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Book Discussion Groups
July—Sept. 2008
Best-sellers, classics, comedies, histories, memoirs, mysteries, romances and thrillers - whatever your favorite genre, library book discussion groups are a fun and thought-provoking way to share reading. Our regular book groups last one hour and are designed to let you participate at the level you wish. Ask questions, share your opinions or just listen to the conversation. Groups are hosted in all Chesterfield County public libraries and at a variety of times. One of the groups is sure to fit your schedule. Book discussion groups are a great way to turn reading into a social activity. Please join us in exploring a wide range of authors and styles. This guide lists all the books that will be discussed.
Annotations are taken from "Books in Print."
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July |
| Jackson, Joshilyn |
FIC JAC |
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Gods in Alabama |
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In this stunning and award-winning debut novel, Jackson tells the story of a young woman whose future is threatened by a crime from her youth. |
| Monday July 7 7 p.m. Meadowdale |
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| Horan, Nancy |
FIC HOR |
| Loving Frank |
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In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly in the extraordinary story of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright. While scholars in the past have considered Mamah a footnote in the study of America's greatest architect, author Nancy Horan brings to life their dramatic love story, and illuminates Cheney's profound influence on Wright. Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, and vividly portrays the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover and intellectual; a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. It is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape Mamah's notions of love and responsibility and ultimately lead to the book's stunning conclusion. |
| Wednesday July 9 10:30 a.m. Chester Choices |
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| Picoult, Jodi |
FIC PIC |
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My Sister’s Keeper |
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Can a parent love too much? Or is too much never enough? Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age 13, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate - a life and a role that she has never challenged ... until now. |
| Thursday July 10 10:30 a.m. LaPrade Books and Bites |
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| de los Santos, Marisa |
FIC DE |
| Love Walked In |
| A tribute to classic film and true romance, this is the story of a 31-year-old cafe manager and an 11-year-old searching for her father, and the unexpected ways in which their lives are forever changed by chance. |
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Tuesday July 15 11 a.m. Enon |
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| See, Lisa |
FIC SEE |
| Snow Flower and the Secret Fan |
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In 19th-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu "women’s writing." Some girls were paired with laotongs, "old sames," in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become "old sames" at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. |
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Tuesday July 15 7 p.m. Bon Air Book Talks |
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| Bushnell, Candace |
FIC BUS |
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Lipstick Jungle |
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Bushnell introduces Nico O'Neilly, Wendy Healy and Victory Ford, numbers 8, 12 and 17 on The New York Post's list of "New York's 50 Most Powerful Women." In 21st-century New York, to get ahead and stay ahead, these women will do anything, including jeopardizing their personal and professional relationships. |
| Monday July 21 7 p.m. LaPrade Chick Lit |
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| Meltzer, Brad |
FIC MEL |
| The Book of Fate |
| In six minutes, one of us would be dead. None of us knew it was coming ... So says Wes Holloway, a once-cocky and ambitious presidential aide, about the day that changed his life forever. On that Fourth of July, Wes put Ron Boyle, the chief executive's oldest friend, into the presidential limousine. By the time the trip came to an end, Wes was permanently disfigured, and Boyle was dead, the victim of a crazed assassin. Eight years later, Boyle is spotted, alive and well, in Malaysia. In that moment, Wes has the chance to undo the worst day of his life. |
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Tuesday July 22 7 p.m. Ettrick-Matoaca |
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| Armstrong, Karen |
279.09 A |
| Islam: A Short History |
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Armstrong demonstrates that the world's fastest-growing faith is a much richer and more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist strain might suggest. She begins with the flight of Muhammad and his family from Medina in the seventh century and the subsequent founding of the first mosques, then traces the development of Islam over the centuries. She concludes with an assessment of Islam today and its challenges. |
| Wednesday July 23 7:30 p.m. Midlothian |
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| Bloom, Amy |
FIC BLO |
| Away |
| Panoramic in scope, "Away" is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle's Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. |
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Thursday July 24 11 a.m. Clover Hill |
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| Allen, Sarah Addison |
FIC ALL |
| Garden Spells |
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In a garden surrounded by a tall fence, tucked away behind a small, quiet house in an even smaller town, is an apple tree that is rumored to bear a very special sort of fruit. In this luminous debut novel, Sarah Addison Allen tells the story of that enchanted tree and the extraordinary people who tend it. |
| Monday July 28 1 p.m. Central Brown Bag Page Turners |
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August |
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| | Bryson, Bill | 917.404B |
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A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail |
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Bill Bryson decided in 1996 to walk the 2,100-mile Appalachian trail. Winding from Georgia to Maine, this uninterrupted "hiker's highway" sweeps through the heart of some of America's most beautiful and treacherous terrain. Bryson risked snake bite and hantavirus to trudge up unforgiving mountains, plod through swollen rivers, and yearn for cream sodas and hot showers. This amusingly ill-conceived adventure brings Bryson to the height of his comic powers, but his acute eye also observes an astonishing landscape of silent forests, sparkling lakes, and other national treasures that are often ignored or endangered. |
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Monday Aug. 4 7 p.m. Meadowdale |
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| Hoffman, Alice | FIC HOF |
| Skylight Confessions |
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Writing at the height of her powers, Alice Hoffman conjures three generations of a family haunted by love. Cool, practical and deliberate, John is dreamy Arlyn's polar opposite. Yet the two are drawn powerfully together even when it is clear they are bound to bring each other grief. Their difficult marriage leads them and their children to a house made of glass in the Connecticut countryside, to the avenues of Manhattan and to the blue waters of Long Island Sound. Glass breaks, love hurts, and families make their own rules. Ultimately, it falls to their grandson, Will, to solve the emotional puzzle of his family and of his own identity. |
| Wednesday Aug. 6 10:30 a.m. Chester Choices |
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| Gilbert, Elizabeth | 910.4 G |
| Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia |
| A celebrated writer pens an irresistible, candid and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life. |
| Thursday Aug. 14 10:30 a.m. LaPrade Books and Bites |
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| Allen, Sarah Addison | FIC ALL |
| Garden Spells |
| In a garden surrounded by a tall fence, tucked away behind a small, quiet house in an even smaller town, is an apple tree that is rumored to bear a very special sort of fruit. In this luminous debut novel, Sarah Addison Allen tells the story of that enchanted tree and the extraordinary people who tend it. |
| Monday Aug. 18 7 p.m. LaPrade Chick Lit |
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| McCaig, Donald | FIC MCC |
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Rhett Butler’s People |
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Fully authorized by the Margaret Mitchell estate, "Rhett Butler's People" is the astonishing and long-awaited novel that parallels the Great American Novel, "Gone With The Wind." Twelve years in the making, the publication of "Rhett Butler's People" marks a major and historic cultural event. Through the storytelling mastery of award-winning writer Donald McCaig, the life and times of the dashing Rhett Butler unfolds. |
| Tuesday Aug. 19 11 a.m. Enon |
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| Russo, Richard | FIC RUS |
| Bridge of Sighs |
| "Bridge of Sighs" is classic Russo, coursing with small-town rhythms and the claims of family, yet it is brilliantly enlarged by an expatriate whose motivations and experiences - often contrary, sometimes not - prove every bit as mesmerizing as they resonate through these richly different lives. Here is a town, as well as a world, defined by magnificent and nearly devastating contradictions. (Annotation by "Advance" the Ingram Book Magazine.) |
| Tuesday Aug. 19 7 p.m. Bon Air Book Talks |
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| Hosseini, Khaled | FIC HOS |
| A Thousand Splendid Suns |
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Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them - in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul - they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. |
| Tuesday Aug.19 7 p.m. Ettrick-Matoaca |
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| Kingsolver, Barbara |
641.0973 K |
| Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life |
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Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life - vowing that, for one year, they'd only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat. |
| Thursday Aug. 21 11 a.m. Clover Hill |
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| Chabon, Michael |
FIC CHA |
| The Yiddish Policemen’s Union |
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For 60 years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For 60 years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown. |
| Monday Aug. 25 1 p.m. Central Brown Bag Page Turners |
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| Powers, Richard |
FIC POW |
| The Echo Maker |
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On a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. When he emerges from a protracted coma, Mark believes that this woman - who looks, acts and sounds just like his sister - is really an identical impostor. |
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Wednesday Aug. 27 7:30 p.m. Midlothian |
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September |
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| | McEwan, Ian | FIC MCE |
| Atonement |
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On a summer day in 1935, 13-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment's flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions "Atonement" follows through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the 20th century. |
| Wednesday Sept. 3 10:30 a.m. Chester Choices |
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| Mortenson, Greg | 371.822 M |
| Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations – One School at a Time |
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In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson 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 - Greg Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban. |
| Monday Sept. 8 7 p.m. Meadowdale |
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| McCarthy, Cormac | FIC MCC |
| The Road |
| A man and his young son traverse a blasted American landscape, covered with the ashes of the late world. The man can still remember the time before but not the boy. There is nothing for them except survival, and the precious last vestiges of their own humanity. At once brutal and tender, despairing and hopeful, spare of language and profoundly moving, "The Road" is a fierce and haunting meditation on the tenuous divide between civilization and savagery, and the essential, sometimes terrifying power of filial love. |
| Thursday Sept. 11 10:30 a.m. LaPrade Books and Bites |
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| Cabot, Meg | FIC CAB |
| Queen of Babble |
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Lizzie Nichols has a problem: she can't keep anything to herself. And when she opens her big mouth on a trip to London, her good intentions get her long-distance beau, Andrew, in major hot water. Now she's stuck in England with no boyfriend and no place to stay until the departure date on her nonrefundable airline ticket. Fortunately, Lizzie's best friend and college roommate, Shari, is spending her summer catering weddings in a 16th-century château in southern France. Who cares if Lizzie's never traveled alone in her life and only speaks rudimentary French? She's off to Souillac to lend a helping hand! |
| Monday Sept. 15 7 p.m. LaPrade Chick Lit |
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| Gregory, Philippa | FIC GRE |
| The Other Boleyn Girl |
| A 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 survived by following her own heart. |
| Tuesday Sept. 16 11 a.m. Enon |
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| Lutz, Lisa | FIC LUT |
| The Spellman Files |
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Meet Isabel "Izzy" Spellman, private investigator. This 28-year-old may have a checkered past littered with romantic mistakes, excessive drinking and creative vandalism; she may be addicted to "Get Smart" reruns and prefer entering homes through windows rather than doors - but the upshot is she's good at her job as a licensed private investigator with her family's firm, Spellman Investigations. Invading people's privacy comes naturally to Izzy. In fact, it comes naturally to all the Spellmans. If only they could leave their work at the office. |
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Tuesday Sept. 16 7 p.m. Bon Air Book Talks |
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| Weisman, Alan | 304.2 W |
| The World Without Us |
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A penetrating, page-turning tour of a post-human Earth. In "The World Without Us," Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us. |
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Tuesday Sept. 16 7 p.m. Ettrick-Matoaca |
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| Brooks, Geraldine | FIC BRO |
| People of the Book |
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In 1996, a rare book expert is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of a mysterious, beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in 15th-century Spain and recently saved from destruction during the shelling of Sarajevo's libraries. When Hanna Heath, a caustic Aussie loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in the book's ancient binding - an insect-wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair - she begins to unlock the mysteries of the book's eventful past and to uncover the dramatic stories of those who created it and those who risked everything to protect it. |
| Thursday Sept. 18 11 a.m. Clover Hill |
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| Bloom, Amy | FIC BLO |
| Away |
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Panoramic in scope, "Away" is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side, to Seattle's Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia. |
| Monday Sept. 22 1 p.m. Central Brown Bag Page Turners |
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| Meltzer, Brad | FIC MEL |
| The Book of Fate |
| In six minutes, one of us would be dead. None of us knew it was coming ... So says Wes Holloway, a once-cocky and ambitious presidential aide, about the day that changed his life forever. On that Fourth of July, Wes put Ron Boyle, the chief executive's oldest friend, into the presidential limousine. By the time the trip came to an end, Wes was permanently disfigured, and Boyle was dead, the victim of a crazed assassin. Eight years later, Boyle is spotted, alive and well, in Malaysia. In that moment, Wes has the chance to undo the worst day of his life. |
| Wednesday Sept. 24 7:30 p.m. Midlothian |
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