Second Thursday Book Club

January 12

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

This heartwarming tale is delivered from a dog's eye point of view.  The dog's owner, Denny Swift, a down-on-his-luck race car driver, is trying to create a career for himself on the professional circuit.  The two cross paths fro the first time on a farm on the outskirts of Seattle and become inseparable.  Smart, loyal, and long-suffering (all the things a good drog should be!), Enzo bears wtiness to the milestones in Denny's life, including his marriage to Eve and the birth of their daughter, Zoë.

A Cup of Light by Nicole Mones

Lia Frank, a specialist in Chinese porcelain for a Sotheby's-like art dealer called Hastings, flies to Beijing to appraise a cache of some twenty porcelain pots secretly offered for sale, only to find out there are close to eight-hundred pots of unsurpassed beauty.  Given the value of the collection, it is Lia's job to ensure that the collection is authentic and not a fraud.  The author of Lost in Translation returns with this new novel that pairs conventional romance with unconventional and intriguing art world mystery.

Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Greg Boyle

In this artful, disquieting, yet surprisingly jubilant memoir, Jesuit priest Greg Boyle recounts his two decades of working in Los Angeles County, which contains 1,100 gans with nearly 86,000 members.  Boyle's Homeboy Industries is the largest gang intervention program in the country, offering job training, tattoo removal, and employment to members of enemy gangs.  Effectively straddling the debate regarding where the responsibility for urban violence lies, Boyle both recounts the despair of watching the kids you love cooperate in their own demise and levels the challenge to readers to stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.

In the Garden of Beasts: love, terror, and an American family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson

Explore a vivid portrait of Berlin during the first years of Hitler's regime brought to life through the stories of two people: William E. Dodd, who became America's first ambassador to Hitler's regime in 1933, and his scandalously carefree daughter, Martha.  Both were players in the exhilirating (and terrifying) story of Hitler's obsession for absolute power, which culminates in the events of one murderous night, later known as "The Night of the Long Knives."  The rise of Nazi Germany is a well-chronicled time in history, which makes In the Garden of Beasts all the more remarkable.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Sixty-eight year-old Major Ernest Pettigrew has settled into a genteel life of quiet retirement in his beloved village of Edgecombe St. Mary.  He is refined, gentlemanly, unwaveringly proper in his sense of right and wrong and amused by most things modern.  Major Pettigrew is mourning the loss of his younger brother Bertie and attempting to get his hands on Bertie's antique Churchill shotgun - one of a pair the boys' father split between them.  Bertie's widow doesn't want to hand the shotgun over.  The embattled hero discovers an unexpected ally and source of consolation in his neighbor, the Pakistani shopkeeper Jasmina Ali.  On the surface, Pettigrew and Ali's backgrounds and life experiences couldn't be more different, but they discover that they have the most important things in common.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Pharmaceutical researcher Dr. Marina Singh sets off into the Amazon jungle to find the remains and effects of a colleague who recently died under somewhat mysterious circumstances. But first she must locate Dr. Anneck Swenson, a renowned gynecologist who has spent years looking at the reproductive habits of a local tribe where women can conceive well into their middle ages and beyond. Eccentric and notoriously tough, Swenson is paid to find the key to this longstanding childbearing ability by the same company for which Dr. Singh works. Yet that isn't their only connection: both have an overlapping professional past that Dr. Singh has long tried to forget.

Mink River by Brian Doyle

Worried Man and Cedar are the entire Department of Public Works for Neawanka, a small Oregon coastal town at the mouth of the Mink River.  Beyond fixing potholes, they make the Oral History Project their mission.  Award-winning essayist Doyle writes with an inventive and seductive style that echoes that of ancient storytellers in a lyrical mix of natural history, poetry, and Salish and Celtic lore that offers crime, heartache, celebration, healing, and death.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

Most of us know or think we know who Ernest Hemingway was: a brilliant writer full of macho swagger driven to take on huge feats of bravery and a pitcher or two of martinis - before lunch.  But beneath this man or myth, or some combination of the two, is another Hemingway, one we've never seen before.  Hadley Richardson, Hemingway's first wife, is the perfect person to reveal him to us - and to immerse us in the incredibly exciting and volatile world of Jazz-age Paris.

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

Discover the person behind the historical myth and seductive veil of Hollywood.  Coming forward from the pageantry of a biased history, this biography uncovers a woman who was far more complex than her few chroniclers would admit or her legend allows.  Schiff's Cleopatra is brutal and cunning, well able to hold her own in the shifting and dangerous political waters that routinely consumed men of great talent and power; a brilliant diplomat, focused on building her empire and making her claim.

The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb by Melanie Benjamin

"Never would I allow my size to define me. Instead, I would define it." She was only two-foot eight-inches tall, but her legend reaches out to us more than a century later. As a child, Mercy Lavinia "Vinnie" Bump was encouraged to live a life hidden away from the public. Instead, she reached out to the immortal impresario P. T. Barnum, married the tiny superstar General Tom Thumb in the wedding of the century, and transformed into the world's most unexpected celebrity. Her plucky nature, intelligence, grace and maturity were a shock to many who saw her, who imagined her to be a tiny doll - but she proved to be anything but doll-like in life.

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

When we first encounter Victoria, it's the day of her empancipation from foster care, her eighteenth birthday.  "Emancipation" couldn't be a more ironic word for that moment.  For Victoria, as for most foster care survivors, freedom really means free fall.  She has nowhere to go, no resources, no one who cares about her.  Victoria ends up sleeping in a public park, tending a garden of pilfered blossoms, and living on her wits.  It's only when a local florist sees Victoria's special way with flowers that she is given a means to survive.  But survival is just the beginning.  The heartbreaking question is will Victoria let herself love and be loved?

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

Enroute to a rural orphanage in the borderlands of the Balkans, where emotions about the war are still raw, a young doctor named Natalia gets the sudden, sad news that her grandfather, a well-respected doctor, has passed away.  That he died far from home, in a village that appears on no map, raises several questions, in spite of the fact that the old man had been suffering from cancer.  Her grandmother asks Natalia to retrieve a packet of his belongings: as Natalia travels deeper into the fraught landscape, she unravels the meaning of the two central stories running "like secret rivers through all the other stories of her grandfather's life" - the story of his repeated meetings with the deathless man and the story of his experience with the tiger's wife.