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Shelf Indulgence
If you enjoy reading a diverse mix of literary fiction and nonfiction, then this book club is for you! We read one book each month, and meet on the third Thursday at 11:00am to discuss it. Past selections have come from popular genres such as Historical Fiction, Mysteries, Biographies and Memoirs, Travel Tales, Thrillers, Comedies, and Nonfiction. We welcome new members!
September Book:
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle. Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.
October Book:
Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy
The area surrounding Cashiers, North Carolina, is home to people of all kinds, but the world that Jacob McNeely lives in is crueler than most. His father runs a methodically organized meth ring, with local authorities on the dime to turn a blind eye to his dealings. Having dropped out of high school and cut himself off from his peers, Jacob has been working for this father for years, all on the promise that his payday will come eventually. The only joy he finds comes from reuniting with Maggie, his first love, and a girl clearly bound for bigger and better things than their hardscrabble town. Jacob has always been resigned to play the cards that were dealt him, but when a fatal mistake changes everything, he’s faced with a choice: stay and appease his father, or leave the mountains with the girl he loves. In a place where blood is thicker than water and hope takes a back seat to fate, Jacob wonders if he can muster the strength to rise above the only life he’s ever known.
November Book:
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.
December Book:
Flight by Lynn Steger Strong
It's December 22nd and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry's house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother's Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother's house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help. With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as "a defining novel of our age" (Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps. Flight is a novel of family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, one that forms a powerful next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time.
January:
Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah
February:
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
March:
The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris
April:
Dear Life by Alice Munro
May:
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
June:
The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton
July:
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
August:
Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano
September:
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
January:
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover (Memoir)
February:
The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman (Historical Fiction)
March:
Dovetail by Karen McQuestion (Mystery/Suspense)
April:
Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang (Memoir)
May:
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel (Biography/Mystery)
June:
The Engineer’s Wife by Tracey Enerson Wood (Historical Fiction)
August:
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Humor/Adventure)
September:
Carnegie's Maid by Marie Benedict (Biography/Historical Fiction)
October:
The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri (Political)
November:
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (Mystery)
December:
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (Historical Fiction)
January:
The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
February:
Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
March:
Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane
April:
News of the World by Paulette Jiles
May:
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
June:
The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult
July:
Long Bright River by Liz Moore
August:
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
September:
The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi
October:
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
November:
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
December:
Bring your Favorite Titles!
January:
A Star For Mrs. Blake by April Smith
February:
Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler
March - September:
No Book Club due to COVID-19
October:
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
November:
Code Name Helene by Ariel Lawhorn
December:
All Adults Here by Emma Straub
January:
Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger
Britt Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
February:
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and The Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan
In The Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende
March:
The Widow by Fiona Barton
April:
The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro
May:
Old World Murders by Kathleen Ernst (Wisconsin Author)
June:
The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel
July:
The River by Peter Heller
August:
The Orchard: A Memoir by Theresa Weir
September:
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
October:
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
November:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon
December:
The Indigo Girl by Natasha Boyd
January:
Gray Mountain by John Grisham
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
February:
Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
March:
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
April:
The Second Mrs. Hockaday by Susan Rivers
May:
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance
June:
Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
July:
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
August:
The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
Caroline: Little House, Revisited by Sarah Miller
September:
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
October:
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa
November:
The Woman’s Hour by Elaine Weiss
December:
Montaigne in Barn Boots by Michael Perry
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley