Date

Title

Author

Comments

Rating

January 15, 2009

Family Tree

Barbara Delinsky

A child with clearly African-American traits is born to a white couple with no knowledge of African roots on either side.

February 19, 2009

Possessing the Secret of Joy

Alice Walker

An extraordinarily courageous and compelling novel that explores the tragic consequences of an African woman's decision to go through the female initiation ceremony

March 19, 2009

Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls

Walls's parents -just two of the unforgettable characters in this excellent, unusual book - were a matched pair of eccentrics

April 16, 2009

Water for Elephants

Sara Gruen

A tender story of first love, of murder, mayhem and animal and human brutality, of hucksters, whores and the general hoopla created when the circus rolls into town.

May 21, 2009

The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream

Paulo Coelho

Santiago, an Andalucian shepherd boy, inspired by a dream of a distant treasure in the Egyptian pyramids, leaves Spain to literally follow his dream.

June 18, 2009

God's Shrink: 10 Sessions and Life's Greatest Lessons from an Unexpected Patient

Michael Adamse

From the author: "I wondered if God might be more like us than we imagined and thought that if that were so, then it would be entertaining to explore that idea in the context of a fiction-inspirational novel."

July 16, 2009

Memoirs of a Geisha

Arthur Golden

A young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

August 20, 2009

Mercy

Jodi Picoult

What could have been a competent, topical novel about a mercy killing becomes, in Picoult's hands, an inspired meditation on love.

September 17, 2009

One Thousand White Women

Jim Fergus

In 1875, the chief of the Cheyenne nation comes to Washington to seal a treaty and suggests that peace between Whites and Cheyenne could be established if the Cheyenne were given white women as wives.

October 15, 2009

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini

At 15, Mariam is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, the Taliban take over, and life becomes a struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can lead a person to overcome daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.

November 19, 2009

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Jung Chang

WThrough the story of three generations of women -- grandmother, mother and daughter -- Wild Swans tells nothing less than the whole tumultuous history of China's tragic twentieth century.

December 17, 2009

The Good Earth

Pearl S. Buck

We are reading spectators of the rise and fall and twists and turns of Wang Lung's family, just before the Chinese revolution..