top of page

Book Club

 

We meet on the first Thursday of every month to discuss our latest book, and vote on what we will read next.

We alternate between fiction, and non-fiction.

Our current selection is:

 

 

Reactionary Spirit JPEG.jpg

Coming up Next:

James JPEG.jpg

For more information contact Linda Montgomery

montbaar@comcast.net

Books We've Read in the Past:

2024:

  • The Women - Kristin Hannah

  • I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life - Ed Yong

  • The Frozen River - Ariel Lawhon

  • Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present - Fareed Zakaria

  • Remarkably Bright Creatures - Shelby Van Pelt

  • American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis - Adam Hochschild

  • Tom Lake - Ann Patchett

  • The Guncle - Steven Rowley

  • A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy - Nathan Thrall

2023:
  • West with the Night - Beryl Markham

  • Demon Copperhead - by Barbara Kingsolver

  • White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism - by Robin DiAngelo

  • Lessons in Chemistry - by Bonnie Garmus

  • How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America - by Heather Cox Richardson

  • Goodbye, Columbus - by Philip Roth

  • Owls of the Eastern Ice - by Jonathan Slaght

  • Horse - by Geraldine Brooks

  • These Truths: A History of the United States - by Jill Lepore

  • Afterlives - by Abdulrazak Gurnah

  • The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective 
    Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations - by James Surowiecki 

 
2022:
  • Howards End - by E. M. Forster

  • Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street - by Rana Foroohar

  • The Plot - by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  • The Rope: A True Story of Murder, Heroism and the Dawn of the NAACP -
    by Alex Tresniowski

  • Son of Svea: A Tale of the People's Home - by Lena Andersson

  • The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz -
    by 
    Erik Larson

  • The Anomaly - by Herve Le Tellier

  • The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe - by Matthew Gabriele and David M Perry

  • Exhalation: Stories - by Ted Chiang

  • Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures -
    by Merlin Sheldrake

  • Deacon King Kong - by James McBride

  • The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist's Point of View - by Tim Crane


2021:
  • News of the World - by Paulette Jiles

  • American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer - by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

  • Project Hail Mary - by Andy Weir

  • White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America - by Joan C. Williams

  • Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague - by Maggie O'Farrell

  • Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA - by Neil Shubin

  • The Night Watchman - by Louise Erdrich

  • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics - by Carlo Rovelli

  • Tyll - by Daniel Kehlmann

  • The Yellow House - by Sarah M. Broom

  • The Anthologist - by Nicholson Baker

  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - by Isabel Wilkerson

2020:
  • The Old Man and the Sea - by Ernest Hemingway

  • Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption - by Bryan Stevenson

  • Their Eyes Were Watching God - by Zora Neale Hurston

  • A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II - by Sonia Purnell

  • The Overstory - by Richard Powers

  • The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth About the Nordic Miracle - by Michael Booth

  • The Dutch House - by Ann Patchett

  • The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer - by Dan Buettner

  • It Can't Happen Here - by Sinclair Lewis

  • Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution - by Mona Eltahawy

  • A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding - by Jackie Copleton

  • The Year of Living Danishly - by Helen Russell

2019:
  • Exit West - by Mohsin Hamid

  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - by Yuval Noah Harari

  • The Museum of Innocence - by Orhan Pamuk

  • Women V. Religion - edited by Karen L. Garst, PhD

  • Unsheltered - by Barbara Kingsolver

  • Becoming - by Michelle Obama

  • Major Pettigrew's Last Stand - by Helen Simonson

  • The Common Good - by Robert Reich

  • Pachinko - by Min Jin Lee

  • The Death and Life of the Great Lakes - by Dan Egan

  • Less - by Andrew Sean Greer

  • Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge - by Erica Dunbar

2018:
  • Sing, Unburied, Sing - by Jesmyn Ward

  • Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence - by Max Tegmark

  • Station Eleven - by Emily St. John Mandel

  • The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World - by Edward Dolnick

  • Disgrace - by J. M. Coetzee

  • The Black Count: Glory, Revolution Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo - by Tom Reiss

  • The Distant Marvels - by Chantel Acevedo

  • Lab Girl - by Hope Jahren

  • A Gentleman in Moscow - by Amor Towles

  • Born A Crime - by Trevor Noah

  • Origin - by Dan Brown

 
2017:
  • The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve - by Stephen Greenblatt

  • Devoted - by Jennifer Mathieu

  • The Boy Kings of Texas: A Memoir - by Domingo Martinez

  • Gilead - by Marilynne Robinson

  • Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right - by Jane Mayer

  • The Handmaid's Tale - by Margaret Atwood

  • The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt - by T. J. Stiles

  • The Vegetarian - by Han Kang

  • The Boys in the Boat - by Daniel James Brown

  • The Buffalo Soldier - by Chris Bohjalian

  • The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science - by Richard Holmes

  • Ten Little Indians - by Sherman Alexie

2016:
  • The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World - by Andrea Wulf

  • Night - by Elie Wiesel

  • Just Kids - by Patti Smith

  • The Sympathizer - by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  • Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World - by David Silverman

  • Frankenstein - by Mary Shelley

  • Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley - by Charlotte Gordon

  • The Buddha in the Attic - by Julie Otsuka

  • The Omnivore's Dilemma - by Michael Pollan

  • Jazz - by Toni Morrison

  • Being Mortal - by Atul Gawande

  • A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters - by Julian Barnes

 

2015:
  • Godless - by Dan Barker

  • Claire of the Sea Light - by Edwige Danticat

  • Between the World and Me - by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  • Last Night in Twisted River - by John Irving

  • In the Garden of Beasts - by Erik Larson

  • The Round House - by Louise Erdrich

  • A Call to Action - by Jimmy Carter

  • The Children Act - by Ian McEwan

  • The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness - by Michelle Alexander

  • Bangkok 8 - by John Burdett

  • The Age of American Unreason - by Susan Jacoby

 

2014: 
  • The Light Between Oceans - by M. L. Stedman

  • Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decision - by Dan Ariely 

  • Pride and Prejudice - by Jane Austen

  • American Creation - by Joseph J. Ellis

  • Unaccustomed Earth - by Jhumpa Lahiri

  • Ninety Percent of Everything- by Rose George

  • American Pastoral - by Phillip Roth

  • The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - by Eric Foner

  • Middlesex - by Jeffrey Eugenides

  • My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel - by Ari Shavit

  • The Outcast Oracle - by Laury Egan

  • Eleanor of Aquitaine - by Alison Weir

 

2013:
  • My Antonia - by Willa Cather

  • Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story - by Jim Holt

  • Flight Behavior - by Barbara Kingsolver

  • The Bonobo and the Atheist - by Frans de Waal

  • The Turn of the Screw - by Henry James

  • 1776 - by David McCullough

  • Siddartha - by Hermann Hesse

  • The Warmth of Other Suns - by Isabel Wilkerson

  • Gilgamesh translated - by Stephen Mitchell

  • The Places in Between - by Rory Stewart

  • English Passengers - by Matthew Kneale

  • Microbe Hunters - by Paul de Kruif

 

2012:
  • State of Wonder - by Ann Patchett

  • Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt - by Nina Burleigh

  • The Grapes of Wrath - by John Steinbeck

  • Biography of Eleanor Roosevelt - Reader’s choice

  • The Martian Chronicles - by Ray Bradbury

  • The Swerve: How the World Became Modern - by Stephen Greenblatt

  • To Kill a Mockingbird - by Harper Lee

  • Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body - by Neil Shubin

  • The Quiet American - by Graham Greene

  • The God Delusion - by Richard Dawkins

  • The Whiskey Rebels - by David Liss

  • Triangle: The Fire That Changed America - by David Von Drehle

 

2011:
  • The Wordy Shipmates - by Sarah Vowell

  • Half of a Yellow Sun - by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  • Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer

  • The Plague - by Albert Camus

  • Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour - by Lynn Olson

  • Winesburg, Ohio - by Sherwood Anderson

  • Woman, An Intimate Geography - by Natalie Angier

  • True Grit - by Charles Portis

  • The Moral Landscape - by Sam Harris

  • Cutting for Stone - by Abraham Verghese

2010:
  • Walking Israel, a Personal Search for the Soul of Israel - by Martin Fletcher

  • To Live - by Yu Hua

  • Collapse - by Jared Diamond

  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - by Mark Twain

  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - by Rebecca Skloot

  • The Things They Carried - by Tim O’Brien

  • Cosmos - by Carl Sagan

  • City of Thieves - by David Benioff

  • Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism - by Susan Jacoby

  • The Elegance of the Hedgehog - by Muriel Berbery

  • The Healing of America, A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Healthcare - by T. R. Reid

  • The View from Castle Rock - by Alice Munro

  • Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion - by Edward J. Larson.

 

2009:
  • Madame Bovary - by Gustav Flaubert

  • The Meaning of it All - by Richard Feynman

  • Bel Canto - by Ann Patchet

  • Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists - by Jean H. Baker

  • Brave New World - by Aldous Huxley.

  • Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

  • The White Tiger - by Aravind Adiga.

  • Apollo 13 - by James Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger

  • A Death in the Family - by James Agee

  • The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution - by Sean B. Carroll

 
2008:
  • The Joke - by Milan Kundera

  • Dreams From My Father - by Barack Obama

  • Palace Walk - by Naguib Mahfouz

  • Infidel - by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  • Interpreter of Maladies - by Jhumpa Lahiri

  • Incompleteness - by Rebecca Goldstein

 

2007:
  • The Exception - by Christian Jungerse.

  • Flow - by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  • The Kite Runner - by Khaled Hosseini

  • Crimes Against Logic - by Jamie Whyte

  • Letter to a Christian Nation - by Sam Harris

bottom of page