Book Club in a Bag
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Each book club kit consists of a cloth bag containing 10 copies of a book, plus a Study Guide with background information about the book and the author and possible discussion questions. Also included are tips and resources for making your book club and its discussions even better. Book Club in
a Bag titles How to Check Out a Book Club in a Bag
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If you have ideas for new Book Club
in a Bag titles, please let us know! (Titles must be available
in paperback.) Email your suggestions to webmail@duluth.lib.mn.us |
Book Club in a Bag Titles:
Try our printer-friendly list of titles and authors to take to your book group meetings.
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The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore, walked into his mother's grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married. Check the Library Catalog |
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And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie First, there were ten--a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal--and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. And only the dead are above suspicion. Check the Library Catalog |
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Angry Housewives Eating
Bon Bons by Lorna Landvik From the initial formation of The Freesia Court Book Club and over the course of the next thirty years, five women in small-town Minnesota share the events, triumphs, tragedies, hardships, joys, and sorrows of their lives. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Box Children by Sharon Wyse This is the story of a twelve-year-old girl living on a Texas wheat farm. Her only friends are the Box Children, five tiny dolls she has named after her lost siblings: babies her mother has miscarried. This summer, Lou Ann's mother is pregnant again, but Lou Ann can already sense that something is wrong. As her mother's grasp on reality slips away, she must rely on her own wit and courage to make sense of adolescence. Check the Library Catalog |
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Originally published in 1932, Huxley's terrifying vision of a controlled and emotionless future "Utopian" society is truly startling in its prediction of modern scientific and cultural phenomena, including test-tube babies and rampant drug abuse. Check the Library Catalog |
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Bread Alone by Judith Hendricks When her husband leaves her for another woman, Wynter Morrison moves to Seattle to start a new life and pursues her passion for breadmaking by accepting a position in a local bake shop, where she discovers the extraordinary healing power of making bread. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Cape Ann by Faith Sullivan Prior to World War II, the Erhardts live in a storage room adjacent to the depot, but Lark's growing makes the room too small, and they have no money, because of Lark's father's drinking and gambling, to purchase a house. Check the Library Catalog |
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Confessions of an Ugly
Stepsister by Gregory Maguire Set against the rich backdrop of seventeenth-century Holland, this provocative version of the Cinderella tale tells the story of Iris, an unlikely heroine who finds herself swept from the lowly streets of Haarlem to a strange world of wealth, artifice, and ambition. Her path quickly becomes intertwined with that of Clara, the mysterious and unnaturally beautiful girl destined to become her sister. Far more than a mere fairy-tale, this is a novel of beauty and betrayal, illusion and understanding, reminding us that deception can be unearthed--and love unveiled--in the most unexpected of places. Check the Library Catalog |
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Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother. Check the Library Catalog |
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Devil in the White City by Eric Larson
A gripping tale about two men -- one a creative genius, the other a mass murderer -- who turned the 1893 Chicago World's Fair into their playground. Set against the dazzle of a dream city whose technological marvels presaged the coming century, this real-life drama of good and evil unfolds with all the narrative tension of a fictional thriller. Check the Library Catalog |
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Eat Cake by Jeanne Ray Ruth loves to bake cakes. If there is a crisis, she bakes a cake; if there is a reason to celebrate, she bakes a cake. Ruth sees it as an outward manifestation of an inner need to nurture her family, which is a good thing when suddenly that family rapidly expands to include her estranged parents, two teenagers and a gainfully employed husband who is suddenly without a job. Check the Library Catalog |
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Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert Plagued with despair after a nasty divorce, the author, in her early 30s, divides a year equally among three dissimilar countries, exploring her competing urges for earthly delights and divine transcendence. First, pleasure: savoring Italy's buffet of delights--the world's best pizza, free-flowing wine and dashing conversation partners. Then, prayer and ascetic rigor: seeking communion with the divine at a sacred ashram in India, Gilbert emulates the ways of yogis in grueling hours of meditation, struggling to still her churning mind. Finally, a balancing act in Bali, where Gilbert tries for equipoise "betwixt and between" realms, studies with a merry medicine man and plunges into a charged love affair. Sustaining a chatty, conspiratorial tone, Gilbert fully engages readers in the year's cultural and emotional tapestry. Check the Library Catalog |
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Emma
by Jane Austen
Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances' love affairs. Her plans for the matrimonial success of her new friend Harriet, however, lead her into complications that ultimately test her own detachment from the world of romance. Check the Library Catalog |
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Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris A sensual novel follows a woman as she returns to the French village where she lived as a girl during the German occupation. Check the Library Catalog |
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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley A monster assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator. Includes illustrated notes throughout the text explaining the historical background of the story. Duluth's One Book, One Community selection for 2005. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Friday Night Knitting
Club by Kate Jacobs Gathering for their weekly knitting club at a small yarn shop on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a group of friends shares such challenges as raising children, navigating the ups and downs of their careers, and pursuing uncertain relationships. Check the Library Catalog |
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Good Grief by Lolly Winston
Grieving over the death of her husband from cancer, thirty-six-year-old Sophie Stanton finds her personal and professional world in a shambles and, in an attempt to reinvent her life, moves to Ashland, Oregon. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald A dashing, enigmatic millionaire is obsessed with an elusive, spoiled young woman. Duluth's One Book, One Community selection for 2006. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Guernsey Literary and
Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary
Ann Shaffer In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation.. Check the Library Catalog |
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In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien John and Kathy Wade, whose marriage has been built on mutual deception, visit a Minnesota lake to try to sort things out, a difficult process made more so by Kathy's sudden disappearence. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan Encompassing two generations and a rich blend of Chinese and American history, the story of four struggling, strong women also reveals their daughter's memories and feelings. Duluth's One Book, One Community selection for 2007. Check the Library Catalog |
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Keeping the House by Ellen Baker
Lonely, restless, and bored with her life as a housewife in 1950s Pine Rapids, Wisconsin, Dolly Magnuson becomes fascinated by the abandoned grand old house on the hill overlooking the town and sets out to unravel the dark secrets of the family that had once owned it. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini The unforgettable, beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household, Amir and Hassan nonetheless grow up in different worlds: one the son of a prominent and wealthy man, the other, the son of a servant, is a member of a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Lady and the Unicorn
by Tracy Chevalier. Interweaves historical fact with fiction to explore the mystery behind the creation of the remarkable Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, woven at the end of the fifteenth century, which today hang in the Cluny Museum in Paris. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Last Report on the
Miracles at Little No Horse by
Louise Erdrich As a priest nears the end of his life, he is asked to prove or disprove the sainthood of a woman he knows well and struggles to guard his own secret identity in the process. Check the Library Catalog |
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Life of Pi by Yann Martel Possessing encyclopedia-like intelligence, unusual zookeeper's son Pi Patel sets sail for America, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a life boat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain. Check the Library Catalog |
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Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
A fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd Wright's first marriage. Despite the title, this is not a romance, but a portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with the restrictions of the early 20th century. Frank and Mamah, both married and with children, met when Mamah's husband, Edwin, commissioned Frank to design a house. Their affair became the stuff of headlines when they left their families to live and travel together, going first to Germany, where Mamah found rewarding work doing scholarly translations of Swedish feminist Ellen Key's books. Frank and Mamah eventually settled in Wisconsin, where they were hounded by a scandal-hungry press, with tragic repercussions. Check the Library Catalog |
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Marley & Me by John Grogan
The heartwarming and unforgettable story of a family in the making and the wondrously neurotic dog who taught them what really matters in life. John and Jenny brought home Marley, a wiggly yellow furball of a puppy. Life would never be the same. Marley quickly grew into a barreling, ninety-seven-pound streamroller of a Labrador retriever. He crashed through screen doors, gouged through drywall, flung drool on guests, stole women's undergarments, and ate nearly everything he could get his mouth around, including couches and fine jewelry. Through it all, he remained steadfast, a model of devotion, even when his family was at its wit's end. Unconditional love, they would learn, comes in many forms. Is it possible for humans to discover the key to happiness through a bigger-than-life, bad-boy dog? Just ask the Grogans. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox
Convinced that he is destined for great wealth, power, and influence, Edward Glyver will do anything to reclaim a prize that is rightfully his, including a showdown with his rival, poet-criminal Phoebus Rainsford Daunt. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Memory Keeper's
Daughter by Kim Edwards |
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Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich Reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way the nation perceives its working poor. Check the Library Catalog |
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Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge. Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens -- until the day its complacency is shattered by a shocking act of violence. In the aftermath, the town's residents must not only seek justice in order to begin healing but also come to terms with the role they played in the tragedy. For them, the lines between truth and fiction, right and wrong, insider and outsider have been obscured forever. Check the Library Catalog |
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The No. 1 Ladies Detective
Agency by Alexander McCall Smith Precious Ramotswe has opened Botswana's first and only detective agency staffed by women. Check the Library Catalog |
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Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
Through the voice of 11-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy obsessed with cowboys living in 1960s Minnesota, the story is told of the Land family's cross-country search for Reuben's outlaw older brother, who has been charged with murder. Check the Library Catalog |
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Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Dorian Gray, a remarkably handsome young man, meets Lord Henry Wotton and is corrupted into a life of terrible evil that is reflected only in his portrait. Check the Library Catalog |
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Plainsong by Kent Haruf A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver. From unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together -- their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. Check the Library Catalog |
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Population 485: Meeting
Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time
by Michael Perry
Here the local vigilante is a farmer's wife armed with a pistol and a Bible, the most senior member of the volunteer fire department is a cross-eyed butcher with one kidney and two ex-wives (both of whom work at the only gas station in town), and the back roads are haunted by the ghosts of children and farmers. Michael Perry grew up here, and now -- after a decade away -- he has returned. Unable to polka or repair his own pickup, his farm-boy hands gone soft after years of writing, Mike figures the best way to regain his credibility is to join the volunteer fire department. Against a backdrop of fires and tangled wrecks, bar fights and smelt feeds, he tells a frequently comic tale leavened with moments of heartbreaking delicacy and searing tragedy. Duluth's One Book, One Community selection for 2009. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Quilter's Apprentice by Jennifer Chiaverini After moving with her husband, Matt, to a small college town, Sarah McClure struggles to find a fulfilling job. In the meantime, she agrees to help seventy-five-year-old Sylvia Compson prepare her family estate, Elm Creek Manor, for sale. As part of her compensation, Sarah is taught how to quilt by this cantankerous elderly woman, who is a master of the craft. Check the Library Catalog |
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Reading Lolita in Tehran
by Azar Nafisi. This is the story of Azar Nafisi's dream, and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, a small circle of seven young women gathered together every Thursday in secret at her home to read and discuss great books of Western literature. At first they were suspicious of one another, reticent and afraid to speak their minds. But soon they began to share their dreams and disappointments, as their stories entwined with those they were reading: The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Lolita -- their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis A classic satire on human weakness features Screwtape, an elderly devil, who writes a series of letters to Wormwood, his apprentice and nephew. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd After her "stand-in mother," a bold black woman named Rosaleen, insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens joins Rosaleen on a journey to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters. Check the Library Catalog |
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Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand Seabiscuit was an unlikely champion: a roughhewn, undersized horse with a sad little tail and knees that wouldn't straighten all the way. But, thanks to the efforts of three men, Seabiscuit became one of the most spectacular performers in sports history. The rags-to-riches horse emerged as an American cultural icon, drawing an immense following and becoming the single biggest newsmaker of 1938 -- receiving more coverage than FDR or Hitler. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon Barcelona, 1945 - Just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes one day to find that he can no longer remember his mother's face. To console his only child, Daniel's widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona's guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel's father coaxes him to choose a book from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the book he selects, a novel called The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax's work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. Check the Library Catalog |
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The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield When her health begins failing, the mysterious author Vida Winter decides to let Margaret Lea, a biographer, write the truth about her life, but Margaret needs to verify the facts since Vida has a history of telling outlandish tales. Check the Library Catalog |
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Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson One man's campaign to build schools in the most dangerous, remote, and anti-American reaches of Asia: in 1993, Greg Mortenson was an American mountain-climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of a Pakistani village, he promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time-- Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban. In a region where Americans are often feared and hated, he has survived kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. But his success speaks for itself-- at last count, his Central Asia Institute had built fifty-five schools. Duluth's One Book, One Community selection for 2008. Check the Library Catalog |
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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Scout's father defends a black man accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town during the 1930s. Duluth's One Book, One Community selection for 2002. Check the Library Catalog |
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. A young girl in a shabby neighborhood lives with dreams in an innocent time before the war. Check the Library Catalog |
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Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach In Amsterdam in the 1630s, a young wife escapes her stifling marriage to an older man into the arms of the artist who is hired to paint their portrait. Check the Library Catalog |
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A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks A nostalgic look back at the 1950s in a story of first love set in a small North Carolina town. Check the Library Catalog |
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Widow for One Year by John Irving Chronicles the life of a complex, abrasive woman born in the shadow of her siblings' deaths and her parents' adultery, who only finds love after motherhood and widowhood. Check the Library Catalog |
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Will to Murder: The True
Story Behind the Crimes & Trials Surrounding the Glensheen
Murders by Gail Feichtinger On June 27, 1977, an intruder entered a stately manor built along the Lake Superior shore. Before leaving with a basketful of stolen jewelry, the intruder used a satin pillow to smother Elisabeth Congdon, after killing the heiress's valiant nurse, Velma Pietila, by beating her with a candlestick -- crimes set in motion by a hastily hand-written will penned just days before the killings. For the first time the story of the Glensheen mansion killings and the crimes and trials surrounding Marjorie Caldwell Hagen, Elisabeth Congdon's notorious adopted daughter, is told. Check the Library Catalog |
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Women of the Silk by Gail Tsukiyama.
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Wonder When You'll Miss
Me by Amanda Davis. Losing a considerable amount of weight in her attempt to commit suicide, sixteen-year-old Faith Duckle returns to the school where she had been tormented, haunted by painful memories and working to exact retribution from those who hurt her. Check the Library Catalog |
The Book Club in a Bag project was begun with a generous gift from the Friends of the Duluth Public Library.
