IMC Beach Books
Here are books that you might enjoy during the summer.
Have a wonderful summer.
WTHS Book Club Choices
The Amateur Marriage Anne Tyler
Although acquaintances like to think of them as a perfect couple, Pauline and Michael are constantly bickering, sulking and fighting at home. And by cutting back and forth among the viewpoints of different characters, Ms. Tyler is able to provide a kaleidoscopic view of their marriage, and the ripple effect that their contentious relationship has on their children
Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found Jennifer Lauch
Jennifer Lauck revisits her extraordinarily difficult childhood. Her mother's lengthy illness led to a reversal of roles, casting Lauck as the caretaker in the relationship. Worse, shortly after her mother's passing, Lauck's father married a woman who might best be described as an "evil stepmother." Lauck's pitch-perfect evocation of her younger self's point of view and her resilience in the face of emotional and physical hardship make this an unforgettable read
My Losing Season Pat Conroy
For the rest of Conroy's teammates, The Citadel's 817 record in 19661967 made it a season best forgotten, but the author remembers it as an odyssey of hardwood heroics, Olympian fortitude and larger-than-life adversaries. Despite frustrations dealing with a coach whose aberrant behavior borders on masochistic and an institution whose social customs mirror his father's brutality, Conroy learns the lessons that only losing can teach.
Best Sellers
The Jane Austen Book Club Karen Joy Fowler
As six
Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane
Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit
affairs, changing relationships, and love.
The Life of Pi 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
The Rule of Four Ian Caldwell and Deisten Thomason
A mysterious coded manuscript, a violent Ivy League murder, and the secrets of a Renaissance prince collide in a labyrinth of betrayal, madness, and genius.
The Notebook Nicholas Sparks
An elderly man reads a story from a notebook to a woman who does not know him; the story is of young lovers kept apart by disapproving parents
The Secret Life of Bees Sue Monk Kidd
The Secret Life of Bees is a novel of love and almost unbelievable courage, the quest of one young girl in search of her mother and so much more
The Known World Edward P. Jones
When a plantation
proprietor and former slave--now possessing slaves of his own--dies, his
household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid
patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.
Never Change Elizabeth Berg
Resigned to her life alone, unmarried fifty-one-year-old Myra Lipinsky immerses herself in her career as a visiting nurse, in which role she is reunited with Chip Reardon, who has returned to his hometown to live while he deals with an incurable illness
One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Garcia Marquez chronicles the Buendia family, whose fortunes or, more commonly, misfortunes-- for the one hundred years of the title and whose story ultimately encapsulates the entire history of mankind, from genesis to apocalypse
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West Gregory Maguire
An astonishingly rich re-creation of the land of Oz, this book retells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who wasn't so wicked after all. Taking readers past the yellow brick road and into a phantasmagoric world rich with imagination and allegory, Wicked just might change the reputation of one of the most sinister characters in literature.
Historical Fiction
The Birth of Venus Sarah Dunant
Turning fifteen in
Renaissance Florence, Alessandra Cecchi becomes intoxicated with the works of a
young painter whom her father has brought to the city to decorate the family's
Florentine palazzo.
Lady and Unicorn 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.
The Princes of Ireland Edward Rutherfurd
A fictional account of the history of Ireland recreates such events as the mission of Saint Patrick, the Viking invasion, and the trickery of Henry II that led to England's establishment in Ireland
Things They Carried Tim OBrien
Heroic young men carry the emotional weight of their lives to war in Vietnam in a patchwork account of a modern journey into the heart of darkness
Pompeii Robert Harris
When
the aqueduct that brings fresh water to thousands of people around the bay of
Naples fails, Roman engineer Marius Primus heads to the slopes of
Mount Vesuvius
to investigate, only to come face to face with an impending catastrophe.
Books with Beach or Water in the Title
Appropriate for Summer
The Beach House Mary Alice Monroe
Returning to her childhood home in the Low country at the request of her mother, Caretta Rutledge, who had thought she had forever buried her Southern roots and her troubled family, unexpectedly begins to reconnect with her friends and family while she fixes up the family beach house, learning that in order to live life to the fullest, she must forgive and forget the past
Beach House James Patterson
Jack Mullen is in law
school in New York City when the shocking news comes that his brother Peter
drowned in the ocean off East Hampton. Jack knows his brother and knows this
couldn't be an accident. Someone must have wanted his brother--and wanted him
dead.
Beach Music Pat Conroy
Living in Rome with his
daughter, Jack McCall finds his grief following his wife's suicide interrupted
by the arrival of his sister-in-law and two friends seeking his help in tracking
down a classmate who went underground as a Vietnam
protestor
Peace Like a River Leif Enger
Set in the early 1960s, Enger's debut novel is narrated by eleven-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy whose close-knit family is broken apart after the oldest son, Davy, commits a crime of passion and becomes a fugitive. Reuben, his father and younger sister become immersed in a series of mystical events as they follow Davy's trail across the northern United States
The Lake House - James Patterson
"Six extraordinary children are trying to lead normal lives in the Rocky Mountain countryside. They live in different homes, with different families, but there is something powerful that connects them. Something that puts them in terrible danger. The only time they've ever felt safe was when they were together in the waterfront cabin they call the Lake House
Still Water Jennifer Lauck
Jennifer Lauck continues the autobiographical she began in the bestselling Blackbird, as 12-year-old Jenny arrives in Reno with her childhood possessions and faces life without her brother Bryan. Once again, Jenny struggles to survive, as she's passed from caretaker to caretaker. When Bryan makes a dramatic decision, everything changes, and Jenny is forced to confront the secrets she's been hiding from for years.
Crow Lake Mary Lawson
In the rural farm country of northern Ontario, the lives of two families--the farming Pye family, and zoologist Kate Morrison and her three brothers--are brought together and torn apart by misunderstanding, resentment, family love, and tragedy
Non Fiction
Galileos Mistake Wade Rollen and Thomas Allen
Argues that the Catholic Church was right to try the father of astronomy on charges of heresy in 1633. Galileo's key error, Canadian historian Rowland finds, was not his advocacy of the Copernican scheme of the solar system, in which the planets rotate about the sun, but his contention that the scientific method is the sole means to determine truth. In support of this thesis, Rowland undertakes a detailed examination of the history behind Galileo's trial.
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail Malika Oufkir
This is a heart-rending account of resilience in the face of extreme deprivation, of the courage and humor with which one family faced their fate. This is the story of the Malika family of Morocco who spent fifteen years in a penal colony, the last ten years in solitary cells.