Book Discussion Kit Titles List is Now Up to Date!

The Book Discussion Kit Title list has been updated. It can be found here.

Some of the NEW titles available now are:

Death’s Excellent Vacation Edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner

"This anthology of all-new tales of the paranormal had one binding thread…they were all about finding a little rest and relaxation, taking a vacation and getting away from everyday life. As true with a lot of vacations, all does not run smoothly along the way. Reservations are misplaced, luggage lost, cockroaches in the bathtub…but not too many vacations have the endings that this cast of stellar authors have cooked up for their characters. Sit by the pool, crack a cold one, and put on some sunscreen. This book will give you an even better appreciation for staying home and forgoing that vacay for a while (Source)."

 

The End of Your Life Book Club By Will Schwalbe

“What are you reading?”

"That’s the question Will Schwalbe asks his mother, Mary Anne, as they sit in the waiting room of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 2007, Mary Anne returned from a humanitarian trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan suffering from what her doctors believed was a rare type of hepatitis. Months later she was diagnosed with a form of advanced pancreatic cancer, which is almost always fatal, often in six months or less.

This is the inspiring true story of a son and his mother, who start a “book club” that brings them together as her life comes to a close. Over the next two years, Will and Mary Anne carry on conversations that are both wide-ranging and deeply personal, prompted by an eclectic array of books and a shared passion for reading. Their list jumps from classic to popular, from poetry to mysteries, from fantastic to spiritual. The issues they discuss include questions of faith and courage as well as everyday topics such as expressing gratitude and learning to listen. Throughout, mother and son are constantly reminded of the power of books to comfort us, astonish us, teach us, and tell us what we need to do with our lives and in the world. Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying (Source)."

The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom

"In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds and when loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare and lives are at risk. The Kitchen House is a tragic story of page-turning suspense, exploring the meaning of family, where love and loyalty prevail (Source)."

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis

"In a sweeping tale that moves forward and backward in time across sixty years in Georgia and Philadelphia, Ayana Mathis’s extraordinary first novel tells the story of an unforgettable family—and an indomitable woman—caught in singular moment in American history.

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd, hoping for a chance at a better life, flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia with her twin babies. Instead, she watches helplessly as they succumb to an illness that a few pennies might have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave, fearing a show of tenderness would inadequately prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their lives.

True to Hattie’s expectations, the Shepherd children confront desolation, poverty, and the coldness and cruelty of their time. Floyd and Franklin battle inner demons in music halls and in the jungles of Vietnam; Bell, ruinously ill, awaits death but discovers salvation from an unexpected source; Alice and Billups wrestle with a secret history that threatens to undo them both; and Ella and Ruthie—one of whom escapes to a brighter life, at a devastating cost—are caught in the vortex of their mother’s deepest passions.

Hattie’s children, her tribes, are the children of the Great Migration. Their lives, captured here in twelve distinct and soaring narrative threads, tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation (Source)."

Wild From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

A Best Nonfiction Book of 2012: The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly
A Best Book of the Year: NPR, St. Louis Dispatch, Vogue

"At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.
 
Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her (Source)."

Titles COMING SOON:

Killing Lincoln The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever by Bill O'Reilly
"A riveting historical narrative of the heart-stopping events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the first work of history from mega-bestselling author Bill O'Reilly

The anchor of The O'Reilly Factor recounts one of the most dramatic stories in American history-how one gunshot changed the country forever. In the spring of 1865, the Civil War finally comes to an end after a series of incredibly bloody battles. President Abraham Lincoln's generous terms for Robert E. Lee's surrender are devised to fulfill Lincoln's dream of healing a divided nation, with the former Confederates allowed to reintegrate into American society. One man and his band of murderous accomplices, perhaps reaching into the highest ranks of the U.S. government, are not appeased.

In the midst of the patriotic celebrations in Washington, D.C., John Wilkes Booth-charismatic ladies' man and impenitent racist-murders Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater. A furious manhunt ensues and Booth immediately becomes the country's most wanted fugitive. Lafayette C. Baker, a brilliant but enigmatic New York detective and former Union spy, unravels the string of clues leading to Booth, while federal forces track his accomplices. The thrilling chase ends in a fiery shootout and a series of court-ordered executions-including that of the first woman ever executed by the U.S. government, Mary Surratt. With an unforgettable cast of characters, vivid historical detail, and page-turning action, Killing Lincoln is history that reads like a thriller (Source)."

 

The Round House A Novel By

The Round House By Louise Erdrich

"The Round House won the National Book Award for fiction.

One of the most revered novelists of our time—a brilliant chronicler of Native-American life—Louise Erdrich returns to the territory of her bestselling, Pulitzer Prize finalist The Plague of Doves with The Round House, transporting readers to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. It is an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.

Riveting and suspenseful, arguably the most accessible novel to date from the creator of Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace, Erdrich’s The Round House is a page-turning masterpiece of literary fiction—at once a powerful coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a tender, moving novel of family, history, and culture (Source)."

 

Wonder by R. J. Palacio

"August (Auggie) Pullman was born with a facial deformity that prevented him from going to a mainstream school—until now. He's about to start 5th grade at Beecher Prep, and if you've ever been the new kid then you know how hard that can be. The thing is Auggie's just an ordinary kid, with an extraordinary face. But can he convince his new classmates that he's just like them, despite appearances (Source)?"


We hope you enjoy the book discussion kits. For book discussion kit information click here. If you have any questions or would like to reserve a kit for your group, feel free to call the Reference Department at 788-4087 x1339.

Happy Reading!


 
http://jackson.lib.mi.us/node/12104
jackson.lib.mi.us
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-48
341497
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:BA2YEH2O6XJUMHIVZC4QTNBRCJXLDGDU
<urn:uuid:14cd6da9-29a7-4e3a-b64f-5d3f1a1bb52e>
2013-12-20T05:45:08Z
198.109.219.252
sha1:UI3AI33I7WUGZUNTUOWE2OERP2EGAAZL
<urn:uuid:67e2bc10-4f50-4d58-895d-5717cc9ea005>
http://jackson.lib.mi.us/node/12104
length
response
<urn:uuid:73a79d8e-55b7-44b2-83c8-adbd725bc84c>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-33-133-15.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-48
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Winter 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf