SUGGESTIONS FOR 2014 - 2015 READING LIST

From Janice:

Ok, Just looked over the book recommendations.  Mine aren't quite as deep but we may enjoy them.

THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL OF ALL:  Searching for my father and finding the Zodiac Killer    by Gary L. Stewart   Non-fiction: 339 pages

Soon after his birth mother contacted him for the first time at the age of 39 ,adoptee  Gary L. Stewart decided to search for his biological father.  His quest would lead him to the horrifying truth and force him to reconsider everything he thought he knew about himself and his world.

RIDING THE BUS WITH MY SISTER   by Rachel Simon     Non-fiction; 296 pages  

Rachel Simon tells the true story of how one day she agrees to spend a year with her high-functioning mentally retarded sister riding the city buses all day.  Beth is a spirited  woman with mental retardation who spends nearly all day riding buses in her Pennsylvania city.  The drivers are her mentors, her fellow passengers are her community.

This true- life journey would raise interesting questions of what it means to be regarded as different in a world where disabilities are still taboo.

Field trip??????

THE MAN WHO QUIT MONEY by Mark Sundeen  Non-fiction; 272 pages

Daniel Suelo questioned and rejected most of the assumptions about our weird, relentlessly materialistic culture and found a way to live on his own terms.  He is doing it without getting angry, going on a march or bombing anyone. Suelo doesn't pay taxes or accept food stamps or welfare.  He lives in the Utah canyonlands, forages wild foods and gourmet discards.  Sundeen raises questions about our relationships with money and the decisions we all make about how we live.

Field trip?????

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY   by Michael Chabon   Fiction; 636 pages  

This book chronicles the lives of young Czech  immigrant Joe Kavalier and his American cousin Sammy Clay.  

The Plot:  Two Jewish boys growing up in pre-World War II New York City combine their amazing talents and flaws to help create the burgeoning comic book industry

Hailed as Chabon's "magnum opus"

Winner of the  PEN/Faulkner award and New York Society Library Book Award

THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS   by M. L. Stedman  Fiction; 343 pages

A novel set on a remote Australian island, where a childless couple lives quietly running  a lighthouse until a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a live baby.  The couple make a devastating choice that forever changes two worlds.

This novel is a tale with difficult to be answered ethical and emotional questions.  

THE INVENTION OF WINGS    by Sue Monk Kidd   Fiction; 369 pages

The story of real-life abolitionist Sarah Grimke's lifelong quest for racial and gender equality.

Told parallel to the (fictionalized) story of her slave (Handful) who refuses to allow her mind to be enslaved even if her body is.  It follows both women from ages eleven to fifty as their lives grow together, apart and together again.

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From Andrea:

Book Club Recommendations 2014-2015

NOTE: I have chosen to recommend the following books because each explores social issues I believe will make for a stimulating discussion.

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solo

962 pages;  Non-fiction

Publisher’s summary:   All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on forty thousand pages of interview transcripts with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges. Whether considering prenatal screening for genetic disorders, cochlear implants for the deaf, or gender reassignment surgery for transgender people, Solomon narrates a universal struggle toward compassion. Many families grow closer through caring for a challenging child; most discover supportive communities of others similarly affected; some are inspired to become advocates and activists, celebrating the very conditions they once feared. Woven into their courageous and affirming stories is Solomon’s journey to accepting his own identity, which culminated in his midlife decision, influenced by this research, to become a parent.

Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun: A Personal History of Violence by Geoffrey Canada   181 pages (rev. ed); Non-fiction

Publisher’s summary:  Long before the avalanche of praise for his work—from Oprah Winfrey, from President Bill Clinton, from President Barack Obama—long before he became known for his talk show appearances, Members Project spots, and documentaries like Waiting for “Superman”, Geoffrey Canada was a small boy growing up scared on the mean streets of the South Bronx. His childhood world was one where “sidewalk boys” learned the codes of the block and were ranked through the rituals of fist, stick, and knife. Then the streets changed, and the stakes got even higher. In his candid and riveting memoir, Canada relives a childhood in which violence stalked every street corner. Includes the story of the founding of the Harlem Children’s Zone.

The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine    246 pages;  Non-fiction

Publisher’s summary:  Madeline Levine has been a practicing psychologist for twenty-five years, but it was only recently that she began to observe a new breed of unhappy teenager. When a bright, personable fifteen-year-old girl, from a loving and financially comfortable family, came into her office with the word empty carved into her left forearm, Levine was startled. This girl and her message seemed to embody a disturbing pattern Levine had been observing. Her teenage patients were bright, socially skilled, and loved by their affluent parents. But behind a veneer of achievement and charm, many of these teens suffered severe emotional problems. What was going on?

The various elements of a perfect storm—materialism, pressure to achieve, perfectionism, disconnection—are combining to create a crisis in America's culture of affluence.

Jumping the Fence: A Legacy of Race in 150 Years of Family Secrets by Maureen Gilmer  176 pages; Non-fiction

Publisher’s summary:

In 19th century New Orleans, real life legislator Jean Benjamin Esnard and his family struggled to conceal their mixed race ancestry and pass as white in the increasingly hostile racial environment of the post-Civil War South. Their secret began to unravel, however, when their son, Adrien, was born darker than his siblings and labeled “C” for “colored” on his birth certificate. As desperation sets in, Jean Benjamin and his wife Florentine must make the heartbreaking decision to separate the family in order to save it.

In Jumping the Fence, Maureen Gilmer shares the extraordinary true story of early civil rights activists—her ancestors—who stopped at nothing to protect each other and their assets in the struggle against slavery and segregation.

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by

Tom Reiss  414 pages; Non-fiction

Publisher’s summary:  The real-life protagonist of The Black Count, General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today yet with a story that is strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of the best loved heroes of literature.

Yet, hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: the real hero was the son of a black slave -- who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time.

The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.

This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital by Mark Leibovich   386 pages;  Non-fiction

Publisher’s summary:  Washington—This Town—might be loathed from every corner of the nation, yet these are fun and busy days at this nexus of big politics, big money, big media, and big vanity. There are no Democrats and Republicans anymore in the nation’s capital, just millionaires. That is the grubby secret of the place in the twenty-first century.

In This Town, Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, presents a blistering, stunning—and often hysterically funny—examination of our ruling class’s incestuous “media industrial complex.” Through his eyes, we discover how the funeral for a beloved newsman becomes the social event of the year. How political reporters are fetishized for their ability to get their names into the predawn e-mail sent out by the city’s most powerful and puzzled-over journalist. How a disgraced Hill aide can overcome ignominy and maybe emerge with a more potent “brand” than many elected members of Congress. And how an administration bent on “changing Washington” can be sucked into the ways of This Town with the same ease with which Tea Party insurgents can, once elected, settle into it like a warm bath.

There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America by Alex Kotlowitz  324 pages; Non-fiction

Publisher’s summary:  There Are No Children Here, the true story of brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 11 and 9 at the start, brings home the horror of trying to make it in a violence-ridden public housing project. The boys live in a gang-plagued war zone on Chicago's West Side, literally learning how to dodge bullets the way kids in the suburbs learn to chase baseballs. "If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver," says Lafeyette at one point. That's if, not when--spoken with the complete innocence of a child. The book's title comes from a comment made by the brothers' mother as she and author Alex Kotlowitz contemplate the challenges of living in such a hostile environment: "There are no children here," she says. "They've seen too much to be children." This book humanizes the problem of inner-city pathology, makes readers care about Lafeyette and Pharoah more than they may expect to, and offers a sliver of hope buried deep within a world of chaos.

The Grace of Silence: A Family Memoir by Michele Norris  185 pages; Non-fiction

Publisher’s summary:  In the wake of talk of a “postracial” America upon Barack Obama’s ascension as president of the United States, Michele Norris, cohost of National Public Radio’s flagship program All Things Considered, set out to write, through original reporting, a book about “the hidden conversation” on race that is unfolding nationwide. She would, she thought, base her book on the frank disclosures of others on the subject, but she was soon disabused of her presumption when forced to confront the fact that “the conversation” in her own family had not been forthright.

Norris unearthed painful family secrets that compelled her to question her own self-understanding: from her father’s shooting by a Birmingham police officer weeks after his discharge from the navy at the conclusion of World War II to her maternal grandmother’s peddling pancake mix as an itinerant Aunt Jemima to white farm women in the Midwest. In what became a profoundly personal and bracing journey into her family’s past, Norris traveled from her childhood home in Minneapolis to her ancestral roots in the Deep South to explore the reasons for the “things left unsaid” by her father and mother when she was growing up, the better to come to terms with her own identity. Along the way she discovered how her character was forged by both revelation and silence.

Perfect Peace by Daniel Black   352 pages; Fiction

Publisher's Summary: The heartbreaking portrait of a large, rural southern family’s attempt to grapple with their mother’s desperate decision to make her newborn son into the daughter she will never have.

When the seventh child of the Peace family, named Perfect, turns eight, her mother Emma Jean tells her bewildered daughter, “You was born a boy. I made you a girl. But that ain’t what you was supposed to be. So, from now on, you gon’ be a boy. It’ll be a little strange at first, but you’ll get used to it, and this’ll be over after while.” From this point forward, his life becomes a bizarre kaleidoscope of events. Meanwhile, the Peace family is forced to question everything they thought they knew about gender, sexuality, unconditional love, and fulfillment.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis  243 pages; Fiction

Publisher’s summary:  Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family.

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented.  Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave.  She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl   514 pages; Fiction

Publisher’s summary:  Marisha Pessl’s dazzling debut sparked raves from critics and heralded the arrival of a vibrant new voice in American fiction. At the center of Special Topics in Calamity Physics is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway School, she finds some—a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna Tartt (then invites the rest of the Western Canon to the party) in this novel—with visual aids drawn by the author—that has won over readers of all ages.

Bastard Out of Carolina: A Novel by Dorothy Allison   309 pages; Fiction

Publisher’s summary:  Critics have likened Allison to William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Harper Lee, naming her the first writer of her generation to dramatize the lives and language of poor whites in the South. Since its appearance, the novel has inspired an award-winning film and has been banned from libraries and classrooms, championed by fans, and defended by critics.

Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place that is home to the Boatwright family-a tight-knit clan of rough-hewn, hard- drinking men who shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who get married young and age too quickly. At the heart of this story is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a bastard child who observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective. When her stepfather Daddy Glen, "cold as death, mean as a snake," becomes increasingly more vicious toward her, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that tests the loyalty of her mother, Anney-and leads to a final, harrowing encounter from which there can be no turning back.

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Suggestions from Robert:

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR 2014-2015

Great House by Nicole Krauss 289 pages; Fiction

For 25 years, a reclusive American novelist has been writing at the desk she inherited from a young Chilean poet who disappeared at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police; one day a girl claiming to be the poet’s daughter arrives to take it away, sending the writer’s life reeling. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers, among her papers, a lock of hair that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer slowly reassembles his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis in Budapest in 1944.

Linking these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett 353 pages; Fiction

Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a Minnesota pharmaceutical company, is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have all but disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be an extremely valuable new drug, the development of which has already cost the company a fortune. Nothing about Marina’s assignment is easy: not only does no one know where Dr. Swenson is, but the last person who was sent to find her, Marina’s research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the insect-infested jungle in hopes of finding her former mentor as well as answers to several troubling questions about her friend’s death, the state of her company’s future, and her own past.

The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth 391 pages; Fiction

It is an alternative history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as anti-Semitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roth’s are persecuted on various levels. The narrator and central character in the novel is the young Philip, and the care with which his confusion and terror are rendered makes the novel as much about the mysteries of growing up as about American politics. Roth based his novel on the isolationist ideas espoused by Lindbergh in real life as a spokesman for the America First Committee and his own experiences growing up in Newark, New Jersey.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz 339 pages; Fiction

Written by Dominican author Junot Díaz. Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey where Díaz was raised and deals explicitly with his ancestral homeland's experience under dictator Rafael Trujillo. It has received numerous positive reviews from critics and went on to win numerous prestigious awards, such as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

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China Dolls by Lisa See 383 pages; Fiction

Takes readers back to pre-World War II San Francisco and introduces them to Grace Lee, Ruby Tom, and Helen Fong, three young Chinese-American nightclub performers who, despite pronounced difference in backgrounds and personalities, forge resilient friendships. Told from the distinct perspectives of each woman and spanning a full half century.
[This is the latest title from Lisa See; we have read Shanghai Girls and Dreams of Joy.

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Suggestions from Lori:

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins    Fiction,  about 300 (easy reading) pages per installment

We could read only the first book (Hunger Games), or preferably all 3 in the series - Catching Fire, and Mockingjay.  These are young adult books, and are easy reading.   A better perspective comes from reading the series of 3, or you can watch the movie for the first two books!    I was reluctant at first to read these books because I thought they would be overwhelmingly dark and grim, but that's not the case.  The story is very entertaining, and interesting because of its parallels with the "real world"; its dystopian society focus,  female protagonist and "3-act" structure; and its huge popularity  - lots to talk about!

From "GradeSaver.com":  "The Hunger Games series details the adventure of Katniss Everdeen, who is forced to engage in a fight-to-the-death tournament against other children. The novel takes place in Panem, a dystopic country built on what was once North America.   In a world of limited resources, the despotic government run by the Capitol keeps its citizens in line by separating them into Districts and reinforcing severe class separations."   

A Walk in the Woods  by Bill Bryson    Non-fiction, 274 (easy, fun) pages

This isn't a new book -  first published in 1998 - but this book made me laugh out loud about a hundred times.     It does get a little dry toward the end when discussing the future of the Appalachian Trail, but you can skip the boring parts and it's still worth reading.   A movie version is in production, although I don't know when it might be released.   The issues it raises about conservation and how nature influences society are more important as climate change becomes a bigger threat.  Try to read it while sitting outdoors in a beautiful setting, if you can!

From Wikipedia:  "The book describes Bryson's attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend.   The book is written in a humorous style, interspersed with more serious discussions of matters relating to the trail's history, and the surrounding sociology, ecology, trees, plants, animals and people." 

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Suggestions: - Reading List 2014-15 Submitted by Heidi Louwaert:

Jack London: An American Life by Earle Labor  * 480 pages  Non-fiction

    Earle Labor is apparently the world scholar on Jack London and is also the curator for the Jack London Museum in Louisiana. This book has received great reviews for its in depth account of London’s life and is well written and exceptionally entertaining. I know very little about Jack London but imagine he led an exciting life and I would like to read about him.

***side note:  there is a Jack London Museum in Glen Ellen .... field trip?
http://www.jacklondons.net/museum.html 

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson  * 640 pages  Non-fiction

    The author is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who gives us an account of three African Americans who migrate from the South during the Jim Crow era. Wilkerson has done extensive research and has received high praise for her exceptional writing of this important chapter in American history. This is a topic I have not read about and am very interested.

Dancing Fish and Ammonites by Penelope Lively   * 224 pages  Non-fiction

    Dancing Fish is a memoir about growing old, about memory and history, about reading and writing. It is an insightful and fascinating consideration of old age and memory which will leave you with the thought whether it’s the traveling that’s better or having arrived at the destination. The Man Booker Prize-winning novelist’s memoir is driven by wistfulness and reminisce her journey of over eighty years, wondering if one remains the same or experiences change during the course of life. It is a deeply personal reflection which is both charming and compelling. This book is recommended by a friend and I will most likely read it whether it is chosen or not.

David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell  * 320 pages  Non-fiction

    An insightful summary of seemingly unrelated success stories, all anchored by Gladwell's well researched  theme of the identifying and reshaping of commonly perceived disadvantages into practical and useful advantages. I’ve been told it is a “feel good” book and one that people like to talk about.

Me Before You by JoJo Moyes   * 400 pages  Fiction

    Before Louisa met Will, her plans didn't reach beyond their tiny English town. Will, when he wasn't closing multimillion-dollar deals, blew off steam scaling mountains, leaping from planes, and enjoying exquisite women--until an accident left him paralyzed and seriously depressed. When his mother hires Lou to keep his spirits up, he meets her awkward overtures with caustic contempt, but she's tenacious and oddly endearing. Their fondness grows into something deeper, gaining urgency when she realizes his determination to end his life, and her efforts to convince him of its value throw her own bland ambitions into question. Plumbing morally complex depths with comedy and compassion, Jojo Moyes elevates the story of Lou and Will from what could have been a maudlin weepie into a tragic love story, with a catharsis that will wring out your heart and leave you feeling fearless. A good friend loved this novel.

The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes   * 163 pages  Fiction

    This story received rave reviews with words like elegant, playful, remarkable, beautiful, “exquisitely crafted, sophisticated, suspenseful, and achingly painful, The Sense of an Ending is a meditation on history, memory, and individual responsibility.  The novella is sort of a coming of age story about one man and his experiences from his school days through early adulthood. Plus it is short!

Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danicat  * 256 pages   Fiction

    This story takes place in a small fishing town in Haiti. The two main characters are a father and his 7 yr old daughter and the search for a mother for her. There are a half dozen more characters and their lives all flow beautifully together in a prose which the author is well known for. Danticat’s captivating visual descriptions of the seaside town engulf the reader’s psyche. But it’s the core human struggles that make it impossible to put the novel down . . . She brilliantly sheds light on an array of human issues with sexuality, identity, politics, class . . .

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri   * 352 pages  Fiction

    From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of The Namesake comes an extraordinary new novel, set in both India and America, that expands the scope and range of one of our most dazzling storytellers: a tale of two brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past, a country torn by revolution, and a love that lasts long past death. Short-listed for the Man Booker Award.

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer   * 560 pages  Fiction

    The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life. Thought it sounded “Interesting”!!!!

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Suggested by Teri:

Dark Invasion by Howard Blum    474 pages; Non-fiction

    Publisher Summary: A true-life tale of espionage and terror on American soil during World War I follows New York Police Inspector Tom Tunney's search for a team of German saboteurs who were planning a series of "accidents" using explosives and biological weapons.

The author was on Fresh Air and sparked my interest.  Film rights have been sold.  Also, we are in the Centenary year for the beginning of WWI, so it seems appropriate to read about that period.

Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst    251 pages; Fiction

Paris, 1938. As the shadow of war darkens Europe, democratic forces on the Continent struggle against fascism and communism, while in Spain the war has already begun. Alan Furst, whom Vince Flynn has called “the most talented espionage novelist of our generation,” now gives us a taut, suspenseful, romantic, and richly rendered novel of spies and secret operatives in Paris and New York, in Warsaw and Odessa, on the eve of World War II.

I saw the author at Kepler’s and the sections he read were very interesting -- arms dealing in Spain in 1938.

Big Data a Revolution That Will Transform  How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor  Mayer-Schönberger    Non-fiction; 242 pages

A revelatory exploration of the hottest trend in technology and the dramatic impact it will have on the economy, science, and society at large.

Which paint color is most likely to tell you that a used car is in good shape? How can officials identify the most dangerous New York City manholes before they explode? And how did Google searches predict the spread of the H1N1 flu outbreak?

The key to answering these questions, and many more, is big data. “Big data” refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.

In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.

www.big-data-book.com

Recommended by a member of another book club; she described this as an ‘eye-opening’ book.

Snowden Files; the Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding  Non-Fiction;  346 pages

Discusses the infamous intelligence breach brought about by Edward Snowden, including the dangers of global monitoring, how Snowden managed to leave the country with a hard drive full of secrets, and his battle for asylum.

Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian newspaper. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

He is currently based at the Guardian's office in London.

Major news story that I’d like to know more about.

The Fight for the Four  Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great by Harvey J. Kaye   Non-Fiction;  292 pages

On January 6, 1941, the Greatest Generation gave voice to its founding principles, the Four Freedoms: Freedom from want and from fear. Freedom of speech and religion. In the name of the Four Freedoms they fought the Great Depression. In the name of the Four Freedoms they defeated the Axis powers.  In this thought-provoking account, a scholar and advocate revisits Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms for all Americans—the most significant legacy of America's most progressive generation, and stresses the importance of honoring these freedoms in today's society before it's too late.

Kirkus: “A systematic, heady dose of American history by a frustrated, even outraged progressive thinker”  

I heard the author on To The Best of Our Knowledge and this sounded interesting.  Also, there is a Ken Burns PBS special on the Roosevelts coming up in a few months, and this might complement it.

A Week at the Airport; a Diary by Alain de Botton    Non-Fiction; 107 pages

From the bestselling author of The Art of Travel comes a wittily intriguing exploration of the strange "non-place" that he believes is the imaginative center of our civilization.

Given unprecedented access to one of the world’s busiest airports as a “writer-in-residence,” Alain de Botton found it to be a showcase for many of the major crosscurrents of the modern world—from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our global interconnectedness to our romanticizing of the exotic. He met travelers from all over and spoke with everyone from baggage handlers to pilots to the airport chaplain. Weaving together these conversations and his own observations—of everything from the poetry of room service menus to the eerie silence in the middle of the runway at midnight—de Botton has produced an extraordinary meditation on a place that most of us never slow down enough to see clearly. Lavishly illustrated in color by renowned photographer Richard Baker, A Week at the Airport reveals the airport in all its turbulence and soullessness and—yes—even beauty.

Another one I heard about on To the Best of Our Knowledge -- sounded suitably quirky and fun.  Reviews mention “ extrapolating large truths from small details”, which seems like a good starting point for a discussion.

Loving Frank; a Novel by Nancy Horan  Fiction; 362 pages

Fact and fiction blend in a historical novel that chronicles the relationship between seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, from their meeting in Oak Park, Illinois, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society.

I read this for another book group and we had a good discussion about some of the issues raised such as the place of women, morality, place of the artist in society …  Also, it got me interested in looking up some of FLW’s buildings.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson   Fiction; 332 pages

In her profoundly moving, uniquely comic debut, Kate Atkinson introduces readers to the mind and world of Ruby Lennox, born above a pet shop in York at the halfway point of the twentieth century, and determined to understand both the family that precedes her and the life that awaits her.  Taking her own conception as her starting point, the irrepressible Ruby narrates a story of four generations of Yorkshire women as they move through two World Wars, coronations, secrets, heartbreak, and happiness.  

I read the author’s Life After Life for another book group, and then read some of the Jackson Brodie stories; the author does interesting things with the passage of time, and the way seemingly random events connect.  This is her first novel.

Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubon   Non-fiction; 361 pages

Thubron, a gifted writer with over a dozen books to his name, has written a vivid account of his journey, often under intimidatingly iffy circumstances, across the full length of the ancient Silk Road, from China to the Mediterranean. Rich in history, readers will be transported by stories of ancient empires and sobered by their present realities as witnessed by the indefatigable author.

A friend recommended this author as being very readable, writing about parts of the world that are less well known, but frequently in the news.  The idea of the Silk road ( the old trading route, not the recently shut down website) has always fascinated me.