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 2024 PICKS
For fans of Everything I Never Told You and The Mothers, a deeply moving and unflinching debut following a young Vietnamese-Australian woman who returns home to her family in the wake of her brother’s shocking murder, determined to discover what happened.
Fiction
Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own in this explosive, highly praised debut novel, a National Book Award finalist for 2023.
Fiction
Isaac Fitzgerald has lived many lives. He’s been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents’ lives–or so he was told.
Nonfiction
A taut, groundbreaking, and highly acclaimed novel from bestselling and award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, about a writer’s relationship with her larger-than-life mother–and about the very nature of writing, memory, and art.
Fiction
A grand tour through the hidden realms of animal senses that will transform the way you perceive the world –from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes.
Nonfiction
Inspired by her own Iranian-American heritage, acclaimed author Susanne Pari weaves a beautifully crafted story of mothers and daughters, secrets and lies, and defying expectations–even when those choices come with an irrevocable cost.
Fiction
If you’re not having fun, you’re not fully living. The author of How to Break Up with Your Phone makes the case that, far from being frivolous, fun is actually critical to our well-being–and shows us how to have more of it.
Nonfiction
Set in a close-knit suburb in the grip of winter, A Quiet Life follows three people grappling with loss and finding a tender wisdom in their grief.
Fiction
In this “riveting, heartfelt” novel of love and consequences, a woman dreams of becoming a doctor until World War II leads her instead into an astonishing love—and a fateful choice.
Fiction
An incredible, deeply reported story of identical twins Isabella and Hà, born in Viêt Nam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds.
Nonfiction