By Garth Stein
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian
With Ed Goldberg, Head of Reference, Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian, Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian, Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

“He Said, She Said” Book Discussion
Join us for a special evening to celebrate a year of great books and discussions.

Monday, December 19, 2011. 7:30 PM.

Nearing the end of his life, Enzo, a dog with a philosopher’s soul, tries to bring together the family, pulled apart by a three year custody battle between daughter Zoe’s maternal grandparents and her father Denny, a race car driver.

Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic poem of a hero’s triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people.

Became the movie: Beowulf.

By Tracey Jackson

A funny, fearless, no-holds-barred look at aging--hormone replacement therapy, online dating, eye lifts, and all.

By Michael Koryta
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Monday, November 7, 2011. 7 PM.

WWII vet, Arlen Wagner, and young friend Paul Brickhill are traveling by train to a new CCC camp in the Florida Keys when Arlen’s supernatural sense tells him they have to get off the train if they want to stay alive. They find themselves at Cypress House and right in the middle of a vipers’ nest of small-town corruption and misery.

By Saralee Rosenberg

In Mindy's yoga-obsessed, thirty-is-the-new-wife neighborhood, every day is a battle between Dunkin' Donuts, her jaws-of-life jeans, and Beth Diamond, the self-absorbed sancti-mommy next door who looks sixteen from the back.

By Erik Larson
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, the book intertwines the true tale of two men - the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair, striving to secure America’s place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death.

By David A. Kessler

The former FDA commissioner who reinvented the food label and tackled the tobacco industry, cracks the code of overeating by explaining how our bodies and minds are changed when we consume foods that contain sugar, fat, and salt.

By James Frey
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Written from the perspective of his family, friends, and followers, in the same way the story of Jesus Christ was told in the New Testament, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible is the story of Ben Zion Avrohom, also known as Ben Jones, also known as the Messiah, also known as the Lord God.

By Michael Pollan

A collection of simple, sensible, and easy to use rules--the perfect guide for anyone who would like to become more mindful of the food he or she eats.

By Pearl S. Buck
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

A slave bride of a Chinese laborer devotes herself to her husband's family, but when civil war in China brings wealth to the family, her happiness is endangered as her husband brings home a second wife.

By John Steinbeck
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, June 24, 2014. 1:30 PM.

The landmark novel about the plight of American farmers who were forced off their farms by drought and foreclosure during the 1930's.

Became the movie: The Grapes of Wrath.

By Chelsea Cain
Series Archie and Gretchen Thrillers
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager, Megan Kass, Systems Manager, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Nathalie Levin, Children's Services Librarian

Addicted to painkillers and still bound to Gretchen Lowell, the beautiful serial killer who had abducted and tortured him before turning herself in, Portland detective Archie Sheridan is caught in another deadly duel with a murderer targeting teenage girls.

By Jamie Ford
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

When artifacts from Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II are uncovered during renovations at a Seattle hotel, Henry Lee embarks on a quest that leads to memories of growing up Chinese in a city rife with anti–Japanese sentiment.

By Edith Wharton

The tragic story of Lily Bart, a beautiful young woman caught up in the shallow and corrupt world of New York society at the turn of the century, where wealth and social status are everything.

Became the movie: The House of Mirth.

By Brian Freeman
Series Jonathan Stride Novels

Lieutenant Jonathan Stride knows it's not a moral world. One teenage girl has already disappeared on his watch, leaving behind no body, no killer, and no justice. Now, when another girl goes missing on a cold night in Minnesota, Stride must relive his worst nightmare...

By Erik Larson
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director, Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian
With Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Wednesday, June 6, 2012.  7:30 PM. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, during Hitler's rise to power, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.

By Dean Koontz

A young woman staying as a guest in a Napa Valley farmhouse becomes trapped in a fight for survival with a self-proclaimed "homicidal adventurer", and races to warn his next intended victim.

By Charlotte Bronte
With Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian

Tuesday, September 27, 2011.  1 PM & 7:30 PM.

“In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall, a country estate owned by the mysteriously remote Mr. Rochester (From the Publisher).”

Became the movie: Jane Eyre.

By Elizabeth Berg

A fifty-one-year-old home-care nurse is assigned a new patient, her high school crush, who is dying from a brain tumor.

By Edward Rutherfurd
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Barney Levantino, Reference Librarian

A tale set against a backdrop of New York City's history from its founding through the September 11 attacks traces the experiences of characters who witness such periods as the Revolutionary War, the city's emergence as a financial giant, and the Gilded Age.

By Ken Follett

Set in twelfth–century England, this epic of kings and peasants juxtaposes the building of a magnificent church with the violence and treachery that often characterized the Middle Ages.

Became the TV mini-series: The Pillars of the Earth.

By Emma Donoghue
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk, Susan L., Library Page, Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, May 22. 1 PM & 7:30 PM

Five–year–old Jack has spent his life living in an eleven–by–eleven foot space his mother calls Room and while Jack uses his imagination to create wondrous fantasies to entertain himself, his mother dreads the day her son begins to question why they must remain in Room and tries to find a way to escape.

Composed in medieval England by an unknown poet and set in what were (even then) the old days of King Arthur, the tale begins when a magical warrior with green skin and green hair interrupts the Christmas party at Camelot with a bizarre challenge which Sir Gawain accepts.

Became the movie: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

By Jo Nesbo

In Oslo, after the first snow of the season has fallen, a woman disappears, and a sinister snowman is left in her wake. As irascible detective Harry Hole realizes that this is only one of multiple disappearances, he begins to think a serial killer may be at work.

By H.P. Lovecraft
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Celebrated as the godfather of modern horror, Lovecraft's universe is a frightening shadow world where reality and nightmare intertwine, and redemption can come only from below.

By Tim O'Brien

"A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling… depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three (From the Publisher)."

By Chris Grabenstein
Series John Creepak Mysteries
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

When a billionaire real estate tycoon is found murdered on the Tilt-A-Whirl at a seedy seaside amusement park in the summer tourist town of Sea Haven. John Ceepak, a former MP just back from Iraq heads the investigation.

By Lauren Hillenbrand
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk, Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk
With Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, October 16.  7:30 PM.

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashes into the Pacific and Lt. Louis Zamperini survives. Captured by the Japanese and driven to the limits of endurance, he would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor.

By Richard Paul Evans
Recommended By Nancy Lowenstein, Library Page

When his partner betrays him and his wife dies, an inconsolable Alan Christoffersen leaves most of his worldly possessions behind and sets off on a soul searching journey from Washington to Florida.

By Henry James

Catherine Sloper, heiress to a fortune, attracts the attention of a good-looking but penniless young man, Morris Townsend, but her father is convinced that his motives are merely mercenary. He will not consent to the marriage, regardless of the cost to his daughter.

By Sara Gruen
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell.

By Evan Fallenberg

At eighty-five, Teo is ready to retire from the bombast and romance of life as one of the world’s most influential choreographers. But when he meets Vivi, a fortyish waitress at a Tel Aviv cafe, the fires of his youth flare back to life.

By Elizabeth Noble

Susannah’s world is rocked by her rekindled feelings for Rob, then totally turned upside down by a revelation from her best friend Amelia. Just when Susannah and Amelia need each other the most, they are facing a crisis that threatens to tear their friendship apart.