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Links to https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp3-lrU3kLJJmH3e2UltjoUNTTlQOMdtt.

September 14, 2019

In many ways, September feels like the dawn of a new year! It’s time to line up pre-holiday projects and establish some new goals. For your book group, you may be back to meeting again after having the summer off, or at least getting back to full attendance. Once you all get out the wine and catch up on each other’s lives, we have a lot of great ideas for your next discussion.

My neighborhood book group is reading SOMEONE WE KNOW by Shari Lapena. We had not read a thriller, and thought since this one is set in a neighborhood, it would be fun. My Long Hill Book Group is reading I.M. by Isaac Mizrahi. Most are listening to the latter as Isaac does a brilliant job of narrating, and we do love memoirs narrated by their authors.

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Cara Wall, author of The Dearly Beloved

Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How, then, can he fall in love with Lily after she tells him with certainty that she will never believe in God? James, the youngest son in a hardscrabble Chicago family, spent much of his youth angry at his alcoholic father and avoiding his anxious mother. Nan grew up in Mississippi, the devout and beloved daughter of a minister and a debutante.

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Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her --- untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream.

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Thomas Kies

Author of the Geneva Chase Mystery series, Thomas Kies lives and writes on a barrier island on the coast of North Carolina with his wife, Cindy, and Lilly, their shih-tzu. He has had a long career working for newspapers and magazines, primarily in New England and New York.

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Win 12 Copies of HEARTLAND by Sarah Smarsh for Your Group

Each month, we ask book groups to share the titles they are reading that month and rate them. From all entries, three winners will be selected, and each will win 12 copies of that month’s prize book for their group. Note: To be eligible to win, let us know the title of the book that YOUR book group is CURRENTLY reading, NOT the title we are giving away.

Our latest prize book is HEARTLAND: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh, which is now available in paperback --- an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country. To enter, please fill out the form below by Wednesday, October 9th at noon ET.
 

David R. Gillham, author of Annelies: A Novel of Anne Frank

Anne Frank is a cultural icon whose diary painted a vivid picture of the Holocaust and made her an image of humanity in one of history’s darkest moments. But she was also a person --- a precocious young girl with a rich inner life and tremendous skill as a writer. In ANNELIES, David R. Gillham explores with breathtaking empathy the woman --- and the writer --- she might have become.

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William Kent Krueger, author of This Tender Land

1932, Minnesota. The Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O’Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent’s wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.

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Anne Gardiner Perkins, author of Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant

In the winter of 1969, young women across the country sent in applications to Yale University for the first time. The Ivy League institution dedicated to graduating "one thousand male leaders" each year had finally decided to open its doors to the nation's top female students. Isolated from one another, singled out as oddities and sexual objects, and barred from many of the privileges an elite education was supposed to offer, many of the first girls found themselves immersed in an overwhelmingly male culture they were unprepared to face.

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September 6, 2019

Reader Nancy Sharko Reports on the 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival

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Our reader Nancy Sharko was at the 19th annual Library of Congress National Book Festival on August 31st and shares her experiences with us in this blog post. Here, she talks about the panels she attended, featuring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Beth Macy, Sara Paretsky, Laila Lalami and many more.