August 2010

Bookfix @ Scooter's Coffeehouse - The Legends
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
10:00 am, Scooter's Coffeehouse, The Legends
The remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course.

Inspirational Book Club
June Bug by Chris Fabry
7 pm, West Wyandotte Library
When nine-year-old June Bug sees an artist's rendition of herself on a missing child poster, she begins questioning her dad about their vagabond life. Now Johnson, little June Bug's father, must face his past as a series of unexpected media events forces his hand and reroutes his life.

Stranger Than Fiction: A Reading Group
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
12:30 pm, Scooter's Coffeehouse, The Legends
The first Americans in space--Yeager, Conrad, Grissom, and Glenn--battle the Russians for control of the heavens and put their lives on the line to demonstrate a quality beyond courage.

Common Grounds Book Group
Unaccustomed Earth, short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
1 pm, Café 625, Main Library
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lahiri delivers eight dazzling stories that take readers from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life.

In Case You Missed It Book Club
Neuromancer by William Gibson
10:30 am, Books-A-Million, The Legends
With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same. Case, a burned out computer whiz, is asked to steal a security code that is locked in the most heavily guarded databank in the solar system.

September 2010

Bookfix @ Scooter's Coffeehouse - The Legends
Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis
10:00 am, Scooter's Coffeehouse, The Legends
Charles Schulz, the most widely syndicated cartoonist of all time, is also one of the most misunderstood figures in American culture. Michaelis contrasts the private man with his central role in shaping the national imagination.

Inspirational Book Club
The Eleventh Guest by Brock & Bodie Theone
7 pm, West Wyandotte Library
The lepers in the valley of Mak’ob hear the rumors that a miracle worker is walking the earth. Ten lepers are chosen to leave the valley to search for this healer, knowing that outside the valley lies certain death. Will they find him in time? Could this healer be the Messiah they long for?

Stranger Than Fiction: A Reading Group
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
12:30 pm, Scooter's Coffeehouse, The Legends
Most war correspondents observe wars and then tell stories about the battles, the soldiers and the civilians. George Orwell--novelist, journalist, sometime socialist--actually traded his press pass for a uniform and fought against Franco's Fascists in the Spanish Civil War during 1936 and 1937.

Reader's Corner Book Club
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquéz
1 pm, YWCA Corner Coffee Café
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina chooses to marry a wealthy doctor, Florentino whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet reserves his heart for Fermina. When her husband dies, Florentino attends the funeral to declare his undying love after fifty years, nine months, and four days.

In Case You Missed It Book Club
White Noise by Don DeLillo
10:30 am, Books-A-Million, The Legends
DeLillo's White Noise captures the particular strangeness of life in a time where humankind has finally learned enough to kill itself.

October 2010

Bookfix @ Scooter's Coffeehouse - The Legends
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
10:00 am, Scooter's Coffeehouse, The Legends
The story of Janie Crawford, a proud and independent black woman, who comes of age expecting better treatment than what she gets from her three husbands and community.

Inspirational Book Club
The Frontiersman's Daughter by Laura Frantz
7 pm, Main Library
Lovely and high-spirited, Lael Click is the daughter of a celebrated frontiersman. Haunted by her father's ties to the Shawnee Indians and her family's past, Lael draws strength from the rugged land as she comes of age in the fragile Kentucky settlement her father founded. But the arrival of a handsome doctor threatens her view of her world.

Stranger Than Fiction: A Reading Group
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
12:30 pm, Scooter's Coffeehouse, The Legends
Roach perfectly balances her skepticism and her curiosity with a sincere desire to know. She goes to school to learn to be a medium, subjects her brain to electromagnetic waves to see if they induce the experience of seeing ghosts and joins a group trying to record sounds made by the spirits of the Donner party.

Reader's Corner Book Club
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
United We Read 2010
1 pm, YWCA Corner Coffee Café
The only two students of Asian descent at their school, Chinese-American Henry and Japanese-American Keiko quickly strike up a friendship that turns to love. Their lives are complicated: by war, and by Henry's father's ill regard for the Japanese. When Keiko's family is sent to an internment camp, time and tragedy separate her from Henry.

In Case You Missed It Book Club
The Exorcist by Peter Blatty
10:30 am, Books-A-Million, The Legends
Blatty fictionalized the true story of a child's demonic possession in the 1940s. The deceptively simple story focuses on Regan, the 11-year-old daughter of a movie actress residing in Washington, D.C.; the child apparently is possessed by an ancient demon.

November 2010

Bookfix @ Scooter's Coffeehouse - The Legends
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Steven Chbosky
10:00 am, Scooter's Coffeehouse, The Legends
Charlie, the wallflower of the title, endures a friend's suicide and other teenaged angst during his 10th grade year in this coming-of-age novel set in western Pennsylvania in 1991.

Inspirational Book Club
Snow Melts in Spring by Deborah Vogts
7 pm, West Wyandotte Library
Mattie Evans, a young veterinarian in rural Kansas, saves a horse injured in a terrible accident. But she also finds herself tending the wounded relationship between a prodigal son and his ailing father.

Stranger Than Fiction: A Reading Group
Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science by Richard Preston
12:30 pm, Scooter's Coffeehouse, The Legends
Preston gets to the heart of these nonfiction essays by placing himself in the center of the story. The "panic" of the book's title refers to his own when his biohazard suit was breached and he feared he may have been exposed to one of the deadliest known viruses.

Common Grounds Book Group
Little Bee by Chris Cleave
1 pm, Café 625, Main Library
From the author of the international bestseller Incendiary, comes a haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers--one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.

In Case You Missed It Book Club
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
10:30 am, Books-A-Million, The Legends
Published in 1951, this influential story details the two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield after he has been expelled from prep school. Confused and disillusioned, he searches for truth and rails against the "phoniness" of the adult world.

December 2010

Bookfix @ Scooter's Coffeehouse - The Legends
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
10:00 am, Scooter's Coffeehouse, The Legends
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger.

Inspirational Book Club
Dear and Glorious Physician by Taylor Caldwell
7 pm, West Wyandotte Library
Lucanus grew up in the household of the Roman govenor of Antioch. He became a physician and traveled throughout the Mediterranean region healing the sick. After learning of the life and death of Christ, Lucanus visited all the places where Jesus had been, questioning everyone before writing the Gospel according to St. Luke.

Stranger Than Fiction: A Reading Group
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
12:30 pm, Scooter's Coffeehouse, The Legends
In 1925, renowned British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett embarked on a much publicized search to find the city of Z, site of an ancient Amazonian civilization that may or may not have existed. Fawcett, along with his grown son Jack, never returned, but that didn't stop countless others, including actors, college professors and well-funded explorers from venturing into the jungle to find Fawcett or the city.

In Case You Missed It Book Club
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
10:30 am, Books-A-Million, The Legends
First novelist Zadie Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light. She also has an impressive geographical range, guiding the reader from Jamaica to Turkey to Bangladesh and back again.