A Big Bag of Books for Your Book Discussion Group

Genesee District Library encourages book discussion groups. We think books are meant to be shared whether reading funny verse to a toddler, talking about something wonderful found in a book, or recommending an author to a friend. A book group is sharing thoughts about a particular book and following the themes wherever they lead the group. Several established groups meet in our libraries. All of them accept new members. New groups can be started by just talking to a branch librarian.

GDL has started a new service for book discussion groups anywhere in its service area. Whether you are thinking of starting one or belong to an established group we have a “kit” for your group, a Big Bag of Books. GDL will provide to your group a special bag containing ten copies of the title your book club has chosen to read. The bag includes discussion questions and information about the book’s storyline and author. Large Print copies or audio books will be provided whenever available. The Big Bag of Books is checked out for six weeks. If you think this new program sounds stimulating and fun, call the GDL Programs/Events Coordinator, Marilyn Brown, at 810-230-3328. Following is our list of Bags:

• New! At Home in Mitford by Jan Karon. As part of a series of five books, "At Home In Mitford" which introduces the reader to Father Tim, a cherished Episcopalian rector in the town of Mitford. The residents of Mitford will surely come to take up residence in your heart as you read through this heartwarming series of miracles, love, mysteries and everyday life which take you into the lives of Mitford's charming, eccentric, and lovable citizens including Father Tim's big black dog, Barnabas, who can be instructed to behave with a mere verse of scripture!
• Atonement by Ian McEwan. (This title is also available as a downloadable eBook from our Digital Library!) In 1935 England, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses an event involving her sister Cecilia and her childhood friend Robbie Turner, and she becomes the victim of her own imagination, which leads her on a lifelong search for truth and absolution.
• Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie. (This title is also available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library!) During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, two boys are sent to the country for reeducation, where their lives take an unexpected turn when they meet the beautiful daughter of a local tailor and stumble upon a forbidden stash of Western literature.
• Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood. Years after painter Elaine Risley flees Toronto for Vancouver, she returns to search for long-missing parts of her life and pursue the elusive Cordelia, her best friend and sometimes enemy.
• Changing Faces by Kimberla Lawson Roby. (This title is also available as a downloadable eBook and audiobook from our Digital Library!) Whitney, Taylor, and Charisse have been best friends for years, but they are about to face an unexpected wave of troubles when Charisse's husband threatens to go public with a secret that she has been desperately trying to hide from her mother.
• Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. A simple trip to town to buy their college bound son a suitcase ends in tragedy for the Morrison family. When their parents are killed in an automobile accident, the 4 Morrison children are left to forge ahead with heartbreaking humor, misunderstandings, resentments, and family love.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.
• Digging to America by Anne Tyler. (This title is also available as a downloadable eBook and audiobook from our Digital Library!) Two families awaiting the arrival of their adopted infant daughters from Korea meet at the airport. The families lives become intertwined after the Donaldsons, a young American couple invite the Yazdan's, Maryam, her son and his Iranian American wife to an arrival party, which becomes an annual event. Maryam, who came to this country thirty-five years earlier, feels her values threatened when she is courted by a newly widowed Donaldson. A penetrating light on the American way as seen from two perspectives, those who are born here and those who are still struggling to fit in .A chance airport encounter between two families--the Donaldsons, and the Iranian-born Yazdans--as both couples await the arrival of an adopted daughter from Korea, prompts an examination about what it means to be an American.
• Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells. (This title is also available as a downloadable eBook from our Digital Library!) SiddaLee has escaped her Louisiana hometown to become a theatrical director, but as she gathers mementos from the Ya-Ya Sisterhood to assist in writing a play about women's friendships, she yearns to revisit her childhood.
• Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller. (This title is also available as a downloadable eBook from our Digital Library!) Magnificently original and affecting, Fuller's memoir of a childhood dominated by the Rhodesian civil war of 1971-1979 captures the fascinating life of a white family living in one of the most remote regions of Africa. The author sensitively and lovingly conveys the frightening aspects of wartime, her family's personal struggles, and her parents' own racism, all the while retaining a bittersweet sense of humor. 2001.
• Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. (This title is also available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library!) Charming, gregarious, spiritually curious, and suffering a disastrous divorce, Elizabeth Gilbert picked herself up and took off for a year of travel. The journey took her to Italy to explore Pleasure, to India to study Devotion, and to Indonesia to find Balance. The result of this exploration is an engaging, intelligent, and entertaining memoir rich in spiritual insight.
• Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter. (This title is also available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library!) After the death of his father, the accomplished, flamboyant, and controversial Judge Oliver Garland, his son Talcott, a law professor, must unravel the truth about his father's life, a quest that brings him face to face with old scandals, family secrets, and justice gone wrong.
• Evening by Susan Minot. Now ailing and surrounded by her children, sixty-five-year-old Ann Grant Lord reminisces about a glorious summer weekend some forty years earlier during which she met and lost the love of her life. By the author of Folly.
• Eye Contact by Cammie McGovern. In the aftermath of a child's shocking murder, the mother of the only witness, an autistic boy, struggles to work through her son's trauma and his communication disabilities in order to help the police to solve the case.
• Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. (This title is also available as a downloadable eBook from our Digital Library!) This life-affirming fable ironically opens at the end of the life of a seemingly ordinary man. Known as "Eddie Maintenance", Eddie led what he saw as a disappointing life working as head of maintenance at a seaside amusement park. Upon his death, he learns that heaven is a place to make sense of his time on earth and that he will meet five people from his life who will help him understand its greatest lessons.
• New! Founding Mothers: the women who raised our nation by Cokie Roberts. (This title is also available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library!) Focusing mainly on the wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers of the Founding Fathers, this lively and engaging title chronicles the adventures and contributions of numerous women of the era between 1740 and 1797. While their men were away serving as soldiers, statesmen, or ambassadors, the women's lives were fraught with difficulty and danger. Through it all, they corresponded with their husbands, friends, and even like-minded women in England. Readers will enjoy seeing how many of these individuals showed their mettle when they were still in their teens.
• French by Heart: An American Family’s Adventures in La Belle France by Rebecca S. Ransey. (This title is also available as a downloadable eBook from our Digital Library!) Describes how an American family of five moved from South Carolina suburbia to a town in the middle of France and the dramatic changes in their lives as the entire family embraced a whole new culture and language.
• Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs. (This title is also available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library!) As a single mom in her late 30s, Georgia has her hands full juggling the demands of running the Walker & Daughter knitting store with the challenges of raising her spunky teen daughter, Dakota. Georgia’s regular customers gather once a week to work on their latest projects and chat
• The Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. A poor seventeenth-century servant girl knows her place in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer, but when he begins to paint her, nasty whispers and rumors circulate throughout the town.
• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. The second child of a scholarly, alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing from the Arizona desert, to Las Vegas, to an Appalachian mining town, during which her siblings and she fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities.
• Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo by Paula Huntley. The author recounts her experiences as an English teacher for Kosovo Albanians and how her students formed a book club that brought them together and helped them work through their painful war experiences.
• Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. (This title is available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library!) As six Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love.
• New! Julie and Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen by Julie Powell. Nearing 30 and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, JuliePowell resolved to reclaim her life by cooking, in the span of a single year, every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child's legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her unexpected reward: not just a newfound respect for calves' livers and aspic, but a new life--lived with gusto.
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Traces the unlikely friendship of Amir, a wealthy Afghanistani youth, and a servant's son, in a tale that spans the final days of the nation's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza, her distinguished husband, and a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years
• New! Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. Published in 1984, this stunning collection of interrelated short stories won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Focusing on the lives of several Chippewa Indian families, and the white families with whom they interact and/or marry, author Louise Erdrich depicts their traditional culture through some of the early characters, and, through later characters, the way the old ways change or become compromised through education, the introduction of religion by missionaries, and contact with modern society. The stories are set in North Dakota on or near a remote reservation, not far from the Canadian border, similar to the place where Erdrich grew up and where her parents worked as teachers for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
• The Love Wife by Gish Jen. The arrival of a "cousin" from mainland China, arranged by Mama Wong to serve as a nanny, throws the household of Carnegie Wong, a second-generation Chinese American, his WASP wife Blondie, and their three children into turmoil.
• New! Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean. As a young woman, Marina worked as a museum guide at the Hermitage in Leningrad. When war broke out and the Germans invaded the city, Marina and her comrades were tasked with removing the museum's priceless treasures and storing them safely away. During the 900 days of siege, the city residents faced devastation, starvation, and cold. The Hermitage's basement became Marina's refuge. The empty picture frames gracing its exhibition halls contained echoes of its former art, providing a distraction that helped Marina survive the horrors of war. Now living in Seattle, Marina is an elderly woman who is sinking into dementia. About to attend her granddaughter's wedding, her past overtakes the present and she is living in a muddled world of war, beauty, and the struggle for survival.
• Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear. (This title is available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library.) Private detective Maisie Dobbs must investigate the reappearance of a dead man who turns up at a cooperative farm called the Retreat that caters to men who are recovering their health after World War I.
• New! March by Geraldine Brooks. Brooks's luminous second novel, after 2001's acclaimed Year of Wonders, imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves, or "contraband." His narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to prevent and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier as a Connecticut peddler to the plantations.
• Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards. In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twin daughter during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from the baby's affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child.
• Nanny Diaries by Nicola Kraus. (This title is available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library.) Nanny, a struggling NYU student, takes a position caring for the son of the rich and glamorous X family, and learns how to juggle a vast array of tasks so that a Park Avenue wife never has to lift a well-manicured finger.
• New! Narrow Dog to Carcassonne by Terry Darlington. (This title is available as a downloadable ebook from our Digital Library!) In a narrow boat built strictly for inland canals, two British retirees and their whippet sail across the English Channel, into the Mediterranean, and up to Carcassonne, France. Wry asides about the whippet's sex drive and fear of water mix with horrifying tales of storms at sea and social gaffes at the dock. One never knows what the travelers will next encounter, and never wants the story to end.
• New! No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club by Virginia Ironside. In her first American release, London journalist Ironside slices through the hullabaloo about reclaiming youth. On the cusp of 60, Marie begins keeping a diary, and the approximately 18 months' worth of entries that make up the narrative offer blunt appraisals of the state of the world, matters of health and family, and the good and bad aspects of the Internet age (cut and paste is good; booking travel online is bad).
• The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. (This title is available as a downloadable ebook from our Digital Library!) Working in Gaborone, Botswana, sleuth Precious Ramotswe investigates several local mysteries, including a search for a missing boy and the case of the clinic doctor with different personalities for different days of the week.
• One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus. (This title is available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library!) A vivid portrait of the American West follows May Dodd as she leaves the East Coast asylum to which she had been committed by her high-society family, heads west, and, with the help of a government program, ends up marrying a chief of the Cheyenne nation.
• New! The Other Boleyn Girl by Phillippa Gregory. Sisterly rivalry is the basis of this fresh, wonderfully vivid retelling of the story of Anne Boleyn. Anne, her sister Mary and their brother George are all brought to the king's court at a young age, as players in their uncle's plans to advance the family's fortunes.
• The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve. From the initial knock on the door at 3 a.m. to some five months later, Katharine Lyons finds herself in the grips of extreme emotion. Her pilot husband Jack's plane, with 103 passengers aboard, has exploded off the coast of Ireland.
• Road by Cormac McCarthy. (This title is available as a downloadable ebook from our Digital Library.) In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.
• Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. (This title is available as a downloadable ebook and audiobook from our Digital Library!) The family of a fierce evangelical Baptist missionary--Nathan Price, his wife, and his four daughters--begins to unravel after they embark on a 1959 mission to the Belgian Congo, where they find their lives forever transformed over the course of three decades by the political and social upheaval of Africa.
• Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman by Elizabeth Buchan. (This title is available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library.) Her happy marriage and successful career falling apart after twenty-five years, Rose Lloyd struggles with the prospect of starting over before finding unexpected fulfillment in her new independence and the reappearance of an old flame.
• Rocket Boys: a Memoir by Homer Hickam, Jr. (This title is available as a downloadable ebook from our Digital Library.) The author traces the boyhood enthusiasm for rockets that eventually led to a career at NASA, describing how he built model rockets in the family garage in West Virginia, inspired by the launch of the Soviet satellite "Sputnik"
• River King by Alice Hoffman. (This title is available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library.) There are two things any reader can count on when coming to Alice Hoffman: her prose and a remarkable empathy for those who live on the fringes of society. In her 13th novel, the author turns both to good account. Set in a tony private school located in a small New England town, The River King traces an intricate weave of intersecting lives over the course of a year.
• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. (This title is available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library.) After her "stand-in mother," a bold black woman named Rosaleen, insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens joins Rosaleen on a journey to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters.
• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. (This title is available as a downloadable ebook and audiobook from our Digital Library!) A story of friendship set in nineteenth-century China follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.
• Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. (This title is available as a downloadable ebook and audiobook from our Digital Library!) Published more than sixty years following the author's death at Auschwitz, a remarkable story of life under the Nazi occupation includes two parts--"A Storm in June, " set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, and "Dolce," set in a German-occupied provincial village rife with jealousy, resentment, resistance, and collaboration.
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a black woman in the 30's. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.
• Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell. (This title is available as a downloadable ebook and audiobook from our Digital Library.) Set in the ports and valleys of northeastern Italy during the last 2 years of World War II, Mary Doria Russell tells the story of 43,000 Jews, both native born Italians and refugees from eastern Europe, whose lives were saved by ordinary citizens. This is the story of a father and daughter making their escape from Belgium, a British soldier parachuting into occupied territory, a Catholic priest risking his life shielding refugees, and an emotionally disillusioned , renegade German doctor.
• Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. Now old and ailing, the famous but reclusive writer, Vida Winter, is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for 6 decades. Calling on young biographer Margaret Lea, who is also troubled by a painful past, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good in this gothic tale of heartache and romance.
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger. (This title is available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library.) Caught in an impossible-to-resolve situation that spans the boundaries of temporal reality, this tale of a plucky librarian who is accidentally cast back in time focuses on the romantic complications of time travel.
• New! The Virgin of Small Plains by Nacy Picard. (This title is available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library!) Picard probes the truth behind miracles and the tragedies behind lies in this mesmerizing suspense novel set in Kansas.
• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. (This title is available as a downloadable audiobook from our Digital Library!) Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.

We have become especially aware of the need in senior centers and senior housing of all kinds for book discussion groups. GDL can help get those started with the Big Bags of Books program. Call for more information at 810-230-3328 or e-mail.

NoveList is one GDL’s most helpful research databases for readers and discussion groups. Click on Research, select NoveList from the Arts and Literature category, and type in your GDL card number and PIN.