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The Books'n'Beans Discussion Group focuses primarily on contemporary fiction. We meet on the second Thursday of each month at 7:00 in Meeting Room F178 (East) in the East Wing of the Fishers Library. The group leader brings copies of the next title to each meeting. See the schedule below for details on dates and book titles.
January 2008
"Mister Pip" by Lloyd Jones: On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, on which survival is daily struggle, eccentric Mr. Watts, the only white man left after the other teachers flee, spends his day reading to the local children from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations, capturing the imaginations of thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers with the London adventures of a young orphan named Pip.
February 2008
"Atonement" by Ian McEwan: In 1935 England, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses an event involving her sister Cecilia and her childhood friend Robbie Turner, and she becomes the victim of her own imagination, which tears her family apart and leads her on a lifelong search of truth and absolution
March 2008
"The Book Thief" by Marcus Zusak: Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
April 2008
"Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortenson: The author, having been rescued and resuscitated by Himalayan villagers after a failed attempt to climb K2, worked to build schools that would particularly benefit the young girls who were forbidden an education by Taliban restrictions, an endeavor for which his life has been repeatedly threatened.
May 2008
"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.
June 2008
"The Septembers of Shiraz" by Dalia Sofer: Their serene villa life devastated by a wrongful imprisonment, the wife and children of Tehran gentleman Isaac Amin face potential betrayals within their own household and eventually plan a dangerous escape.
July 2008
"In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote: Capote's masterful account of the senseless 1959 murders of four members of a farm family in Holcomb, Kansas. The subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved.
August 2008
"Suite Francaise" by Irene Nemirovsky: TPublished more than sixty years following the author's death at Auschwitz, a remarkable story of life under the Nazi occupation includes two parts--"A Storm in June," set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, and "Dolce," set in a German-occupied provincial village rife with jealousy, resentment, resistance, and collaboration.
September 2008
"Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen: Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.
October 2008
"A Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest Gaines: Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man who returns to his hometown to teach, forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, when he is asked to impart his learning and pride to the condemned man.
November 2008
"Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides: Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparent's desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
December 2008
"Gorky Park" by Martin Cruz Smith: In contemporary Moscow, Chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko unravels the mystery of a triple murder complicated by the shadowy and uncooperative presence of the KGB, the FBI, and the NYPD and by his falling in love.
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