BBTL’s Previous Discussions

The 2009/2010 Reading List

The 2008/2009 Reading List

Books By the Lake celebrated their 10th year anniversary at the April 2008 meeting.

The 2007/2008 Reading List

* September 19, 2007–Austen Envy:
Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club, and Laurie Horowitz’s The Family Fortune.

The story of Anne Elliot and the love she once had for a naval officer drives Austen’s Persuasion. Anne had been persuaded by her family that he was not suitable. And regretfully, she lets him slip away. Years later, they meet again. In Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club, six Californians get together to for a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, as their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love. In Horowitz’s first novel, The Family Fortune, Jane, the sensible middle daughter in an old-guard Boston Brahman family whose once enormous fortune has vanished, finds herself the sole support of her family until love turns her life upside down.

* October 17, 2007. Julia Glass’s Three Junes

This stunning novel reveals the interconnected lives, loves, and relationships of different generations of the McLeod family over the course of three crucial summers in stunning prose. (2002).

* November 28, 2007. Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and the Madness at the Fair that Changed America. (NON-FICTION).

This is a gripping tale about two men — one a creative genius, the other a mass murderer — who turned the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair into their playground. Set against the dazzle of a dream city whose technological marvels presaged the coming century, this real-life drama of good and evil unfolds with all the narrative tension of a fictional thriller. (2003)

* December 19, 2007. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, And Indonesia. . (NON-FICTION/MEMOIR)

Gilbert, author of Stern Men, chronicles her intrepid quest for spiritual healing, and her sensuous and audacious spiritual odyssey is found here to be as deeply pleasurable as it is enlightening. (2006)

* January 16, 2008. Kim Edward’s The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.

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. (2006)

* February 20, 2008. Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper

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. (2004)

* March 19, 2008. Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss

In this Booker Prize Winner, in a crumbling house in the remote northeastern Himalayas, an embittered, elderly judge finds his peaceful retirement turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai. (2006)

* April 16, 2008. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

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. (2004)

* May 21, 2008. Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants

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. (2006)

* July 16, 2008. Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

An astonishingly rich re-creation of the land of Oz, this book retells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who wasn’t so wicked after all. Taking readers 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. Also a Broadway musical. (1995)

The 2006/2007 Reading List

* September 20, 2006–Village Vignettes:
Joanne Harris’s Five Quarters of the Orange
and Rosina Lippi’s Homestead

In Five Quarters of the Orange (2001), Framboise Dartigen, returning to the small Loire village of her childhood, is relieved when no one recognizes her. Decades earlier, during the German occupation, her family was driven away because of a tragedy that still haunts the town. Framboise has come back to run a little cafe serving the recipes her mother recorded in a scrapbook. But when her cooking receives national attention, her anonymity begins to shatter. Seeking answers, Framboise begins to see that hidden among the recipes for crepes and liquors are clues that will lead Framboise to the truth of long ago.

Another exploration of European village life is found in Lippi’s Homestead (1998), a debut collection of 12 linked stories portraying the life of a small Austrian village and its inhabitants over the course of the 20th century. The novel opens in 1909 with Anna of Bengat homestead and her love for rough, beautiful Peter, her husband, and for their children, and for her dead sister’s boys, feeble-minded Stante and crippled Michel. As the years pass, the story unfolds through the eyes of the women of Anna’s family and the interconnected families of Bent Elbow homestead. Against this simple backdrop, Lippi unfolds the grand passions that animate the human heart. Each chapter adds layers of meaning from a different character’s point of view, and the life of this village gathers force and complexity, like a living thing.

* October 18, 2006. Carlo Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (NON-FICTION/MEMOIR).

“Metaphors matter to me, especially perfect ones,” Yale historian Eire writes in this beautifully fashioned memoir, as he recounts one of many wonderfully vibrant stories from his boyhood in 1950s Havana. (2002).

* November 15, 2006. Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America.

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. (2004)

* December 20, 2006. Tobias Wolff’s Old School

During his senior year at an elite New England prep school, a young man who had struggled to fit in with his contemporaries finds his life unraveling due to the school’s obsession with literary figures and their work. (2003)

* January 17, 2007. John Perkin’s Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. (NON-FICTION)

This is the story of one man’s experiences inside the intrigue, greed, corruption and little-known government and corporate activities that America has been involved in since World War II, and which have dire consequences for the future of democracy and the world. (2005)

* February 28, 2007. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

Rand’s magnum opus is a philosophical thriller, the story of a society’s slow collapse as the men of ability go on strike against the creed that treats them as sacrificial animals. From the blast furnaces of a steel mill to the drawing rooms of high society, from the classrooms of philosophers to the decks of a pirate ship, Ayn Rand portrays the role of reason in Man’s life. (1957)

* March 21, 2007. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Traveling from India to New England and back again, the stories in this debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. (1999)

* April 25, 2007. Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters

The novel chronicles the journeys of three Brahman women as they follow divergent paths from their home in Calcutta and a rigid Indian society to seek new lives for themselves on two separate continents. (2002)

* May 16, 2007. Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, two boys are sent to the country for reeducation, where their lives take an unexpected turn when they meet the beautiful daughter of a local tailor and stumble upon a forbidden stash of Western literature. (2001)

* June 20, 2007. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old son of a man killed in the World Trade Center attacks, searches the five boroughs of New York City for a lock that fits a black key his father left behind. (2005)

The 2005/2006 Reading List

* September 21, 2005–Reading Lolita & Gatsby in Wakefield:
Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: Memoir in Books NON-FICTION

For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, this book is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people’s lives. (2003)

Also read with

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

In this Classic novel of the decadent 1920s, Jay Gatsby still adores Daisy Buchanan although she has married someone else, and he risks everything to lure her back. (1925)

and Vladimir V. Nabokov’s Lolita

A Classic novel that studies the moral disintegration of a man whose obsessive desire to possess his step-daughter destroys the lives of those around him. (1958)

* October 19, 2005. Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Could Cure the World. (NON-FICTION).

At the center of this book stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life’s calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. This magnificent book shows how radical change can be fostered in situations that seem insurmountable, and it also shows how a meaningful life can be created, as Farmer—brilliant, charismatic, charming, both a leader in international health and a doctor who finds time to make house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti—blasts through convention to get results. Discussion will be lead by Group member.(2003)

* November 16, 2005. Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening — until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become compatriots. (2002)

* December 21, 2005. Jasper Fforde’s The Erye Affair

In a world where one can literally get lost in literature, Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection, tries to stop the world’s Third Most Wanted criminal from kidnapping characters, including Jane Eyre, from works of literature. (2002)

* January 18, 2006. Jim Fergus’s One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

The story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who, under the auspices of the U.S. government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians. The covert and controversial “Brides for Indians” program, launched by the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, is intended to help assimilate the Indians into the white man’s world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time. (1998)

* February 15, 2006. Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being

A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover—these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. (1984)

* March 15, 2006. Anchee Min’s Red Azalea (NON-FICTION/MEMOIR)

The true story of what it was like growing up in Mao’s China, where the soul was secondary to the state, beauty was mistrusted, and love could be punishable by death. Newsweek calls Anchee Min’s prose “as delicate and evocative as a traditional Chinese brush painting.” (1995)

* April 26, 2006. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

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 to the atrocities of the present day. (2003)

* May 17, 2006. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the the Dog in the Night-time

Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor’s dog and uncovers secret information about his mother. (2003)

* June 21, 2006. T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain

While leading their lives in their gated hilltop community in Los Angeles, Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher accidentally meet Mexican illegal aliens and their encounter brings them together in a relationship of error and misunderstanding. (1995)

The 2004/2005 Reading List

* September 22, 2004–Feeding the Hungry Heart:
Selections from MFK Fisher’s The Art of Eating (1954 & 1976)
Please read all of The Gastronomical Me (350-372), including the introduction, and any other parts of The Art of Eating that appeals to you.

Most critics consider The Gastronomical Me (1946) to be the pinnacle of Fisher’s career. An accumulation of culinary tales from 1912 through 1941, the book contains vignettes of meals and memories from Fisher’s childhood through the rising tension in Europe between the wars.

and

Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table.

New York Times restaurant critic Reichl shares lessons learned at the hands (and kitchen counters) of family members and friends throughout her life, from growing up with her taste-blind mother to the comfort of cream puffs while away at boarding school. (1998)

and Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table.

This book begins where the first book ended, tracing Reichl’s evolution from chef to food writer while detailing the dissolution of her first marriage, the start of a second, and motherhood at the age of 40.(2001)

* October 20, 2004. Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees

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. (2002)

* November 17, 2004. Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. (NON-FICTION).

A vivid, deeply felt, and meticulously researched account of the disastrous encounter between two disparate cultures: Western medicine and Eastern spirituality. In this case, the Lees, a Hmong refugee family in Merced, CA and their daughter Lia who was seven years old and, in the eyes of her American doctors, brain dead. In the Lees’ view, Lia’s soul had fled. (1997)

* December 15, 2004. India Knight’s My Life on a Plate

Meet thirty-three-year-old Clara Hutt: irreverent, sometimes unkind, always self-deprecating. Clara is a part-time magazine writer with a perpetually mysterious husband and two small boys, and some days she wakes up with the feeling that her life isn’t all it should be. With razor-sharp wit and a healthy dose of insight into married life, India Knight takes readers on a continually entertaining ride through one woman’s bumpy search for fulfillment. (2001)

* January 19, 2005. Joan Woolfolk Cross’s Pope Joan

Cross combines legend with historical fact in a novel about Joan of Ingelheim, the female pope. Born in 814 to an English missionary father and a Saxon mother, Joan is frustrated by the limitations imposed on her life because she is a girl. After disguising herself as a boy in order to get the education she seeks, she eventually makes her way to Rome, where her gifts as a healer enable her to become the confidante of two popes. In the midst of vicious papal politics, Joan becomes pope herself. (1996)

* February 16, 2005. Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Ten different novels are interwoven into one. Each chapter begins a new book, a new plot, and a different writing style–stories of menace, spies, mystery, and premonition–with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and the Other Reader try to reach, and read, each other. (1981)

* March 16, 2005. Ian McEwan’s Antonement

The major events of Booker Prize winner McEwan’s novel occur one day in the summer of 1935. Briony Tallis, a precocious 13-year-old with an overactive imagination, witnesses an incident between Cecilia, her older sister, and Robbie Turner, son of the Tallis family’s charwoman. Already startled by the sexual overtones of what she has seen, she is completely shocked that evening when she surreptitiously reads a suggestive note Robbie has mistakenly sent Cecilia. It then becomes easy for her to believe that the shadowy figure who assaults her cousin Lola late that night is Robbie. Briony’s testimony sends Robbie to prison and, through an early release, into the army on the eve of World War II. Gradually understanding what she has done, Briony seeks atonement first through a career in nursing and then through writing, with the novel itself framed as a literary confession it has taken her a lifetime to write. (2002)

* April 27, 2005. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude

The story of a century lived in the mythic village of Macondo, somewhere in South America. The Buendia family struggles to create a life in a place where everything is larger than life and the rain never stops. (1971)

* May 18, 2005. George Howe Colt’s The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home (NON-FICTION)

In this intimate and poignant history of a sprawling century-old summerhouse on Cape Cod, Colt reveals not just one family’s fascinating story but a vanishing way of life. Faced with the sale of the treasured house where he had spent forty-two summers, Colt returned for one last August with his wife and young children. The Big House, the author’s loving tribute to his one-of-a-kind family home, interweaves glimpses of that elegiac final visit with memories of earlier summers spent at the house and of the equally idiosyncratic people who lived there over the course of five generations. (2003)

* June 15, 2005. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi

Meet Pi Patel, a young man on the cusp of adulthood when fate steps in and hastens his lessons in maturity. En route with his family from their home in India to Canada, their cargo ship sinks, and Pi finds himself adrift in a lifeboat — alone, save for a few surviving animals, some of the very same animals Pi’s zookeeper father warned him would tear him to pieces if they got a chance. But Pi’s seafaring journey is about much more than a struggle for survival. It becomes a test of everything he’s learned — about both man and beast, their creator, and the nature of truth itself. (2002)

The 2003/2004 Reading List

* September 17, 2003–Cape Exploration:
Alice Hoffman’s Illumination Night

Elizabeth is an elderly widow suffering from spells of fantasy and failing sight. Andre and Vonny are a young couple trying to make ends meet. Jody is a teenage runaway. On the island of Chilmark near Martha’s Vineyard, they all come together. (1987)

and

Elizabeth McCracken’s The Giant’s House.

An unusual love story set in 1950 about a little librarian on Cape Cod and the tallest boy in the world from a Somerville author. (1996)

* October 15, 2003. Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness

Spanning 70 years and three generations, this is an eloquent and profoundly moving tale of family, race, and redemption. In the early years of this century, Nathan Walker and his fellow sandhogs daily risk their lives burrowing beneath New York City’s East River to build the tunnels that will one day connect Manhattan and Brooklyn. Years later, Nathan’s descendant, a homeless man who calls himself Treefrog, is driven by guilt and a shameful secret to eke out a marginal existence in these same tunnels. (1999)

* November 19, 2003. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

This classic describes the clash between Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter of a country gentleman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a rich and aristocratic landowner. Austen reverses the convention of first impressions: “pride” of rank and fortune, and “prejudice” against Elizabeth’s inferiority of family, hold Darcy aloof; while Elizabeth is equally fired both by the pride of self-respect and by prejudice against Darcy’s snobbery. Ultimately, they come together in love and self-understanding. (1813)

* December 17, 2003. Kent Haruf’s Plainsong

The intensely affecting story of family, tribulation, and tenacity, is set on the High Plains east of Denver where in the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher struggles to raise his two sons alone. (1999)

* January 21, 2004. Bob Smith’s Hamlet’s Dresser: A Memoir (NON-FICTION)

A bookish, lonely child, his crush on the Bard’s work became love when, as an alienated teenager, he joined the American Shakespeare Theatre as Hamlet’s dresser. In time he would dress other characters, perform in small roles, become a coach and a watcher, and eventually lead senior citizens’ groups in Shakespeare-appreciation courses. But this ecstatic marriage was haunted by his sad, contorted childhood. (2003)

* February 25, 2004. Richard Russo’s Straight Man

This funny and courageous novel is about a professor whose sense of humor is tested by the cosmic joke. Hank Devereaux, Jr., failed novelist, creative writing teacher, and estranged son of one of academe’s stars, is a hero whose cynicism must be mitigated by his love for family, friends and, ultimately, knowledge itself. (1998)

* March 17, 2004. Lois Lowry’s The Giver

Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives. A Science Fiction classic that has often been a Banned Book. (1993)

* April 21, 2004. Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections

In this much-lauded novel, Enid faces the disappointments in her life as her husband’s health deteriorates, including her three grown children. This wry book about family dysfunction from city to city was never discussed on the Oprah Show because of the author’s wishes. (2001)

* May 19, 2004. Bob Greene’s Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War (NON-FICTION)

When Bob Greene went home to central Ohio to be with his dying father, it set off a chain of events that led him to knowing his dad in a way he never had before, thanks to a quiet man who lived just a few miles away and changed the history of the world. In 1945, Paul Tibbets had piloted a plane called Enola Gay to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where he dropped the atomic bomb. (2000)

* June 16, 2004. Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague.

When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated mountain village, a housemaid emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through her eyes, we follow the story of the plague year, 1666, as her fellow villagers make an extraordinary choice. Convinced by a visionary young minister, they elect to quarantine themselves within the village boundaries to arrest the spread of the disease. (2001)

The 2002/2003 Reading List

* September 18, 2002–Thematic group.

Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring
Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue.
And…if you can find & fit them in:
Harriet Scott Chessman’s Lydia Cassat Reading the Morning Paper
Katharine Weber’s The Music Lesson.

* October 16, 2002 Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (MEMOIR)

* November 20, 2002 Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies

* December 18, 2002 Adriana Trigiani’s The Big Stone Gap

* January 15, 2003 Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season

* February 26, 2003 Andre Dubus III’s The House of Sand and Fog

* March 19, 2003 Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter

* April 16, 2003 Adele Crockett Robertson’s The Orchard (NON-FICTION/MEMOIR)

* May 21, 2003 Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter

* June 18, 2003 Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair

The 2001/2002 Reading List

* September 18, 2002 Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.

* October 17, 2001 Elizabeth Gilbert’s Stern Men.

* November 14, 2001 Dick Lehr’s Black Mass: The Irish Mob, The FBI and a Devil’s Deal. NON-FICTION.

* December 19, 2001 Alice Mattison’s The Book Borrower.

* January 16, 2002 Harriet Doerr’s Stones for Ibarra.

* February 27, 2002 Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. NON-FICTION/MEMOIR.

* March 20, 2002 Laura Cunningham’s Sleeping Arrangements: A Memoir.

* April 24, 2002 Chang-Rae Lee’s Gesture Life.

* May 15, 2002 Gail Tsukiyama’s Samurai’s Garden.

* June 19, 2002 Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.

The 2000/2001 Reading List

* September 20, 2000–A Thematic Group of Three:
Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird & Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.

* October 18, 2000 E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News.

* November 15, 2000 Helen Fremont’s After Long Silence: A Memoir. NON-FICTION.

Looking for something like this book? Check out The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust by Edith Hahn Beer, and/or To See You Again: A True Story of Love in a Time of War by Betty Schimmel.

* December 13, 2000 Louisa May Alcott’s Long Fatal Love Chase.

* January 17, 2001 Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent.

* February 28, 2001 Blanche Wiesen Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884-1933. NON-FICTION/BIOGRAPHY.

* March 21, 2001 Susan Minot’s Evening.

* April 25, 2001 Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.

* May 16, 2001 Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing.

* June 20, 2001 Elinor Lipman’s The Inn at Lake Devine.

The 1999/2000 Reading List

* September 15, 1999 An historical mystery trilogy–Margaret Lawrence’s Hearts and Bones, Blood Red Roses, and The Burning Bride

* October 20, 1999 Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride

* November 17, 1999 Sebastian Junger’s A Perfect Storm NON-FICTION

* December 15, 1999 Pearl Cleage’s What looks Like Crazy On an Ordinary Day

* January 26, 2000 Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

* February 16, 2000 Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie NON-FICTION

* March 15, 2000 Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries

* April 26, 2000 Arthur Golden’s The Memoirs of a Geisha

* May 17, 2000 John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent

* June 21, 2000 Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

The 1998/1999 Reading List

* September 16, 1998 Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities & Baroness Emmusku Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

* October 21, 1998 Keri Hulme’s The Bone People

* November 18, 1998 Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action NON-FICTION

* December 16, 1998 Olive Ann Burns’s Cold Sassy Tree

* January 20, 1999 John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany

* February 17, 1999 A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance

* March 17, 1999 Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose

* April 28, 1999 Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior NON-FICTION/MEMOIR

* May 19, 1999 James McBride’s The Color of Water NON-FICTION/MEMOIR

* June 16, 1999 Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

Previous titles discussed in 1998 were Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve, and Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison.