Wautoma Reads:
Two separate book clubs meet at the Wautoma Public Library. Feel free to join us for great reads, engaging conversation, light refreshments, and most of all fun.
Book Club 1 is an afternoon book club which meets every second Wednesday at 1:30 in the Library Meeting Room. New members are always welcome.
Reading Schedule for Book Club 1:
2012
December 12: The Winner by David Baldacci
She is twenty, beautiful, dirt-poor, and hoping for a better life for her infant daughter when LuAnn Tyler is offered the gift of a lifetime, a $100 million lottery jackpot. All she has to do is change her identity and leave the U.S. forever.
2013
January 9: Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.
February 13: Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
Elaine Risley, a middle-aged Canadian painter is thrust into an extended reconsideration of her past while attending a retrospective show of her work in Toronto, a city she had fled years earlier in order to leave behind painful memories. Most pointedly, Risley reflects on the strangeness of her long relations with Cordelia, a childhood friend whose cruelties were dealt lavishly to Risley. Atwood's portrayal of the friendship gives the novel its fraught and mysterious center and a critical assessment the "whole world of girls and their doings"."
March 13: Cane River by Lalita Tademy
Lalita Tademy's riveting family saga, based on her own family’s past, chronicles four generations of women born into slavery along the Cane River in Louisiana. It is also a tale about the blurring of racial boundaries as children are born to black women of white fathers.
April 10: A Dog’s Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron
Not just for dog lovers. This is the remarkable story of one endearing dog’s search for his purpose over the course of several lives. More than just another charming dog story, A Dog’s Purpose touches on the universal quest for an answer to life's most basic question: Why are we here?
May 8: There if You Need Me: A True Story by Kate Braestrup
The story of the author’s remarkable journey from grief to faith to happiness as she holds her family together in the wake of her husband's death, pursues his dream of becoming a minister, and ultimately finds her calling as a Unitarian-Universalist chaplain to search-and-rescue workers. It is dramatic, funny, deeply moving, and simply unforgettable.
June 12: Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
Like the great American child narrators Huck Finn and Scout Finch, let us now add Reuben "Rube" Land, the asthmatic 11-year-old boy at the center of the story. Rube recalls the events of his childhood, in small-town Minnesota circa 1962, in a voice that perfectly captures the poetic, verbal stoicism of the northern Great Plains. "Here's what I saw," Rube warns his readers. "Here's how it went. Make of it what you will." And Rube sees plenty.
July 10: Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian
Laurel Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont’s back roads and her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography, spending all her free time at a homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of photographs that he won’t let anyone see. When Bobbie dies, Laurel discovers a deeply hidden secret–a story that leads her far from her old life and into a cat-and-mouse game with pursuers who claim they want to save her
August 14: Defending Jacob by William Landlay
How well do you know your children? A fast, compelling, and compulsively readable courtroom drama: the story of a district attorney’s son who is accused of killing a classmate. As the father attempts to prove his son’s innocence, Landay explores uncomfortable territory: can a tendency toward violence be inherited? Is the capacity for murder a genetic disposition? In the end Landay pulls off a clever plot device that doesn’t reveal itself until the final pages..
September 11: Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever by Bill O'Reilly
Oct 9: Bel Canto by Anne Patchett
November 13: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Book Club 2 is an evening book club which meets every second Thursday at 7pm in t he Library Meeting Room. Again new members are always welcome.
Reading Schedule for Book Club 2:July
January: Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
February: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghes
March: The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Nearing the end of his life, Enzo, a dog with a philosopher's soul, tries to bring together the family, pulled apart by a three year custody battle between daughter Zoe's maternal grandparents and her father Denny, a race car driver.
April: Defending Jacob by William Landlay. !Canceled & Moved to May!
Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than twenty years. When a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: his fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student. As the crisis reveals how little a father knows about his son, Andy will face a trial of his own-- between loyalty and justice, between truth and allegation, between a past he's tried to bury and a future he cannot conceive.
May: Changed!! Defending Jacob by William Landlay
June: A Sand Country Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold, who has become the most esteemed ecologist of this century, is best remembered for his articulation of the "land ethic," which demonstrates a respect and reverence for all life. His landmark book A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, is considered by many to be the most significant book published on nature and the environment.
July: The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter & Sweet by Jamie Ford
Set in the ethnic neighborhoods of Seattle during World War II and Japanese American internment camps of the era, this debut novel tells the story of widower Henry Lee, his father, and his first love Keiko Okabe.
August: Wild by Cheryl Strayed
A powerful, blazingly honest, inspiring memoir: the story of a 1,100 mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe--and built her back up again.
September: Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Investigative reporter Erik Larson unearths the lost history of the 1893 World's Fair and of a madman who grimly parodied the fair's achievements. The "White City" was a magical creation constructed upon Chicago's swampy Jackson Park by a roster of architectural stars, including Daniel H. Burnham, Frederick Olmstead, and Louis Sullivan. Drawing 27 million visitors in six months, the fair gathered the era's brightest intellectual lights and launched innovations like Juicy Fruit gum, Cracker Jacks, and the Ferris wheel. Nearby, Dr. Henry Holmes built "the World's Fair Hotel," a torture palace to which he lured 27 victims, mostly young women. While the fair ushered in a new epoch in American history, Holmes marked the emergence of the serial killer, who thrived on the forces transforming the country.
October: Here if you Need Me by Kate Braestrup
Ten years ago, Kate Braestrup and her husband Drew were enjoying the life they shared together. They had four young children, and Drew, a Maine state trooper, would soon begin training to become a minister as well. Then early one morning Drew left for work and everything changed. On the very roads that he protected every day, an oncoming driver lost control, and Kate lost her husband. Stunned and grieving, Kate decided to continue her husband's dream and became a minister herself. And in that capacity she found a most unusual mission: serving as the minister on search and rescue missions in the Maine woods, giving comfort to people whose loved ones are missing, and to the wardens who sometimes have to deal with awful outcomes.
November: Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley
December: TBA
