Book Discussion in a Bag

Attention Book Groups!

Book Discussion in a Bag kits may be checked out at the Adult Information Desk for six weeks. No more than one kit at a time may be checked out to an individual. Kits may be reserved but not renewed. Borrowers will be charged $1.00 a day for an overdue kit. The entire kit must be returned on the due date The person who checks out a Book Discussion in a Bag kit is financially responsible for returning the entire kit. Kits include a signup sheet to help borrowers keep track of the books.

Please let us know what your book group is reading, so we can provide your members with the titles you are discussing. Library staff also has resources that list recommended book group titles and we’d love to share your favorites with other book groups.

Click here to see which titles are currently available.

For more information, call the Adult Reference Desk at 329-4542 ext 600 to find out more about Book Discussion in a Bag.

Book list

American Salvage (fiction-short stories)
by Bonnie Jo Campbell – local author

These stories are set in a small Michigan town that has been saturated with methamphetamine, a place suffering the torpors of a declining Rust Belt economy and all of the usual small-town modern times pains — loss of love, splintered families, despair about the future — as well. In these stories about cold, lonely, meth-drenched, working-class Michigan life, there’s a certain beauty reaching something like the sublimity of a D.H. Lawrence story. Few of the stories have endings that seem resolved. Because of their despairing feel, and their shape and form, they seem quite lifelike.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (nonfiction)
by Barbara Kingsolver

This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tucson to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. The book’s bulk, written and read by Kingsolver in a lightly twangy voice filled with wonder and enthusiasm, proceeds through the seasons via delightful stories about the history of their farmhouse, the exhausting bounty of the zucchini harvest, turkey chicks hatching and so on.

2009 Reading Together Selection
Ava’s Man (memoir)
by Rich Bragg

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All Over but the Shoutin’ continues his personal history of the Deep South with the story of his mother’s childhood during the Great Depression, and the story of the man who raised her. Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a whiskey-maker, a fisherman who made boats out of car hoods He was a man who took giant steps in rundown boots, a true hero whom history would otherwise have been overlooked.

The Crows (mystery)
by Maris Soule – local writer

Described by some as a psychological cozy, The Crows is part mystery, part suspense. Wry humor is combined with fast paced events giving the reader a view of life in a rural Michigan farming community. Follow P.J., a C.P.A who discovers a man dying in her dining room after coming home from an afternoon walk in the woods, as she learns that what appears to be true could be deceiving.

Eat, Pray, Love (memoir)
by Elizabeth Gilbert

At the age of thirty-one, Gilbert moved with her husband to the suburbs of New York and began trying to get pregnant, only to realize that she wanted neither a child nor a husband. Three years later, after a protracted divorce, she embarked on a yearlong trip of recovery, with three main stops: Rome, for pleasure (mostly gustatory, with a special emphasis on gelato); an ashram outside of Mumbai, for spiritual searching; and Bali, for “balancing.” These destinations are all on the beaten track, but Gilbert’s exuberance and her self-deprecating humor enliven the proceedings

Great Gatsby (fiction)
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write “something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned.” The novel became The Great Gatsby. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captures the spirit of the author’s generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald’s—and his country’s—most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—” Gatsby’s rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

Inheritance of Loss (fiction)
by Kiran Desai

Desai’s second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states—Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel’s teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds “too messy for justice.” The tranquility of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook’s son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter’s affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai’s life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (nonfiction)
by Bill Bryson

Few childhoods are interesting to anyone other than the individuals that lived them. Even a mundane childhood, though, can be made interesting through good writing, and Bill Bryson’s memoir fits this category. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is Bryson’s nostalgia-soaked story of his childhood in 1950s Iowa. Bryson describes his family, friends, and the city of Des Moines with reverence for the profound effect they had on his life.

Olive Kittredge (fiction)
by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout’s new “novel in stories” brings to life a hardscrabble community on the coast of Maine, with quintessentially New England characters. The presence of Olive Kitteridge, a seventh-grade math teacher and the wife of a pharmacist, links these 13 stories. A big woman, she’s like a planetary body, exerting a strong gravitational pull as a mother, wife, teacher, friend, social worker, and curmudgeon. Through the stories we learn how the community evolves and the residents resist or adapt to and endure the many changes occurring around them.

One Oar (poetry)
by Marie Bahlke – local poet

Marie Bahlke has created a powerfully graceful collection of reminiscence as she describes caring for her husband as he slips deeper into Alzheimer’s disease. Marie shares with us her moving journey into the heart of grief, loss and unrelenting love.

Pomegranate Soup: A Novel (fiction)
by Marsha Mehran

The Irish hamlet of Ballinacroagh is the unlikely new home for three Iranian sisters and their new Babylon Cafe. Twenty-seven-year-old Marjan, the most skilled in the kitchen; Bahar, the tentative middle sister; and Layla, the charming teenager, fled the Iranian revolution and, after some years in London, have arrived determined to succeed. Initially wary natives soon fall under the spell of the cafe’s cardamom- and rosewater-scented wonders, But town bully Thomas McGuire, who loathes “feckin’ foreigners,” and gossip Dervla Quigley, who thinks “they’re all sluts,” will do anything to drive the sisters away.

Q Road (fiction)
by Bonnie Jo Campbell – local writer

A farm in rural Kalamazoo County, Mich., provides the backdrop for this May-December love story. Rachel Crane, a homely, motherless, foul-mouthed teenager, lives on a houseboat with her reclusive mother, Margo. They are tenants of George Harland, whose wife abandoned him to maintain his declining farm alone. George becomes irresistibly drawn to Rachel and asks her to marry him; she accepts, but just so she can inherit “his damned land.” Only when her young friend David’s life is imperiled, does Rachel begin to allow herself to feel genuine love for anything but the land.

Run (fiction)
by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett’s novel Run is a set in contemporary Boston. It tells the tale of two families (one poor, one of wealth and privilege) who collide in a January blizzard. Doyle is a widower with lots to lose. He’s a former Boston mayor, a respected white attorney with three adult sons. His biological son, Sullivan, is a something of a disappointment. So he has pinned his hopes on his two adopted black sons to carry on the family tradition of public service. Tennessee is a single black mother with just as much at stake. Although her resources are slim, she pours everything she can into her shining star of a daughter, Kenya.

Snow Falling on Cedars (fiction)
by David Guterson

The story is set in 1950s on Washington’s remote San Piedro Island and begins with a mysterious death of a fisherman. Kabuo Miyamoto is accused of the fisherman’s murder, suspicion aroused more out of the post-war distrust of Japanese-Americans than anything else. To complicate this, the town’s newspaperman, Ishmael Chamber, must deal with his own feelings from childhood for his love of Kabuo’s wife, Hatsue.

Solace of Leaving Early (fiction)
by Haven Kimmel

A romance evolves in the wake of a domestic shooting in Kimmel’s intelligent and compassionate debut novel, which brings two friends of one of the victims together in a small Indiana town. Amos Townsend is the male protagonist, a 40-ish preacher who counseled the late Alice Baker-Maloney as her frayed marriage degenerated into a fatal confrontation with her controlling husband, Jack.

Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (memoir)
by Bich Minh Nguyen

The author and her family fled Saigon by ship on April 29, 1975, the very day Saigon fell to the Communists. Bich’s mother was not at home when the family made their hurried motorbike trip down to the docks, and she was left behind. Eight-month-old Bich, Ahn, their father, Noi, and three uncles arrived in America and settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, along with 4,000 other Vietnamese refugees. This is the story of a young girl living in several conflicting worlds at once. Her home life consisted of Vietnamese foods, language and customs, while the outside world was fast-paced, foreign and fascinating.

A Thousand Splendid Suns (fiction)
by Khaled Hosseini

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. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman’s love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations…One School at a Time (non fiction)
by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin

Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse’s unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town’s first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Women were Leaving the Men (fiction – short stories)
by Andy Mozina local writer

Andy Mozina draws readers into the everyday lives of characters that are instantly relatable but intriguingly flawed. Knocked beyond the brink by departed family members, curious obsessions, and unruly physical attributes, Mozina‘s characters climb and scrape their way toward intimacy, sanity and redemption against the often-absurd odds of their lives in this quirky, humorous and poetic collection.

Year of Wonders (fiction)
by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders describes the 17th-century plague that is carried from London to a small Derbyshire village by an itinerant tailor. As villagers begin, one by one, to die, the rest face a choice: do they flee their village in hope of outrunning the plague or do they stay? The rector, Michael Mompellion, argues forcefully that the villagers should stay put, isolate themselves from neighboring towns and villages, and prevent the contagion from spreading. His oratory wins the day and the village turns in on itself. Cocooned from the outside world and ravaged by the disease, its inhabitants struggle to retain their humanity in the face of the disaster.