Discussion Begins at 7pm
January 29th
Readers Choice-You get to pick what you read this month!
February 26th
Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship by Annabel Abbs
366 Pages-Fiction
Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen by Annabel Abbs is a historical novel based on the true story of poet Eliza Acton, who revolutionized cookery writing in Victorian England by creating the first modern, accessible cookbook with her assistant, Ann Kirby, despite societal barriers of class and gender. The dual-narrated story explores their unlikely friendship, their struggle for independence, and their shared passion for food, all while navigating personal secrets and family pressures.
March 26th
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
126 Pages-Fiction
Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.
April 30th
An Invisible Thread: the True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski
260 Pages-Fiction
He asked for spare change; she kept walking. But something made her turn around and go back. They met nearly every week for years, and built an unexpected, life-changing friendship that has today spanned almost three decades.
May 28th
The White Houses by Amy Bloom
218 Pages-Fiction
A fictional account of the affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok.
June 25th
The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict
296 Pages-Fiction
The Other Einstein offers us a window into a brilliant, fascinating woman whose light was lost in Einstein’s enormous shadow. It is the story of Einstein’s wife, a brilliant physicist in her own right, whose contribution to the special theory of relativity is hotly debated and may have been inspired by her own profound and very personal insight. Mitza Maric has always been a little different from other girls. Most twenty-year-olds are wives by now, not studying physics at an elite Zurich university with only male students trying to outdo her clever calculations. But Mitza is smart enough to know that, for her, math is an easier path than marriage. And then fellow student Albert Einstein takes an interest in her, and the world turns sideways. Theirs becomes a partnership of the mind and of the heart, but there might not be room for more than one genius in a marriage.
July 30th
What You are Looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
300 Pages-Fiction
“What are you looking for?” So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it.
August 27th
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
110 Pages-Fiction
This book tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn’t want to belong, not to her run-down neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Capturing her thoughts and emotions in poems and stories, she is able to rise above hopelessness and create a quiet space for herself in the midst of her oppressive surroundings. Esperanza’s story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become.
September 24th
Home by Toni Morrison
145 Pages-Fiction
When Frank Money joined the army to escape his too-small world, he left behind his cherished and fragile little sitter, Cee. After the war, his shattered life has no purpose until he hears that Cee is in danger. Frank is a modern day Odysseus returning to a 1950s America mined with lethal pitfalls for an unwary black man. As he journeys to his native Georgia in search of Cee, it becomes clear that their troubles began well before their wartime separation. Together, they must return to their rural hometown of Lotus, where buried secrets are unearthed and where Frank learns at last what it means to be a man, heal, and – above all- what it means to come home.