Second Mondays Book Group

Here's what people mentioned reading at the July meeting (sorry to be so late in putting this up!): 

• The inheritance of loss - Kiran Desai
• The other queen - Philippa Gregory
• The shack - William Paul Young
• The eye in the door - Pat Barker
• Sense and sensibility - Jane Austen
• I see you everywhere - Julia Glass
• A short history of women and The gardens of Kyoto - Kate Walbert
  
• The dispossessed - Ursula LeGuin
• A guilty thing surprised - Ruth Rendell
• The river of doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's darkest journey - Candice Millard
• The unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
• The poisonwood bible - Barbara Kingsolver

• Home safe - Elizabeth Berg
• Tea time for the traditionally built - Alexander McCall Smith
• Goldengrove - Francine Prose
• The master - Colm Toibin
• Shutter Island - Dennis Lehane
• The poisonwood bible - Barbara Kingsolver
• The given day - Chinua Achebe
• A test of wills - Charles Todd
• The secret knowledge of water: Discovering the essence of the American desert - Craig Childs
• Hungry monkey: A food-loving father's quest to raise an adventurous eater - Matthew Amster-Burton
• Possessing the secret of joy - Alice Walker
• A thousand splendid suns - Khaled Hosseini
• Never let me go - Kazuo Ishiguro
• Some measure of happiness - Lee Wicks
• The emperor's children - Claire Messud

...and books by Sue Grafton.

Sorry to be so behind on posting this -- people were busy reading in March!

Fiction

• Firewall - Henning Mankell
• Reservation blues and Ten little indians - Sherman Alexie
• Aunt Dimity slays the dragon - Nancy Atherton
• Regeneration - Pat Barker
• Abundance - Sena Jeter Naslund
• The gathering - Anne Enright
• The pickup - Nadine Gordimer
• Indignation - Philip Roth
• People of the book - Geraldine Brooks
• Terrorist - John Updike
• A most wanted man - John Le Carre
• The given day - Dennis Lehane
• Welcome to the world, baby girl! - Fannie Flagg
• Life sentences - Laura Lippman
• Haroun and the sea of stories - Salman Rushdie
• The scarlet letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
• Straight man - Richard Russo
• Sea glass - Anita Shreve
• The black path and The blood spilt - Asa Larson
• Devil on the cross and A grain of wheat - Ngugi wa Thiong'o
• Loving Frank - Nancy Horan
• To the north - Elizabeth Bowen
• Birth of Venus - Sarah Denant
• Shiksa syndrome - Laurie Graff
• Eye contact - Cammie McGovern

Nonfiction

• Animal, vegetable, miracle: A year of food life - Barbara Kingsolver
• Mountains beyond mountains - Tracy Kidder
• Pathologies of power - Paul Farmer
• Pilgrims - Elizabeth Gilbert
• Song of the dodo: Island biogeography in an age of extinctions - David Quammen
• The last fish tale: The fate of the Atlantic and survival in Gloucester, America's oldest fishing port and most original town - Mark Kurlansky
• Seven days in the art world - Sarah Thornton
• Sacred sea: A journey to Lake Baikal - Peter Thomson

Also books by Ian Rankin, Janet Evanovich, Dean Koontz.

Most people were pretty busy getting through Midnight's Children this month, but some had time for a few more:

• The African queen - C.S. Forester
• Don't let's go to the dogs tonight: An African childhood - Alexandra Fuller
• Out of Africa - Isak Dinesen
• The nightingale gallery - Paul Harding
• Revelation - C.J. Sansom
• A month in the country - J.L. Carr
• The warden - Antholy Trollope

It was a big month for nonfiction in the SMBG!

• A matter of justice - Charles Todd
• The scientist in the crib: What early learning tells us about the mind - Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl
• Stone quarry and Reflecting the sky - S.J. Rozan
• Holy cow: An Indian adventure - Sarah Macdonald
• The prince of tides - Pat Conroy
• The party's over: Oil, war, and the fate of industrial societies - Richard Heinberg
• Last car to Elysian Fields - James Lee Burke
• Home - Marilynne Robinson
• My latest grievance - Elinor Lipman
• Bridge of sighs - Richard Russo
• Bel canto - Ann Patchett
• Joy school - Elizabeth Berg
• A short history of tractors in Ukranian - Marina Lewycka

• Point to point navigation - Gore Vidal
• Prayers for rain - Dennis Lehane
• Later the same day - Grace Paley
• Right ho, Jeeves - P.G. Woodhouse
• All the pretty horses - Cormac McCarthy
• The bonesetter's daughter - Amy Tan
• Sister - A. Minette Ansay
• Flesh and blood - Michael Cunningham
• The hour I first believed - Wally Lamb
• Survivor - Chuck Palahniuk
• The miraculous journey of Edward Tulane and Because of Winn-Dixie - Kate DiCamillo
• Ladder of years - Anne Tyler
• Walk two moons - Sharon Creech
• Native speaker - Chang-Rae Lee
• Trespass - Amy Irvine

...and some X-Men comic books!

• Night - Elie Wiesel
• Exit music - Ian Rankin
• The march - E.L. Doctorow
• Love medicine - Louise Erdrich
• Unaccustomed earth - Jhumpa Lahiri
• At risk - Alice Hoffman
• Farewell summer - Ray Bradbury
• Doctor Thorne - Anthony Trollope
• America the beautiful - Moon Unit Zappa
• The glass castle - Jeannette Walls
• Band of brothers - Steven Ambrose
• The great divide: Second thoughts on the American dream - Studs Terkel
• When we were orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro
• Ten days in the hills - Jane Smiley
• Mona in the promised land - Gish Jen
• Cottage for sale -- must be moved - Kate Whouley
• Tell no one and The woods - Harlan Coben
• Lost in a good book and The Eyre affair - Jasper Fforde
• The cave, Seeing and Death with interruptions - Jose Saramago

Also Genesis and Exodus, Shakespeare, and transcendentalists.

• Escaping into the open: The art of writing true, Until the real thing comes along, and What we keep - Elizabeth Berg
• Rosie - Anne Lamott
• The Guernsey literary and potato peel pie society - Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
• The birth house - Ami McKay
• Seeing and Baltasar and Blimunda - Jose Saramago
• Three Junes - Julia Glass
• Dubliners - James Joyce
• A separate peace - John Knowles
• Eat, pray, love - Elizabeth Gilbert
• The secret life of bees - Sue Monk Kidd
• The age of grief - Jane Smiley
• Momento mori - Muriel Spark
• Very old bones - William Kennedy
• The known world - Edward P. Jones
• V. - Thomas Pynchon
• Saving fish from drowning - Amy Tan
• Fury - Salman Rushdie

...and books by Dorothy Gilman and Faye Kellerman, as well as lots of William Trevor's New Yorker short stories.

People did a lot of reading during July and August!

• The double bind - Chris Bohjalian
• The great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
• The good earth - Pearl S. Buck
• Never let me go - Kazuo Ishiguro
• Bombay time - Thrity Umrigar
• Them - Joyce Carol Oates
• Owls do cry and An angel at my table - Janet Frame
• The meaning of life - Terry Eagleton
• The secret life of bees - Sue Monk Kidd
• Sometimes a great notion - Ken Kesey
• The year of pleasures - Elizabeth Berg
• Diary of a bad year - J.M. Coetzee
• The future of love - Shirley Abbott
• On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan
• The second plane: September 11 -- Terror and boredom - Martin Amis
• The hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
• This land is their land: Reports from a divided nation - Barbara Ehrenreich
• Charming Billy - Alice McDermott
• Antony and Cleopatra and Richard III - William Shakespeare
• Emerson: The mind on fire - Robert D. Richardson
• Cairo modern - Naguib Mahfouz
• Black flies - Shannon Burke
• The spa - Faye Weldon
• A case of exploding mangoes - Mohammed Hanif
• The Indian clerk - David Leavitt
• Gentlemen of the road - Michael Chabon

Here's the list of books people nominated for the group to read starting in November. The committee (Carmen, Carol, Dorothy, Kathryn, Linda, and Meera) is planning to meet and select about 12 from this list on Sept. 15. If you have any comments about any of these, you can leave them here, send them to any of us on the committee, or bring them to the group meeting on Sept. 8. Thanks for all the great suggestions!

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart (1958)
Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2001)
Pat Barker: The Ghost Road (1996)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Julian Barnes: Arthur and George (2005)
Charles Baxter: First Light (1987)
Don De Lillo: Mao II (1991)
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Giuseppe Di Lampedusa: The Leopard (1960)
Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1989)
Anne Enright: The Gathering (2007)
Sue Monk Kidd: The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (1996)
Nadine Gordimer: The Conservationist (1974)
Mohammed Hanif: A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008)
David Leavitt: The Indian Clerk (2007)
Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn (2000)
Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach (2007) (2 recommendations)
Per Petterson: Out Stealing Horses (2005)
Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (1980)
Anita Shreve: The Last Time They Met (2001)
Jane Smiley: A Thousand Acres (1991)

In last month's meeting, Carol suggested looking through these lists of what people have read (over the last two years!) for things that might be interesting to read as a group. Remember to bring a suggestion or two (or three, or more!) to this month's meeting; these will be passed along to our 'selections committee' to research and propose a schedule for the next year or so.

Here's what people reported reading at the July meeting:

• What is the what: The autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng - Dave Eggers
• Possible side effects - Augusten Burroughs
• The time of our singing - Michael Powers
• A home at the end of the world - Michael Cunningham
• The devil and Miss Prym: A novel of temptation - Paulo Coehlo
• The English patient - Michael Ondaatje
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
• Dirty work - Larry Brown
• On Chesil Beach - Ian MacEwan
• Monkey - Wu Ch'eng-en
• The soul thief - Charles Baxter
• George and Martha: The complete stories about two best friends - James Marshall
• How Elizabeth Barrett Browning saved my life and Host family - Mameve Medwed
• A cup of light and The last Chinese chef - Nicole Mones
• We are all fine here - Mary Guterson
• Nickel and dimed: On (not) getting by in America - Barbara Ehrenreich
• An illuminated life: Belle da Costa Greene's journey from prejudice to privilege - Heidi Ardizzone
• When you are engulfed in flames - David Sedaris
• The great derangement: A terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion at the twilight of the American empire - Matt Taibbi

Sorry for the delay, folks -- better late than never, right?

• The march - E.L. Doctorow
• The joys of love - Madeleine L'Engle
• The senator's wife - Sue Miller
• Out stealing horses - Piers Petterson
• The love wife - Gish Jen
• All over creation - Ruth Ozeki
• Born standing up: A comic's life and Shopgirl - Steve Martin
• Kabul beauty school: An American woman goes behind the veil - Deborah Rodriguez
• Sundays in America: A yearlong road trip in search of Christian faith - Suzanne Strempek Shea
• The most famous man in America: The biography of Henry Ward Beecher - Debby Applegate

Since the January meeting was snowed out, we met to discuss Four Souls (Louise Erdrich) in February instead. Here's what we'd been reading in the meantime:

• Portrait of an unknown woman - Vanora Bennett
• Arthur and George - J. Barnes
• The places in between - Rory Stewart
• On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan
• Kepler's witch: An astronomer's discovery of cosmic order amid religious war, political intrigue, and the heresy trial of his mother - James A. Connor
• The book of air and shadows - Michael Gruber
• Silas Marner - George Eliot
• I know this much is true - Wally Lamb
• Letter to a Christian nation - Sam Harris
• The almost moon - Alice Sebold
• 1776 - David McCullough

...and poetry by Wallace Stevens.

I've been extremely delinquent in posting this; thanks to Carol and Caroline for keeping track of the books people mentioned when I missed the December meeting!

Fiction:

• My name is Red - Orhan Pamuk
• Sons and lovers - D.H. Lawrence
• Atonement - Ian McEwan
• Sula - Toni Morrison
• Digging to America - Anne Tyler
• The mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
• The march - E.L. Doctorow
• A thousand splendid suns - Khaled Hosseini
• A year in the world: Journeys of a passionate traveller - Frances Mayes

Nonfiction:

• The dance of the dissident daughter: A woman's journey from Christian tradition to the sacred femininer - Sue Monk Kidd
• Brave men in desperate times: The lives of Civil War soldiers - John McKay
• Abraham Lincoln - Carl Sandburg
• Mayflower: A story of courage, community, and war - Nathaniel Philbrick
• The endurance: Shackleton's legendary Antarctic exploration and The Bounty: The true story of mutiny on the Bounty - Caroline Alexander
• Good dog. Stay. - Anna Quindlen
• At large and at small: Familiar essays - Anne Fadiman
• My life in France - Julia Child
• Aristotle leads the way (from the Story of Science series) - Joy Hakim
• Into the wild - Jon Krakauer
• Nickel and dimed: On (not) getting by in America - Barbara Ehrenreich

Some of the things we read this month:

• A thousand splendid suns - Khaled Hosseini
• Chocolat - Joanne Harris
• Run - Ann Patchett
• Body surfing - Anita Shreve
• The glass castle - Jeannette Walls
• Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
• Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje
• The bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
• The namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri
• Massachusetts - Nancy Zaroulis
• The interpreter of maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri
• Hullabaloo in the guava orchard - Kiran Desai
• Half the way home - Adam Hochschild

Also, lots of short stories by Hemingway, a biography of Jesse James, and books about the Civil War.