is taken by his bookseller father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a massive sanctuary where books are guarded from oblivion. Told to choose one book to protect, he selects The Shadow of the Wind, by Julian Carax. He reads it, loves it, and soon learns it is both very valuable and very much in danger because someone is determinedly burning every copy of every book written by the obscure Carax. Part detective story, part boy's adventure, part romance, fantasy, and gothic horror, the intricate plot is urged on by extravagant foreshadowing and nail-nibbling tension.
Skipping Christmas: a Novel by John Grisham check ebook/audio availability here
Christmas/mystery/humorous
Imagine a year without Christmas. No crowded malls, no corny office parties, no fruitcakes, no unwanted presents. That’s just what Luther and Nora Krank have in mind when they decide that, just this once, they’ll skip the holiday altogether. Theirs will be the only house on Hemlock Street without a rooftop Frosty; they won’t be hosting their annual Christmas Eve bash; they aren’t even going to have a tree. They won’t need one, because come December 25 they’re setting sail on a Caribbean cruise. But, as this weary couple is about to discover, skipping Christmas brings enormous consequences–and isn’t half as easy as they’d imagine.
