Book Club in a Bag

Book Club in a Bag includes multiple copies of a popular book, information about the author and copies of discussion questions, all packaged in a sturdy zipper bag for you to carry. Each kit may be checked out for 8 weeks. You can view a list of titles below. Please allow some advance notice and have an alternate title choice available. Visit or call the Adult Services Desk for more details, or to reserve a kit. This service is partially sponsored by the Friends of the Library.

• Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos
• Margaret Hughes, a septuagenarian living in Seattle, takes in a series of boarders who help her cope with her illness, and whose lives become unexpectedly connected to each other.
• Don’t Let’s Go to the Dog’s Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
• Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate.
• Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
• The celebrated author of The Last American Man creates an irresistible,candid and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure and spiritual devotion
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit.
• The Faith Club by Ranya Idilby, Priscilla Warner and Suzanne Oliver A true story about three mothers from three different faiths-Islam, Christian and Jewish-who get together to write a children's book highlighting the connections between their religions, but due to misunderstandings, the project nearly falls apart.
• The Fall of a Sparrow by Robert Hellenga
• The critically acclaimed author of "The Sixteen Pleasures" establishes himself as a major literary talent with this beautifully crafted story about a family's struggle to heal itself after the violent death of its eldest daughter.
• The First Desire by Nancy Reisman
• The lives of the four Cohen siblings--Sadie, Jo, Goldie, and Irving--are turned upside down by the secrets that they have kept hidden, even from themselves, as the sudden disappearance of Goldie sparks revelations about their family.
• The Gardens of Kyoto by Kate Walbert
• A coming-of-age story set during wartime retraces one woman's struggles with romance as her favorite cousin Randall is called away to the battlefields of the South Pacific.
• Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris
• As the new term gets under way at the elite St. Oswald's Grammar School for Boys, a number of increasingly devastating incidents occurs, leaving the unraveling school in the hands of the only person who can save it.
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets.
• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
• Jeannette Walls tells the story of her childhood. She talks about living like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Her father, 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.
• The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
  A finalist for the National Book Award, this is an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of World War II. A man and woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, and struggle to reclaim their humanity.
  
• The Ha-Ha by Dave King Rendered unable to speak, read, or write after a Vietnam War injury thirty years earlier, Howard Kapostash feels trapped by his disability until his high school sweetheart, recently forced into rehab, asks him to care for her nine-year-old son
• The History of Love by Nicole Krauss Sixty years after a book's publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl named for one of the book's characters seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.
• Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber
• An anthology of short fiction explores the issue of human longings and how sex and religion have become parallel forms of comfort and dedication, linking each story with the following by a minor element in one tale that becomes a major theme of the next.
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son, in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones
• When a plantation proprietor and former slave--now possessing slaves of his own--dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.
• The Madonna's of Leningrad by Debra Dean
• In a novel that moves back and forth between the Soviet Union during World War II and modern-day America, Marina, an elderly Russian woman, recalls vivid images of her youth during the height of the siege of Leningrad when, as a tour guide at the Hermitage, she and other staff members removed the museum's priceless artworks for safekeeping
• March by Geraldine Brooks
• In a story inspired by the father character in "Little Women" and drawn from the journals and letters of Louisa May Alcott's father, a man leaves behind his family to serve in the Civil War and finds his beliefs challenged by his experiences.
• Mayflower: a story of courage, community and war by Nathaniel Philbrick
• A history of the Pilgrim settlement of New England challenges popular misconceptions, discussing such topics as the diseases of European origin suffered by the Wampanoag tribe, the fragile working relationship between the Pilgrims and their Native American neighbors, and the devastating impact of the King Philip's War.
• The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
• In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twins during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from their baby daughter's affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child.
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• Spanning eight decades, Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. Eugenides was named one of America's best young novelists by both "Granta" and "The New Yorker."
• My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
• Conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Kate begins to question her moral obligations in light of countless medical procedures and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body.
• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
• A portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life.
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• A reunion with two childhood friends draws Kathy and her companions on a nostalgic odyssey into their lives at Hailsham, an isolated private school in the English countryside, and a confrontation with the truth about their childhoods.
• Once Upon a Day by Lisa Tucker
• Having been raised in utopian isolation by her once-famous Hollywood father, twenty-three-year-old Dorothea leaves their New Mexico sanctuary in search of her missing brother and discovers terrifying truths about her family's past.
• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
• In a novel of alternative history, aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, negotiating an accord with Adolf Hitler and accepting his conquest of Europe and anti-Semitic policies.
• The Rich Part of Life by Jim Kokoris
• Teddy and his brothers find their lives thrown into turmoil by the death of their mother and, soon afterwards, a winning lottery ticket that leaves the family with more money than they ever imagined.
• The Ride of Our Lives by Mike Leonard
• A humorous and deeply moving account of an NBC journalist's  cross-country odyssey with his eccentric parents, three grown children and a daughter-in-law.
• The Road by Cormac Mccarthy
• In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants
  of their own humanity
• Saturday by Ian Mcewan
• A successful, happily married neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne is drawn into a confrontation with Baxter, a small-time thug, following a minor motor vehicle accident, an encounter that has savage consequences.
• Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
• After her "stand-in mother," a bold black woman named Rosaleen, insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens joins Rosaleen on a journey to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters.
• Snow by Orhan Pamuk
• After years of lonely political exile, Turkish poet Ka returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral and learns about a series of suicides among pious girls forbidden to wear headscarves.
• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
• A story of friendship set in nineteenth-century China follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.
• Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht
• The close friendship between Martin Simmonds and violin prodigy Dovidl Rappoport, two Jewish boys living in London between the 1930s and the end of World War II, is threatened by the unexpected disappearance of Dovidl on the eve of his debut performance.
• The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
• A novel set in Ireland in the 1920s charts the progress of a young girl whose entire life seems to be falling apart when the threat of arson drives the family from their country home.
• Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
• A story of life in France under the Nazi occupation includes two parts--"Storm in June," set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris, and "Dolce," set in a German-occupied village rife with resentment, resistance, and collaboration.
• Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
• A professor of German history begins a long journey back into a past she has pushed aside, returning to Germany to reopen the wounds of her own life--as well as that of her mother--as a child living in Nazi Germany.
• Three Junes by Julia Glass
• Reveals the interconnected lives, loves, and relationships of different generations of the McLeod family over the course of three crucial summers.
• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• Clare and Henry, deeply in love, try desperately to maintain normal lives even though he has been diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition in which his genetic clock periodically resets, pulling him through time to the past or future.
• Under the Banner of Heaven by Jonathan Krakauer
• Jon Krakauer's literary reputation rests on chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under the Banner of Heaven, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders.
• Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire
• Narrated with the urgency of a confession, "Waiting for Snow in Havana" is both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died -- and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.
• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.
• The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig
• Hired as a housekeeper to work on the early 1900s Montana homestead of widower Oliver Milliron, the irreverent Rose and her brother, Morris,endeavor to educate the widower's sons while witnessing local efforts on a massive irrigation project.
• Wicked by Gregory Maguire
• This re-creation of the land of Oz, tells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who wasn't so wicked after all. Past the yellow brick road and into a phantasmagoric world rich with imagination and allegory, Wicked just might change the reputation of one of the most sinister characters in literature.
• Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
• Through the eyes of a housemaid, the story of the plague is told as it ravages a small village in England in the year 1666. Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.