Literary Book Club Past Reads

Presents the story of a father and son's transformative shared journey in reading in the wake of the father's late-in-life enrollment in his son's undergraduate seminar, where the two engaged in debates over how to interpret Homer's classic masterpiece. After enrolling in an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey that his son teaches, Mendelsohn hoped to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth. Instead he was presented with an opportunity...

A powerful and beautiful novella of one woman, consigned to a dreary retirement home, who wages a defiant battle against the dulling forces around her After seventy-six-year-old Caro Spencer suffers a heart attack, her family sends her to a private retirement home to wait out the rest of her days. Her memory growing fuzzy, Caro decides to keep a journal to document the daily goings-on-her feelings of confinement and boredom; her distrust of the home's...

Starting from the premise that we can no longer afford to live in a disenchanted world, Moore shows that a profound, enchanted engagement with life is not a childish thing to be put away with adulthood, but a necessity for one's personal and collective survival. With his lens focused on specific aspects of daily life such as clothing, food, furniture, architecture, ecology, language, and politics, Moore describes the renaissance these can undergo...

"True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history final, and have doctors, politicians, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they'll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who's never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school's golden boy, whose world is rocked...

"From award-winning actor and food obsessive Stanley Tucci comes an intimate and charming memoir of life in and out of the kitchen"--

Most folk thought Sallie Kincaid was a nobody who'd amount to nothing. Sallie had other plans. Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little about her mother who died in a violent argument with the Duke. By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie...

A boy searches for his fugitive brother in 1960s Minnesota in this New York Times bestseller—“a stunning debut novel [of] faith, miracles, and family” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
An eleven-year-old asthmatic boy, Reuben Land has reason to believe in miracles. But he will soon learn that life, even when touched by the divine, is never easy. Along with his father and poetically inclined sister,

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In glamorous 1920s New York City, two characters of sophisticated taste come together. One is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; the other, the brilliant daughter of penniless aristocrats. Steeped in affluence and grandeur, their marriage excites gossip and allows a continued ascent -- all at a moment when the country is undergoing a great transformation. This is the story at the center of Harold Vanner's novel Bonds, which everyone in 1938 New York...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death.
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant...