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 2023 Whatcom READS community discussion by reading The Cold Millions by Jess Walter with your book group. Then watch for upcoming events starting in Fall 2022 that explore themes from the book.
SPRING 2022 PICKS
In 1939, a new librarian takes a new job at the American Library in Paris. Then the Nazis invade. A testament to courage under fire and an honest exploration of complex friendships.
Fiction
A fresh and fantastical retelling of The Great Gatsby from socialite Jordan Baker’s perspective. Nghi Vo’s version keeps the dazzle of Fitzgerald’s original but tangles race, magic, sexuality and class to create a wholly new, nuanced society.
Fiction
It’s Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico when Amadeo Padilla’s fifteen-year-old daughter Angel comes back home, pregnant. The Five Wounds spans her baby’s first year of life as five generations of the Padilla family converge. Vivid, tender, and funny.
Fiction
An unnamed narrator wanders alone through the Italian city she calls home. Originally published in Italian and translated to English by the author, Whereabouts revisits Lahiri’s fascination with identity, alienation, and belonging.
Fiction
Flora has been happily married for over twenty years. But when she stumbles upon an envelope containing her husband’s wedding band–the one he claimed he lost in a pond years ago–she starts to question everything about her life. A warm novel about the bonds of marriage and friendship.
Fiction
Daniel Lieberman tells the uniquely human story of how we never evolved to exercise–to do voluntary activity for the sake of health–but became obsessed with it anyway. Entertaining and readable, Exercised makes sense of all the conflicting, anxiety-inducing myths we have about how to move.
Nonfiction
After his family flees fundamentalist Pakistan and lands in California, Anvar decides he’s tired of being a Good Muslim–that’s his brother’s job. A funny and surprising debut novel about family and religious stereotypes.
Fiction
As an immigrant kid in 1970s Pennsylvania, Phuc Tran finds a sense of belonging in punk music, skater culture, and classic English literature. A funny and powerful coming-of-age memoir, as well as a fresh perspective on the occupation of Vietnam.
Nonfiction
A poetic memoir about what it means to grow up as an indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author’s experiences with guns. From hunting with her father to threats of violence at Standing Rock, Jensen paints a complicated personal and cultural history.
Nonfiction
A moving story about one teenager’s experience with coerced adoption in the 1960s. American Baby exposes an industry built on lies, greed, racism, sexism, and a stunning amount of medical malpractice.
Nonfiction
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