Books About Books
Centered on Reading Groups
Five neighbors in a small town in Minnesota form the Freesia Court Book Club, unofficially known to their husbands as Angry Wives Eating Bon Bons. Over the next thirty years the women share coffee, desserts, shoulders to cry on and lots of laughter.
In this tribute to friendship, six women gather monthly in Manhattan to share their love of books. As they discuss their favorite books they also reveal their lives to each other. They offer each other emotional support and learn to understand and forgive each other’s weaknesses.
Six Californians, five women and one lone man, meet monthly to discuss the six novels of Jane Austen. As time and the discussions progress, their lives go through many upheavals and changes. Their individual views of Austen’s books are colored by their own lives and personalities.
Seeking conversation, a good book and a glass of wine, five English women meet regularly to read and discuss books. Over the course of a year they find themselves changed and bonded together as they face a number of crises in their lives. “Fast paced and funny,” says Library Journal.
From our Fiction Shelves
Narrated by Death, we learn the story of Liesel, a German foster child living in a small town in Nazi Germany. Liesel’s book stealing, reading and storytelling help her family, the Jewish man they are hiding, and their neighbors cope with the terrors of World War II. Yes, it’s from the Young Adult collection; try it anyway.
In Poland Leo Gursky falls in love and writes a book; flees the Nazis and moves to New York. In the process he loses the love and the book. Now sixty years later Leo meets Alma, a fourteen-year-old who was named for a character in his book, who is writing her own book and worrying about her isolated, bookish mother and her obsessive younger brother.
In postwar Germany, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg falls ill on his way home from school and is rescued and nursed by Hanna, a woman twice his age. They eventually become lovers, and as an important part of their developing relationship the schoolboy reads aloud to Hanna. Years later, as a law student, Michael sees Hanna again. She is on trial and refuses to defend her innocence. An Oprah Book Club selection.
Mysteries and Suspense
Cliff Janeway Mystery series
John Dunning
Cliff Janeway, a Denver cop turned rare book dealer, is a smart, likable tough guy. This series is darker, more pessimistic in tone and more violent than might be expected given the antiquarian book background of the series. Those new to the series should start with the first in the series, Booked to Die. It isn’t necessary to read the books in order, but the first book sets the stage for the rest of the series.
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Murder by the Book: Literary Mysteries from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
A collection of twenty short stories all focusing on crime writers, libraries, book collectors and literary characters. Among the included authors are Bill Pronzini, Ruth Rendell, Dorothy Sayers, and James Thurber.
In 1945 Barcelona, Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books. He enjoys it so much, that he wants to read other books by the author. He discovers, to his amazement, that someone is destroying every single copy of every book the author has ever written. He has innocently stumbled onto a dangerous secret of murder, magic, madness and doomed love.
Thursday Next series
Fforde, Jasper
British Special Operations literary detective, Thursday Next, is a literary detective in an alternative England where literature is taken seriously. Witty and humorous, the series is filled with numerous references to literature. The series begins with The Eyre Affair (2002), and readers should start here.
…and One Classic Science Fiction Novel
In the twenty-fourth century the job of “firemen” is to burn books. One day one of the book burners discovers the value of books and secretly begins to read them.
BF/6-07