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Book Club.
We meet in the store the first Thursday of each month at 7pm and the third Wednesday of each month at 9am. We usually average 6 - 10 participants, no fee, no reservations required. All are welcome. Call us for any other information you need: 425-775-2789.See just below for the current book club choices; see the bottom of the page for books from 2010 and 2011; and see here for a partial list of books we have chosen in earlier years.
2012 Book Club Books:
January 5 & 18, 2012. Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen.
In his first novel since The Corrections, Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Walter and Patty Berglund as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.
February 2 & 15, 2012. The Big Burn by Timothy Egan.
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men—college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps—to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.
Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen.
March 1 & 21, 2012. The Likeness by Tana French.
The haunting follow up to the Edgar Award-winning debut In the Woods.
Tana French astonished critics and readers alike with her mesmerizing debut novel, In the Woods. Now both French and Detective Cassie Maddox return to unravel a case even more sinister and enigmatic than the first. Six months after the events of In the Woods, an urgent telephone call beckons Cassie to a grisly crime scene. The victim looks exactly like Cassie and carries ID identifying herself as Alexandra Madison, an alias Cassie once used. Suddenly, Cassie must discover not only who killed this girl, but, more importantly, who is this girl? A disturbing tale of shifting identities, The Likeness firmly establishes Tana French as an important voice in suspense fiction.
April 5 & 18, 2012. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell.
The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, and costly courtesans comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland. But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken—the consequences of which will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings.
May 3 & 16, 2012. The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal.
Costa Book Award Winner for Biography
Galaxy National Book Award Winner (New Writer of the Year Award)
Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots—which are then sold, collected, and handed on—he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.
And so begins this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire.
June 7 & 20, 2012. The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer.
Paris, 1937. Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he promised to deliver. But when he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter's recipient, he becomes privy to a secret that will alter the course of his—and his family’s—history. From the small Hungarian town of Konyár to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in labor camps, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of a family shattered and remade in history’s darkest hour.
Books we have discussed so far in 2011:
October 2011. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.
September 2011. The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft by Ulrich Boser.
August 2011. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
July 2011. Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry.
June 2011. Oxygen by Carol Cassella.
May 2011. Old Filth by Jane Gardam.
April 2011. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
March 2011. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers.
February 2011. City of Thieves by David Benioff.
January 2011. The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea.
Books we discussed in 2010:
November 2010. Peace by Richard Bausch.
October 2010. Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life by Adam Gopnik.
September 2010. Little Bee: A Novel by Chris Cleave.
August 2010. Border Songs by Jim Lynch.
July 2010. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.
June 2010: The English Major by Jim Harrison.
May 2010: Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell.
April 2010: Guernica by Dave Boling.
March 2010: Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal by Ben MacIntyre.
February 2010: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
January 2010: A Fine Balance by Robinton Mistry.
See here for a list of even more books our book club has chosen to discuss over the past several years.
Hours
M, T, W, F
10 - 6
Thursday
10 - 8
Saturday
9 - 6
Sunday
10 - 5
Phone
425-775-2789
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