As we approach our 50th Book.

Here are all the books we've read to date:

Book Club List – 2005 to 2010

2005

1. August
Peace Like a River
By Leif Enger

2. September
A Walk in the Woods
By Bill Bryson

3. Octocber
The Bad Beginning: A series of Unfortunate Events
By Limony Snicket a.k.a. Daniel Handler

4. November
Dad
By William Wharton









2006

5. January
The Poisonwood Bible
By Barbara Kingsolver

6. February
The DaVinci Code
By Dan Brown

7. March
Confederates in the Attic
By Tony Horwitz

8. April
A Death in the Family
By James Agee

9. May
Their Eyes Were Watching God
By Zora Neale Hurston

10. June
Night
By Elie Wiesel

11. August
The Catcher and the Rye
J.D. Salinger

12. September
Life of Pi
By Yann Martel

13. October
Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima
By James Bradley

14. November
Walden
By Henry David Thoreau









2007

15. January
Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt
By Anne Rice

16. February
Spoon River Anthology
By Edgar Lee Masters

17. March
The Screwtape Letters
By C.S. Lewis

18. April
The Morning Watch
By James Agee

19. May
My Own Country
By Abraham Verghese

20. June
The History of Love
By Nicole Krauss

21. July
Why I Live at the P.O.
By Eudora Welty

22. August
The Kite Runner
By Khaled Hosseini

23. September
A Separate Peace
By John Knowles

24. October
Salvation on Sand Mountain
By Dennis Covington

25. November
Middlesex
By Jeffrey Eugenides









2008

26. January
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
By Bill Bryson

27. February
Beowulf
The Seamus Heaney Translation

28. March
The Great Santini
By Pat Conroy

29. April
The Shack
By William P. Young

30. May
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner

31. June
Walking the Bible
By Bruce Feiler

32. August
The Declaration
By Gemma Malley

33. September
Pontoon
By Garrison Keillor

34. October
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
By Barbara Kingsolver

35. November
The Black Flower
By Howard Bahr









2009

36. January
Dreams from My Father
By Barack Obama

37. February
Peace Like a River
By Leif Enger

38. March
The Hobbit: Or There and Back
By J.R.R. Tolkien

39. June
Gilead
By Marilynne Robinson









40. July
Into Thin Air
By Jon Krakauer









41. August
Hamlet
By William Shakespeare










42. October
The Year of Living Biblically
By A.J. Jacobs









43. November
Sailing Alone Around the Room
By Billy Collins








2010

44. January
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
By David Wroblewski










45. February
The Soloist
By Steve Lopez









46. March
A Prayer for Owen Meany
By John Irving









47. June
Cyrano de Bergerac
By Edmond Rostand









48. September
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
By Rief Larsen










49. October
Gap Creek
By Roger Morgan

2009 Tentative List of Books

This is a tentative book list.  Members of the book club are encouraged to suggest books that they think would benefit the group.  In other words, this list is merely a recommendation and place-holder and meant to be changed.  Please contact Nelson Eddy with your own book recommendations or leave them posted here.

Thursday, February 19, 2009, at 7 p.m.

Peace Like a River

By Leif Enger

"Dead for 10 minutes before his father orders him to breathe in the name of the living God, Rueben Land is living proof that the world is full of miracles.  But it's the impassioned honesty of his quiet, measured narrative voice that gives weight and truth to the fantastic elements of this engrossing tale.  From the vantage point of adulthood, Rueben tells how his father rescued his brother Davy's girlfriend from two attackers, how that led to Davy being jailed for murder and how, once Davy escapes and heads south for the Badlands of North Dakota, 12-year-old Reuben, his younger sister Swede and their janitor father light out after him.  But the FBI is following Davy as well, and Reuben has a part to play in the finale of the chase, just as he had a part to play in his brother's trial.  It's the kind of story that used to be material for ballads, and Enger twines in numerous references to the Old West, chiefly through the rhymed poetry Swede writes about a hero called Sunny Sundown.  That the story is set in the early '60s in Minnesota gives it an archetypal feel, evoking a time when the possibility of getting lost in the country still existed.  Enger has created a world of signs, where dead crows fall in a snowstorm and vagrants lie curled up in fields, in which everything is significant, everything has weight and comprehension is always fleeting.  This is a stunning debut novel, one that sneaks up on you like a whisper and warms you like a quilt in a North Dakota winter, a novel about faith, miracles and family that is, ultimately, miraculous."

From Publishers Weekly

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Thursday, January 29, 2009 at 7 p.m.

Dreams from My Father

By President-Elect Barack Obama

Selected as we usher in America's first African-American president this month.  No matter your politics or religious beliefs, it's good to know about the man who will lead us over the next four years.  This book, written while he was president of the Harvard Law Review was written before he ever publicly considered running for the highest office in the land.  And so, it offers particularly candid insight into the man and his upbringing.

"Obama argues with himself on almost every page of this lively autobiographical conversation.  He gets you to agree with him, and then he brings in a counternarrative that seems just as convincing.  Son of a white American mother and of a black Kenyan father whom he never knew, Obama grew up mainly in Hawaii.  After college, he worked for three years as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side.  Then, finally, he went to Kenya, to find the world of his dead father, his 'authentic' self.  Will the truth set you free, Obama asks?  Or will it disappoint?  Both, it seems.  His search for himself as a black American rooted in the particulars of his daily life; it also reads like a wry commentary about all of us.  He dismisses stereotypes of the 'tragic mulatto' and then shows how much we are all caught between messy contradictions and disparate communities.  He discovers that Kenya has 400 different tribes, each of the with stereotypes of the others.  Obama is candid about racism and poverty and corruption, in Chicago and in Kenya.  Yet he does find community and authenticity, not in any romantic cliche, but with 'honest, decent men and women who have attainable ambitions and the determination to see them through.'"

- Hazel Rochman, From Booklist

Available at Amazon.com for $8.97

Other Books We're Considering for 2009

This is a tentative list so if you have other ideas or if you want to look at the reviews of these at Amazon.com and tell me what you think, please let me know.

In no particular order:

Hometown Favorite -- A modern retelling of the story of Job

By Chip Arnold [son of Buddy Arnold] and Bill Barton

The Year of Living Biblically 

By A. J. Jacobs

 

The Trouble with Poetry:  And Other Poems

By Billy Collins [Former U.S. Poet Laureate]

The Hour I First Believed

By Wally Lamb

Christ the Lord:  The Road to Cana

By Ann Rice

Just After Sunset by Stephen King

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, followed by The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

A Prayer for Owen Meany

By John Irving

The Time Traveler's Wife

By Audrey Niffenegger

The Book of Lies

By Brad Meltzer

Frankland

By James Whorton Jr.