Book Club Picks, Meetings and Resources
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Book Club Picks
If you’re in need of new selections for your book club, we can help! Our quarterly picks lists below are filled with engaging titles sure to spark lively discussion. For each title, we:
- purchase multiple copies so they’ll be available to book club members
- purchase multiple formats so you can read the way you like best
- commit to keeping the titles for 18 months from the time we pick them so you can plan ahead
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Whatcom READS
Join the 2024 Whatcom READS community discussion by reading Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of A Coast Salish Punk by Sasha taqwšeblu LaPointe with your book group. Then watch for upcoming events starting in Fall 2023 that explore themes from the book.
WINTER 2023 PICKS
In this “fun, page-turner of a novel” that’s perfect for fans of Mostly Dead Things and Goodbye, Vitamin, a morbidly anxious young woman stumbles into a job as a receptionist at a Catholic church and soon finds herself obsessed with her predecessor’s mysterious death.
Fiction
A captivating debut novel about the tangled fates of two best friends and daughters of the Italian mafia, and a coming-of-age story of twentieth-century Brooklyn itself.
Fiction
Told in the intimate voices of unique and endearing characters of all ages, these short stories explore desire and heartache, loss and discovery, moments of jolting violence and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs.
Fiction
An award-winning journalist investigates Amazon’s impact on the wealth and poverty of towns and cities across the United States. “A grounded and expansive examination of the American economic divide.”
Nonfiction
Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection, by the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.
Nonfiction
Eighteen months before her beloved father died, Kathryn Schulz met the woman who would become her wife. Lost & Found weaves together their love story with the story of losing Kathryn’s father in a brilliant exploration of the way families are lost and found and the way life dispenses wretchedness and suffering, beauty and grandeur all at once.
Fiction
In her first book since Fates and Furies, author Lauren Groff fashions a boldly original narrative based on the life and legend of 12th-century poet Marie de France. After Marie is banished to a poverty-stricken British abbey by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine at age 17 in 1158, she transforms from a reluctant prioress into an avid abbess.
Fiction
Sister Outsider presents essential writings of black poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, an influential voice in 20th century literature. In this varied collection of essays, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change.
Nonfiction
Ray McMillian is a Black classical musician on the rise–undeterred by the pressure and prejudice of the classical music world–when a shocking theft sends him on a desperate quest to recover his great-great-grandfather’s heirloom violin on the eve of the most prestigious musical competition in the world.
Fiction
Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad is a tender drama for our times, featuring two children on the run from authorities on the serene Greek island of Kos.
Fiction