Book List
Sometimes it’s not enough to read the book, you want to discuss it with others. The Library’s Bound to Please book discussions are a great place to connect to other book lovers in the community. Chosen books include memoirs, contemporary and classic fiction and are available for check out at the Library’s Customer Service Desk. Discussions are held the last Tuesday of the month, in the Ray Bradbury Room, from 2 – 3:30 p.m. unless otherwise noted. Discussions moderated by Lourdes Mordini.
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer, 2011
Tuesday, October 30 at 2 p.m.
On average, people squander forty days annually compensating for things they’ve forgotten. Joshua Foer used to be one of those people. But after a year of memory training, he found himself in the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship. Even more important, Foer found a vital truth we too often forget: In every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres
Tuesday, November 27 at 2 p.m.
The setting is a small village in southwestern Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone there speaks Turkish, though they write it in Greek letters. It’s a place that has room for a professional blasphemer; where a brokenhearted aga finds solace in the arms of a Circassian courtesan who isn’t Circassian at all; where a beautiful Christian girl named Philothei is engaged to a Muslim boy named Ibrahim. 2004, 576pp
The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland
December 18, 2012
Set against the lush tapestry of Renaissance Rome; this is a mesmerizing tale of love, art, and most notably, the love of art. After Artemisia Gentileschi, a promising young painter, is raped by her instructor, a papal court orders her torture and her father betrays her. Shamed but not vanquished, she asks her harsh parent to arrange her marriage to another painter and, thus vindicated in the eyes of society and the church, she begins a new life. But not a happy one. 2002, 352 pp.
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Tuesday, January 29, 2013 at 2 p.m.
An enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. 2009, 541 pp.