Food for Thought Book Discussion
Led by Mount Prospect Public Library Readers Advisors, the Food for Thought Book Discussions will give you food for thought all year long! Food for Thought selections offer a variety of books ranging from classics to non-fiction to popular fiction. This book discussion meets on the first Wednesday of each month at 1 p.m. in Meeting Room B at the Library. Books will be available at the Fiction/AV/Teen desk one month prior to the discussion.
Food for Thought Book Discussion Titles for 2008:
January 2: Enrique's Journey: the Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother by Sonia Nazario
When Enrique was five years old, his single mother made the trek from Honduras to the U.S. in search of a better life and enough money to return home for her children. When things don't work out as planned, Enrique decides to make the difficult journey north to find her.
February 6: The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
The daughters of a ruthlessly ambitious family, Mary and Anne Boleyn are sent to the court of Henry VIII to attract the attention of the king, who first takes Mary as his mistress, in which role she bears him an illegitimate son, and then Anne as his wife.
March 5: The House on the Strand by Daphne Du Maurier
Dick Young is lent a house in Cornwall by his friend Professor Magnus Lane where he agrees to serve as guinea pig for a new drug Magnus has discovered in his biochemical research, the effect of which is to transport Dick to the 14th century.
April 2: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. Told in clear, accessible language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice, this memoir seems destined to become a classic firsthand account of war and the ongoing plight of child soldiers in conflicts worldwide.
May 7: Guilt by Association by Susan R. Sloan
In 1962, Karen Kern is escorted home from a party by a man who rapes her. Badly injured, she identifies her attacker, but the case is dropped. Years later, after Karen has rebuilt her life, she recognizes her attacker to be a Presidential candidate. How she exacts revenge is the core of this novel.
June 4: The Kommandant's Girl by Pam Jenoff
Becoming a spy for the resistance after the Nazi's invade Poland, Emma Bau, taking on a new identity as a gentile, becomes a high-ranking Nazi official's assistant and, leading a double life, compromises her marriage vows, her safety, and the lives of those she loves for the cause.
July 2: Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos
Two very different women, each with her own dark secrets--wealthy, reclusive septuagenarian Margaret Hughes, living alone with her vast collection of priceless antiques, and Wanda Schultz, a brokenhearted young woman in search of her wayward boyfriend--find new meaning and redemption in their growing friendship with each other.
August 6: 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.
September 3: A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
A moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. This is account that manges to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive, as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together.
October 1:
Midwives by Christopher A. Bohjalian
In the winter of 1981, trapped by unpassable roads, midwife Sibyl Danforth makes a life-altering decision when she performs an emergency cesarean section on a woman she fears has died of a stroke.
November 5: Glass Castle: a Memoir by Jeannette Walls
The second child of a scholarly, alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing from the Arizona desert, to Las Vegas, to an Appalachian mining town, during which her siblings and she fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities.December 3: Remembering Babylon by David Malouf
In the mid-19th century, a white child discovered on the Australian coast and raised by aborigines, reveals himself to locals and changes their lives.
