Book Choices for Nov and Dec!

Two months in one!

From Sara for November:

The Distant Hours, Kate Morton
The Goose Girl, Shannon Hale
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles Mann

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And from Corinne for December:

The theme is books I haven't read yet that Disney made into life-action movies:

     Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers:  a magical nanny helps out a family that's disconnected (movie is being remade)
     Toby Tyler, or 10 Weeks With The Circus, James Otis (available on Kindle for free!): a boy runs away from home to join an old-time circus
     Pollyanna, Eleanor Porter: an orphaned girl with a sunshiny attitude changes her town

September Choices

Make your selection from these options for September:

Flunking Sainthood, Jana Riess
Amazon.com blurb:  "This wry memoir tackles twelve different spiritual practices in a quest to become more saintly, including fasting, fixed-hour prayer, the Jesus Prayer, gratitude, Sabbath-keeping, and generosity. Although Riess begins with great plans for success ("Really, how hard could that be?" she asks blithely at the start of her saint-making year), she finds to her growing humiliation that she is failing--not just at some of the practices, but at every single one. What emerges is a funny yet vulnerable story of the quest for spiritual perfection and the reality of spiritual failure, which turns out to be a valuable practice in and of itself."


A Year of Biblical Womanhood, Rachel Held Evans
Another Amazon.com blurb: "Strong-willed and independent, Rachel Held Evans couldn’t sew a button on a blouse before she embarked on a radical life experiment—a year of biblical womanhood. Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year." 

7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess, Jen Hatmaker
Amazon.com again:  "American life can be excessive, to say the least. That’s what Jen Hatmaker had to admit after taking in hurricane victims who commented on the extravagance of her family’s upper middle class home. She once considered herself unmotivated by the lure of prosperity, but upon being called “rich” by an undeniably poor child, evidence to the contrary mounted, and a social experiment turned spiritual was born.

7 is the true story of how Jen (along with her husband and her children to varying degrees) took seven months, identified seven areas of excess, and made seven simple choices to fight back against the modern-day diseases of greed, materialism, and overindulgence."

Recommended reading

Thanks for the contributions, all!  It makes an impressive list, all put together:

Non-fiction:
President's Circle
The Other Wes Moore
You're Already Amazing
Organized Simplicity
Flunking Sainthood
A Year of Biblical Womanhood
Seven, Jen Hatmaker
Anything, Jenny Allen
Call the Midwife, Jennifer Worth
The American Plague (yellow fever)
A Jane Austen Education
Impossible Odds, Jessica Buchanan
Amanda Knox memoir (didn't finish)
Christlike Parenting, Glenn Latham


Fiction:
Miss Grimsley's Oxford Career, Carla Kelly
The Maze Runner series, James Dashner
The Great Gatsby
My Brother Michael, Mary Stewart
Decision at Delphi, Helen MacInnes
Saboteur, Dean Hughes
The Great and Terrible series, Chris Stewart
The Distant Hours, Kate Morton
House at Riverton, Kate Morton
Edenbrooke, Julianne Donaldson
The Princess Bride, Wm Goldman
Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson
Beautiful Creatures series, Garcia & Stohl
The Help
Patron Saint of Butterflies, Cecelia Galante
Patron Saint of Lost Dogs, Nick Trout
Austenland, Shannon Hale
Midnight in Austenland
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (not recommended)
The Light Between Oceans, Stedman
The Flavia de Luce series (audio)
The Firebird, The Shadowy Horses, The Winter Sea, Susanna Kearsley
A Countess Below Stairs, Eva Ibbotsen
Finnikin of the Rock, Melina Marchetta
In Search of Heaven, Anita Stansfield
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde


YA/Children's fiction:
Mrs. Pepperpot series (younger children), Alf Proysen 
Hoot, Carl Hiaasen
Palace of Stone, Shannon Hale
Star Girl, Jerry Spinelli
The Mysterious Benedict Society, series
Out of My Mind, Sharon Draper
Percy Jackson series
Matched series, Ally Condie
Pat of Silver Bush & Mistress Pat, LM Montgomery
Dust Girl, Sarah Zettel
Margaret Petersen Haddix, recommended author
Kane Chronicles, Rick Riordan
The Caged Graves, Dianne Salerni
A Tale Dark And Grimm
Book of 1000 Days, Shannon Hale
The Giver, Lois Lowry
The Fault in Our Stars, John Green
The Wretched of Muirwood, Jeff Wheeler
The Little Prince
Little House on the Prairie series
Graceling, Kristin Cashore
Kat, Incorrigible, Stephanie Burgis
Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson

Reading for June

Ashley's choices for June:

Melting Stones by Tamora Pierce

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

April

Here is the reading for April:

Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson (This one is a metaphor about how people relate to change) 

Our Iceberg Is Melting by John Kotter and Holger Rathbgeber (This one is a metaphor about how to effectively gather a team to manage change)

Ubuntu by Stephen Lundin and Bob Nelson (This is a case study of sorts about how to change the attitude(s) within an organization)

Read all three or pick one!

Book Choices for May

Here are Kirsten's book choices for May:

Life of Pi by Yann Martel - Amazon page here

     (There are 25 copies of this at the library, but 50-ish people on the wait list)

 

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach - Amazon here

     (There are 12 copies and only a few are currently checked out)

 

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell - Amazon reviews here

    (The library only has 2 copies, but you can download it from Amazon for free)

 

 

October reading choices

Jillene's choices for October:

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand--a sweet and ironically funny read with charming English characters,
       "In the small village of Edgecombe St. Mary in the English countryside lives Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson’s wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, the Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother’s death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and regarding her as the permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?" (from Amazon.com) 

The Chosen, Chaim Potok -- a heart-rending depiction of the relationship between two Jewish boys and their fathers

Nurture Shock (recommended by others at the August meeting) -- "One of the most influential books about children ever published, Nurture Shock offers a revolutionary new perspective on children that upends a library's worth of conventional wisdom. With impeccable storytelling and razor-sharp analysis, the authors demonstrate that many of modern society's strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring--because key twists in the science have been overlooked. Nothing like a parenting manual, Nurture Shock gets to the core of how we grow, learn and live."