Library Reading Groups

 What we’re reading:

Annville Free Library - No registration is necessary. AFL's book discussion group invites you to join them for some lively discussion. The group meets once a month on a Monday night at 6:30 PM. Each member is responsible for getting their own copy of the books. 717.867.1802
January 30, 2012 @ 6:30
In The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
Summary: The bestselling author of "Devil in the White City" turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler's rise to power. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
February 27th @ 6:30 – Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks. Catalog
Summary. A richly imagined new novel from the author of the New York Times bestseller, People of the Book. Once again, Geraldine Brooks takes a remarkable shard of history and brings it to vivid life. In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, Brooks has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure.
March 26th @ 6:30
Free Radicals by Michael Brooks
Summary: a bold expose of science's mavericks. For more than a century, science has cultivated a sober public image for itself. But as bestselling author Michael Brooks explains, the truth is very different: many of our most successful scientists have more in common with libertines than librarians. This thrilling exploration of some of the greatest breakthroughs in science reveals the extreme lengths some scientists go to in order to make their theories public. Fraud, suppressing evidence and unethical or reckless PR games are sometimes necessary to bring the best and most brilliant discoveries to the world's attention.
April 30th @ 6:30 – The Book: True Grit by Charles Portis

Catalog
May 7th @ 6:00 – The Movie: True Grit directed by the Coen Brothers (popcorn provided).

 

Lebanon Community Library:
Three reading groups meet at the Lebanon Community Library
Tuesday Morning Book Club: meets 2nd Tuesday of the month at 9 AM. Registration required. Tuesday Evening Book Club: meets 4th Tuesday of the month at 6:30 PM.
Thursday Afternoon Book Club: meets 1st Thursday of the month at 2 PM.
For more information, call Susan Reedy at 717-273-7624.
Tuesday Morning Book Group : meets on 2nd Tuesday of the month at 9 AM. Registration required
January 10
Magnificent Bastards by Rich Hall
Summary: From the grouchy, deadpan, comic genius and brilliantly witty author of Otis Lee Crenshaw: I Blame Society and Things Snowball comes this wonderful new collection of stories of magnificent bastards and lost souls. Meet the man who vacuums bewildered prairie dogs out of their burrows; a smug, carbon-neutral ecocouple; a teenage girl who invites 45,000 MySpace friends to a house party; the author of a business book entitled Highly Successful Secrets to Standing on a Corner Holding Up a Golf Sale Sign; and a man whose attempts to teach softball to a group of indolent advertising executives sparks an international crisis.
February 14
My Thoughts Be Bloody by Nora Titone
Summary: In her debut, Titone, a historical researcher, says almost nothing about John Wilkes Booth's plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, focusing instead on his backstory and (speculative) psychological motivation. The tale has vibrant leads, including Booth's father, Junius Brutus Booth, a famous tragedian and raging alcoholic, and his domineering brother Edwin, the biggest stage star of the Civil War era. Then there's John Wilkes himself, a narcissist and hilariously bad actor--Titone regales readers with scathing reviews--whose good looks and hammy onstage swordplay drew crowds.
March 13
Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Summary: A science fiction classic about the colonization of Mars.
April 10
Last Call : The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
Catalog
Summary: Okrent explores the origins, implementation, and failure of that great American delusion known as Prohibition. "Last Call" explains how Prohibition happened, what life under it was like, and what it did to the country.
May 8
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson		 
  
Tuesday Evening Book Club meets 4th Tuesday of the month at 6:30 PM.
January
The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar
Summary: A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
A Boston Globe Best Fiction Book of 2011

The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves—a twenty-first century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity

With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions
February 28
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
March 27
The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton
Catalog
Summary: Marked by tragedy, traumatized at the age of eight, Michael, now eighteen, is no ordinary young man. Besides not uttering a single word in ten years, he discovers the one thing he can somehow do better than anyone else. Whether it's a locked door without a key, a padlock with no combination, or even an eight-hundred pound safe ... he can open them all.
April 24
Swamplandia by Karen Russell		 
May 22
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides		 
  
Thursday Afternoon Book Group meets 1st Thursday of the month at 2 PM.
January
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
February 2
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Catalog
A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel-an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother's death in childbirth and their father's disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics-their passion for the same woman-that will tear them apart
March 1
Operation Mincemeat by Ben McIntyre
April 5
The Whole Five Feet by Christopher Belia
May 3
Infidel by Ayaan Hirai Ali		 
June 7
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Catalog
Summary: Reality show of the future. How would you play the game?

An annual televised survival competition pits young people from twelve districts against one another. Sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place. 		 

Matthews Public Library
The group meets upstairs in the library at 5:00 p.m. on the fourth Tuesday of the month
2012 Book Selections
January 24, 2012
Brick Lane by Monica Ali
catalog
A deeply moving story of one woman, Nazneen, born in a Bangladeshi village and transported to London at age eighteen to enter into an arranged marriage. Already hailed by the London Observer as "one of the most significant British novelists of her generation," Ali has written a stunningly accomplished debut about one outsider's quest to find her voice.
February 28, 2012
Eat Cake by Jeanne Ray
catalog
Ever since childhood, Ruth has found baking cakes to be a source of relief from the stresses of life. And now-as her husband loses his job, her life-of-the-party father arrives for an extended stay (much to the dismay of her mother, who also moved in recently), and her teenage daughter perfects the art of sulking-Ruth is going to need some serenity. But she also needs a plan. Because with funds running low and tempers running short, her family needs more than the perfect sweet. It's going to be up to Ruth to save the day, and let the crumbs fall where they may...
2011 Book Selections
Tues May 24, 2011 at 5 pm
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
catalog
In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another. 
Tues April 26, 2011 at 5 pm

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." While they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What would we want as our legacy? When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about overcoming obstacles, enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment. It was about living.
Tues Mar 22, 2011 at 5 pm

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Catalog
The disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden, gnaws at her octogenarian uncle, Henrik Vanger. He is determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder. He hires crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, recently at the wrong end of a libel case, to get to the bottom of Harriet's disappearance. Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old, pierced, tattooed genius hacker, possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age--and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness--assists Blomkvist with the investigation.
Tues Feb 22, 2011 at 5 pm

Three Cups of Tea : One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School At A Time by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin

Catalog

One man's campaign to build schools in the most dangerous, remote, and anti-American reaches of Asia: in 1993 Greg Mortenson was an American mountain-climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of a Pakistani village, he promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time--Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.
Matthews Library Tues January 25, 2011 at 5 pm

The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
CatalogA rich and compelling tale of love, sex, ambition, and intrigue, "The Other Boleyn Girl" introduces a woman of extraordinary determination and desire who lived at the heart of the most exciting and glamorous court in Europe, and who survived by following her own heart.  

Palmyra Public Library
Group meets the 2nd Monday of each month in the library meeting room. Contact Mary Adams at 717-838-5797. New members are welcome!
2012 Book Selections
January 9, 2012
Faithful Place by Tana French

Summary: Detective Frank Mackey finds himself straight back in the dark tangle of relationships he left behind twenty-two years ago when the suitcase belonging to his first love, Rosie Daly, shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place. The hotly anticipated third novel of the Dublin murder squad.

February 13, 2012
Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

Summary: Paris, July 1942: Ten year-old Sarah is brutally arrested with her family in the Vel d'Hiv roundup, the most notorious act of French collaboration with the Nazis. But Sarah has locked her brother in their favorite hiding place and kept the key, thinking she will return soon. Paris, May 2002: On Vel d'Hiv's sixtieth anniversary, American journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write about this black day in France's past. In the course of her investigation, Julia stumbles onto a trail of family secrets that connect her to Sarah.

March 12, 2012
The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

Summary: Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the tiger's wife.

2011 Book Selections
December 12, 2011
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout Catalog

Summary: At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her.
November 14, 2011
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Catalog
Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- 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
September 12, 2011
Heart of A Soldier
Catalog

Vision in the Valley
Online Book Group
In Partnership with Helping Hands for the Blind.
This group is open to anyone --vision impaired or sighted -- who want to join us online at www.accessibleworld.org Please contact Barbara Neil at 717-273-7624
January 12, 2012
Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver