Book Discussion Groups

Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra

A footstep on the stairs. A second to react. What happens next will determine everything.

Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs.

She sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway, shrouded in the shadows. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender.

In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm, to plan. Should she search for a weapon or attempt escape? But then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is—and what he wants. – Amazon

June 8 – Murder by Degrees by Ritu Mukerji

What have you been reading? There are so many books out there! It’s time to share. You’ll have a chance to talk about your recent read…good, bad, or mediocre.

The Examiner by Janice Hallett

Gela Nathaniel, head of Royal Hastings University’s new Multimedia Art course, must find six students from all walks of life across the United Kingdom for her new master’s program before the university cuts her funding. The students are nothing but trouble from day one.

There’s Jem, a talented sculptor recently graduated from her university program and eager to make her mark as an artist at any cost. Jonathan, who has little experience aside from running his family’s gallery. Patrick manages an art supply store, but can barely operate his phone, much less design software. Ludya is a single mother and graphic designer more interested in a paycheck than homework. Cameron is a marketing executive in search of a hobby or a career change. And Alyson, already a successful artist, seems to be overqualified.

When the examiner, the man hired to grade students’ final works sifts through the students’ final essays, texts, and message boards, he becomes convinced that someone is in danger…or already dead.  – Amazon

June 10  –  Alchemy of Flowers by Laura Resau

The Five Wishes of Mr. Murray McBride by Joe Siple

With all his family and friends gone except an estranged grandson, retired Major League ballplayer Murray McBride is looking for a reason to live. He finds it in Jason Cashman, a spirited 10-year-old boy with a terminal heart defect and a list of five things he wants to do before he dies. Murray is determined to help Jason fulfill his dreams. Together, they race against the limited time each has left, ticking off Jason’s wishes one by one. Along the way, Murray remembers what it’s like to be young, and Jason fights for the opportunity to grow old. But when tragedy strikes, their worlds are turned upside-down, and an unexpected gift is the only thing that can make Jason’s final wish come true. – Amazon

June 16 – The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

The Neighbor Favor by Kristina Forest

Shy, bookish, and admittedly awkward, Lily Greene has always felt inadequate compared to the rest of her accomplished family, who strive for Black excellence. She dreams of becoming a children’s books editor, but she’s been frustratingly stuck in the nonfiction division for years without a promotion in sight. Lily finds escapism in her correspondences with her favorite fantasy author, and what begins as two lonely people connecting over email turns into a tentative friendship and possibly something else Lily won’t let herself entertain—until he ghosts her without a word.

Months later, Lily is still crushed, but she’s determined to get a hold of her life, starting with finding a date to her sister’s wedding. And the perfect person to help her is Nick Brown, her charming, attractive new neighbor, who she feels drawn to for reasons she can’t explain. But little does she know, Nick is an author—her favorite fantasy author.

Nick, who has his reasons for using a pen name and pushing people away, soon realizes that the beautiful, quiet girl from down the hall is the same Lily he fell in love with over email months ago. Unwilling to complicate things even more between them, he agrees to set her up with someone else, though this simple favor between two neighbors is anything but—not when he can’t get her off his mind…  – Amazon

June 17 – Hedging Your Bets by Jayne Denker

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Evreyday Life by Steven Pinker

Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.

But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room.

Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Artists and humorists have long mined the intrigues of common knowledge, and Pinker liberally uses their novels, jokes, cartoons, films, and sitcom dialogues to illuminate social life’s tragedies and comedies. Along the way he answers questions like:

-Why do people hoard toilet paper at the first sign of an emergency?
-Why are Super Bowl ads dominated by crypto?
-Why, in American presidential primary voting, do citizens typically select the candidate they believe is preferred by others rather than their favorite?
-Why did Russian authorities arrest a protester who carried a blank sign?
-Why is it so hard for nervous lovers to say goodbye at the end of a phone call?
-Why does everyone agree that if we were completely honest all the time, life would be unbearable? – Amazon

June 25 – By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice by Rebecca Nagle

The Darling Dahlia’s and the Red Hot Poker by Susan Wittig Albert

It’s Labor Day weekend, 1935, and members of the Darling Dahlias—the garden club in little Darling, Alabama—are trying to keep their cool at the end of a sizzling summer. This isn’t easy, though, since there’s a firebug on the loose in Darling. He—or she!—strikes without apparent rhyme or reason, and things have gotten to the point where nobody feels safe. What’s more, a dangerous hurricane is poised to hurl itself in Darling’s direction, while a hurricane of a different sort is making a whirlwind campaign stop: the much-loved-much-hated senator from Louisiana, Huey P. Long, whom President Roosevelt calls the “most dangerous man in America.” Add Ophelia Snow’s secret heartthrob, Liz Lacy’s Yankee lover, and the Magnolia Ladies’ garden of red hot pokers, fire-red salvia, and hot pink cosmos, and you have a volatile mix that might just burst into flames at any moment.   – Amazon

July 1 – TBA

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

July 2 – Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by John Grisham

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.   – Amazon

January 8 – Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson