Second Thursday of Each Month @ 6:45 pm
Please join us for any or all of our monthly book clubs. We will discuss a different book each month. All titles are available to borrow through your library and many are available to borrow as a library e-book! There will be no meeting in December.

Thursday, February 9 @ 6:45 pm
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, bestselling author Laura Hillenbrand profiles the extraordinary story of Louis Zamperini, an Army lieutenant and former Olympic athlete who found himself fighting for his life, adrift on the open seas during the Second World War. In May 1943, Zamperini's bomber jet went down in the Pacific, and the young airman somehow--miraculously--managed to survive. But he landed in a wide open expanse of the world's biggest ocean, igniting in him a dogged determination to endure at all costs.

Thursday, March 8 @ 6:45 pm
The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare by Arliss Ryan.
Ryan (The Kingsley House) posits a tantalizing what-if in this delightful novel: what if Anne Hathaway Shakespeare had been Shakespeare's silent writing partner? Ryan places Hathaway in the center of Elizabethan London, where she shines as an artist, has passionate affairs with Ben Jonson and Kit Marlowe, and secretly authors half of the most brilliant plays of the era. Hathaway is a strong character who-though she harps on the same issues throughout the book (a conflict over taking credit for her work versus being successful)-makes for an excellent narrator and a unique lens through which to view the familiar Elizabethan world. Granted, it's light on plot and slow to start, but the entertaining romp that follows makes those shortcomings easy to forgive.

Thursday, April 12 @ 6:45 pm
Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls “Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.” So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls’s no-nonsense, resourceful, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town—riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car and fly a plane. And, with her husband, Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one who is Jeannette’s memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle.

Thursday, May 10 @ 6:45 pm
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, 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 first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s.

Thursday, June 14 @ 6:45 pm
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.
Life has been good to Tony Webster, who's both contentedly retired and contentedly divorced. Then friends reappear from a childhood long left behind and presumably shelved, and as the past suddenly looms large, Tony must rethink everything that has been his life. In the hands of multi-award winner Barnes, this should be masterly and, with the book under 200 pages, there's a gorgeous simplicity at work.

Thursday, July 12 @ 6:45 pm
Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi
Stones from the River is a daring, dramatic and complex novel of life in Germany. It is set in Burgdorf, a small fictional German town, between 1915 and 1951. The protagonist is Trudi Montag, a Zwerg -- the German word for dwarf woman. As a dwarf she is set apart, the outsider whose physical "otherness" has a corollary in her refusal to be a part of Burgdorf's silent complicity during and after World War II. Trudi establishes her status and power, not through beauty, marriage, or motherhood, but rather as the town's librarian and relentless collector of stories.

Thursday, August 9 @ 6:45 pm
The Awakening of St. Augustine: the Anderson Family and the Oldest City by Dr. Tom Graham.

Thursday, September 13 @ 6:45 pm
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
The novel follows the trajectory of Eugene Gant, a brilliant and restless young man whose wanderlust and passion shape his adolescent years in rural North Carolina. Wolfe said that Look Homeward, Angel is "a book made out of my life," and his largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers, including some of today's most important novelists. Rich with lyrical prose and vivid characterizations, this twentieth-century American classic will capture the hearts and imaginations of every reader.

Thursday, October 11 @ 6:45 pm
In the Garden of Beasts  by Erik Larson In this mesmerizing portrait of the Nazi capital, Larson plumbs a far more diabolical urban cauldron than in his bestselling The Devil in the White City. He surveys Berlin, circa 1933-1934, from the perspective of two American naïfs: Roosevelt's ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, an academic historian and Jeffersonian liberal who hoped Nazism would de-fang itself (he urged Hitler to adopt America's milder conventions of anti-Jewish discrimination), and Dodd's daughter Martha, a sexual free spirit who loved Nazism's vigor and ebullience. At first dazzled by the glamorous world of the Nazi ruling elite, they soon started noticing signs of its true nature: the beatings meted out to Americans who failed to salute passing storm troopers; the oppressive surveillance; the incessant propaganda; the intimidation and persecution of friends; the fanaticism lurking beneath the surface charm of its officialdom. Although the narrative sometimes bogs down in Dodd's wranglings with the State Department and Martha's soap opera, Larson offers a vivid, atmospheric panorama of the Third Reich and its leaders, including murderous Nazi factional infighting, through the accretion of small crimes and petty thuggery.

Thursday, November 8 @ 6:45 pm
The Elegant Gathering of White Snows by Kris Radish
Late one night in a small Wisconsin town, eight women after a get-together begin a spontaneous pilgrimage, not telling anyone why they are on this journey. Kris Radish's THE ELEGANT GATHERING OF WHITE SNOWS  is a story of friendship and empowerment as each woman's personal history is revealed, alternately through the narrative of their walk, excerpts from newspaper articles, and their effect on the lives of those they encounter

Thursday, January 10 @ 6:45 pm
Let the World Spin by Colum McCann
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.