Attention Book Groups!

Portage District Library now has updated its Book Discussions in a Bag title list. In each bag you will find ten copies of a book title, an author bio with book reviews, discussion questions, and further reading when available, all ready for you to sign out to your book group members and plunge into a rousing discussion.

 Book Discussion in a Bag kits may be checked out at the Adult Information Desk for two months. No more than one kit at a time may be checked out to an individual. Kits may not be reserved nor renewed. Borrowers will be charged $1.00 a day for an overdue kit. The entire kit must be returned on the due date. The person who checks out a Book Discussion in a Bag kit is financially responsible for returning the entire kit. Kits include a signup sheet to help borrowers keep track of the books.

Please let us know what your book group is reading, so we can provide your members with the titles you are discussing. Library staff also has resources that list recommended book group titles and we’d love to share your favorites with other book groups.

For more information, call the Adult Reference Desk at 329-4542 ext 600 to find out more about Book Discussion in a Bag.

Book Discussion in a Bag Titles 2008

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (nonfiction)by Barbara Kingsolver

This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tucson to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. The book's bulk, written and read by Kingsolver in a lightly twangy voice filled with wonder and enthusiasm, proceeds through the seasons via delightful stories about the history of their farmhouse, the exhausting bounty of the zucchini harvest, turkey chicks hatching and so on.

The Crows (mystery) by Maris Soule (local fiction writer)

Described by some as a psycho9logical cozy, The Crows is part mystery, part suspense. Wry humor is combined with fast paced events giving the reader a view of life in a rural Michigan farming community. Follow P.J., a C.P.A who discovers a man dying in her dining room after coming home from an afternoon walk in the woods, as she learns that what appears to be true could be deceiving.

Eat, Pray, Love (memoir) by Elizabeth Gilbert

At the age of thirty-one, Gilbert moved with her husband to the suburbs of New York and began trying to get pregnant, only to realize that she wanted neither a child nor a husband. Three years later, after a protracted divorce, she embarked on a yearlong trip of recovery, with three main stops: Rome, for pleasure (mostly gustatory, with a special emphasis on gelato); an ashram outside of Mumbai, for spiritual searching; and Bali, for "balancing." These destinations are all on the beaten track, but Gilbert's exuberance and her self-deprecating humor enliven the proceedings

Great Gatsby ( fiction)by F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." novel became The Great Gatsby. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captures the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

Inheritance of Loss (fiction) by Kiran Desai

Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states— Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquility of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (nonfiction) by Bill Bryson

Few childhoods are interesting to anyone other than the individuals that lived them. Even a mundane childhood, though, can be made interesting through good writing, and Bill Bryson’s memoir fits this category. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is Bryson’s nostalgia-soaked story of his childhood in 1950s Iowa. Bryson describes his family, friends, and the city of Des Moines with reverence for the profound effect they had on his life.

One Oar (poetry) by Marie Bahlke (local poet)

Marie Bahlke has created a powerfully graceful collection of reminiscence as she describes caring for her husband as he slips deeper into Alzheimer’s disease. Marie shares with us her moving journey into the heart of grief, loss and unrelenting love.

Out of the Dust (fiction-poetry) by Karen Hesse (Newbery Award Book)

Karen Hesse has taken the Dust Bowl and narrowed her focus to a single family living in Oklahoma in 1934. Through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Billie Jo, the reader is treated to a series of poems describing the catastrophic events that come from living in a world of dust. Each poem is a small masterpiece, slowly expanding to give the inhabitants of Billie Jo's small Okalahoma town depth and purpose. You meet families migrating west to California, bums on railroad tracks. There are abandoned babies and musicians with names like Mad Dog Craddock and the Black Mesa Boys. To read this book is to find yourself completely immersed in the Depression.

Pomegranate Soup: A Novel (fiction) by Marsha Mehran

The Irish hamlet of Ballinacroagh is the unlikely new home for three Iranian sisters and their new Babylon Cafe. Twenty-seven-year-old Marjan, the most skilled in the kitchen; Bahar, the tentative middle sister; and Layla, the charming teenager, fled the Iranian revolution and, after some years in London, have arrived determined to succeed. Initially wary natives soon fall under the spell of the cafe's cardamom- and rosewater-scented wonders, But town bully Thomas McGuire, who loathes "feckin' foreigners," and gossip Dervla Quigley, who thinks "they're all sluts," will do anything to drive the sisters away.

Q Road (fiction)by Bonnie Jo Campbell(instructor Kalamazoo College)

A farm in rural Kalamazoo County, Mich., provides the backdrop for this May-December love story. Rachel Crane, a homely, motherless, foul-mouthed teenager, lives on a houseboat with her reclusive mother, Margo. They are tenants of George Harland, whose wife abandoned him to maintain his declining farm alone. George becomes irresistibly drawn to Rachel and asks her to marry him; she accepts, but just so she can inherit "his damned land." Only when her young friend David's life is imperiled, does Rachel begin to allow herself to feel genuine love for anything but the land.

Solace of Leaving Early (fiction) by Haven Kimmel

A romance evolves in the wake of a domestic shooting in Kimmel's intelligent and compassionate debut novel, which brings two friends of one of the victims together in a small Indiana town. Amos Townsend is the male protagonist, a 40-ish preacher who counseled the late Alice Baker-Maloney as her frayed marriage degenerated into a fatal confrontation with her controlling husband, Jack.

A Thousand Splendid Suns (fiction) by Khaled Hosseini

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations...One School at a Time (non fiction)by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Water for Elephants (fiction) by Sara Gruen

Jacob Jankowski is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. He is reminiscing about his life in the circus. After his parents were killed in an automotive accident, Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. As a veterinarian student he is put in charge of caring for the animals. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people. August, the animal trainer, is a certified and cruel paranoid schizophrenic Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass. According in Publishers Weekly, the ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely.

The Women were Leaving theMen (fiction – short stories) by Andy Mozina (English Department, Kalamazoo College)

Andy Mozina draws readers into the everyday lives of characters that are instantly relatable but intriguingly flawed. Knocked beyond the brink by departed family members, curious obsessions, and unruly physical attributes, Mozina‘s characters climb and scrape their way toward intimacy, sanity and redemption against the often-absurd odds of their lives in this quirky, humorous and poetic collection.

Year of Wonders (fiction) by Geraldine Brooks

Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders describes the 17th-century plague that is carried from London to a small Derbyshire village by an itinerant tailor. As villagers begin, one by one, to die, the rest face a choice: do they flee their village in hope of outrunning the plague or do they stay? The rector, Michael Mompellion, argues forcefully that the villagers should stay put, isolate themselves from neighboring towns and villages, and prevent the contagion from spreading. His oratory wins the day and the village turns in on itself. Cocooned from the outside world and ravaged by the disease, its inhabitants struggle to retain their humanity in the face of the disaster.

You might want to invite local authors to your book groups. Most authors visit groups for food and the opportunity to join into a discussion about their work.

Book Discussion Groups

Do you wonder why there are so many successful book groups across the country?

There is a Native American proverb which says:  "To have joy one must share it. Happiness was born a twin."  We agree.

We get to know books and one another so much better when we share ideas. Writing we didn't like becomes much more interesting as we see it from different viewpoints. Please join us!

Adult Book Discussion open to all. No registration required. Two groups which meet monthly from September -November and January-June, usually on the third Tuesday morning at 10:30 a.m. and the third Wednesday evening at 7 p.m. Meetings last one hour.

Fall 2007/Spring 2008

Open for Discussion: Monthly Book Discussions

Glass Castle by Janet Walls

Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town. Rex Walls drank and stole the grocery money disappearing for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.

September 18th 10:30-11:30
September 19th 7:00-8:00

Namesake by Jhumpa Lapiri

Any talk of The Namesake--Jhumpa Lahiri's follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Interpreter of Maladies--must begin with a name: Gogol Ganguli. Born to an Indian academic and his wife, Gogol is afflicted from birth with a name that is neither Indian nor American nor even really a first name at all. Ashoke gives his American-born son the name as a kind of placeholder, and the awkward thing sticks. Gogol grows up a bright American boy, goes to Yale, has pretty girlfriends, becomes a successful architect, but like many second-generation immigrants, he can never quite find his place in the world.

October 16th 10:30-11:30
October 17th 7:00-8:00

Dearest Dorothy, Are We There Yet? by Charlene Ann Baumbich

Dorothy Jean Westra's the sort of Old lady who would wear purple if she darn well felt like it. Zipping between her Illinois farm and town in an old car she calls The Bomb, Dorothy Jean uses all the experiences of her 80-some years to face some of the toughest decisions of her life. By her example, younger people around her realize that they, too can apply their own brand of wisdom to their knotty problems.

November 13th 10:30-11:30
November 14th 7:00-8:00

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Charles Bovary, an insensitive, crude, socially awkward oaf, sleazes his way into the medical profession and becomes a doctor in small French provinces at the danger of the citizenry. Additionally, Charles marries a young, beautiful woman, Emma, who intoxicated on romance novels, expects her marriage to Charles to be as grand and splendid as the romances she has gorged on all her life. As her marriage grows more hellish, isolating, and frustrating, Emma grows more irritable with her husband and allays her frustrations by spending beyond her means and engaging in affairs with fops and charlatans who seduce Emma with the illusions of romance she has read in her novels. The novel's plot illustrates the vulgarities and pettiness of the French middle-class.

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

What begins as a droll and intriguing excursion into the minutiae of Flaubert's life and intellect, along with an attempt to solve the small puzzle of the parrot-soon devolves into something obscure and worrisome, the exploration of an arcane Braithwaite obsession that is perhaps even pathological. The first hint we have that all is not as it seems comes almost halfway into the book, when after a humorously cantankerous account of the inadequacies of literary critics, Braithwaite closes a chapter by saying, "Now do you understand why I hate critics? From that point, things just get more and more curious, until they end in the most unexpected bang.

January 15th 10:30-11:30
January 16th 7:00-8:00


Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts

Focusing mainly on the wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers of the Founding Fathers, this lively and engaging title chronicles the adventures and contributions of numerous women of the era between 1740 and 1797. Roberts includes a surprising amount of original writings including diaries, letters, political pamphlets and recipes. These founding women managed property, and raised their children and often those of deceased relatives, while trying to make their own contributions to the cause of liberty. They acted as spies, coordinated boycotts, and raised funds for the army. Some even joined their husbands on the battlefield.

February 19th 10:30-11:30
February 20th 7:00-8:00

Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

On December 30, 2003 Joan and her husband, John Gregory Dunne were just sitting down to dinner about 9pm. They had returned from visiting their daughter, Quintana, who was comatose in an ICU in New York City. They were having a conversation as Joan put dinner on the table. She looked up, it was very quiet, John was not responding. He was slumped over the table with his hand raised. She realized all was not well, and in that instant her life changed. An ambulance was called; the trip to the Emergency Department, the meeting with the doctor, massive heart attack mentioned, and she knew her husband was dead. This book is a memoir of Dunne's death, Quintana's illness, and Didion's efforts to make sense of a time when nothing made sense.

One Oar by Marie Bahlke -local poet (poetry)

Winner of the annual Writer's Digest contest for "International Self-Published Book Awards", One Oar: A Journey With Alzheimer’s is a compilation of candid, deeply moving poetry and verse by Marie Bahlke. This collection wells from caring for her husband as he slipped into Alzheimer’s disease and both dealt with finding threads of joy and connection in the midst of day to day survival.

March 18th 10:30-11:30
March 19th 7:00-8:00

Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes about how our food is grown -- what it is, in fact, that we are eating. The book is really three in one: The first section discusses industrial farming; the second, organic food, both as big business and on a relatively small farm; and the third, what it is like to hunt and gather food for oneself. And each section culminates in a meal -- a cheeseburger and fries from McDonald's; roast chicken, vegetables and a salad from Whole Foods; and grilled chicken, corn and a chocolate soufflé (made with fresh eggs) from a sustainable farm; and, finally, mushrooms and pork, foraged from the wild.

April 15th 10:30-11:30
April 16th 7:00-8:00

Prodigal Summer by Kingsolver, Barbara

Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist observing the coyotes from her isolated aerie--isolated, that is, until the arrival of a young hunter who makes her even more aware of the truth that humans are only an infinitesimal portion in the ecological balance. This truth forms the axis around which the other two narratives revolve: the story of a city girl, entomologist, and new widow and her efforts to find a place for herself; and the story of Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley, who seem bent on thrashing out the countless intimate lessons of biology as only an irascible traditional farmer and a devotee of organic agriculture can. As Nannie lectures Garnett, "Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don't see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that's the moral of the story."

May 20th 10:30-11:30
May 21st 7:00-8:00

Questions? Call the Adult Information Desk at 329-4542, ext 600 or email: ARef1@portagelibrary.info