Past Books Discussed
- Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream
- Angels and Demons
- Blind Assassin
- Blood Money
- City of Light
- Dante Club
- The Eyre Affair
- Egyptologist
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
- Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1)
- Good Omens
- Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
- Invention of Hugo Cabret
- Journey Across Tibet: A Young Woman's Trek Across the Rooftop of the World
- Kite Runner
- Last Fine Time
- Neverwhere
- Pastwatch
- Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
- Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery
- Professor and the Madman
- Room with a View
- The Stolen Child
- Time Traveler's Wife
- To Say Nothing of the Dog
- Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback
- Vanishing Acts
- Wrinkle in Time
View
2007 Reading List
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Everyone
in town thinks Meg is volatile and dull-witted and that her younger brother
Charles Wallace is dumb. People are also saying that their father has run
off and left their brilliant scientist mother. Spurred on by these rumors,
Meg and Charles Wallace, along with their new friend Calvin, embark on a
perilous quest through space to find their father. In doing so they must
travel behind the shadow of an evil power that is darkening the cosmos, one
planet at a time.
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman
When
a scatterbrained Satanist nun goofs up a baby-switching scheme and delivers
the infant Antichrist to the wrong couple, it's just the beginning of the
comic errors in the divine plan for Armageddon which this fast-paced novel
by two British writers zanily details. Aziraphale, an angel who doubles as
a rare-book dealer, and Crowley, a demon friend who's assigned to the same
territory, like life on Earth too much to allow the long-planned war between
Heaven and Hell to happen. They set out to find the Antichrist and avert
Armageddon, on the way encountering the last living descendant of Agnes Nutter,
Anathema, who's been deciphering accurate prophecies of the world's doom
but is unaware she's living in the same town as the Antichrist, now a thoroughly
human and normal 11-year-old named Adam. As the appointed day and hour approach,
Aziraphale and Crowley blunder through seas of fire and rains of fish, and
come across a misguided witch hunter, a middle-aged fortune teller and the
Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse. It's up to Adam in the neatly tied end,
as his humanity prevails over the Divine Plan and earthly bungling.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Orphan,
clock keeper, and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station,
where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity. But when his world suddenly
interlocks with an eccentric, bookish girl and a bitter old man who runs
a toy booth in the station, Hugo's undercover life, and his most precious
secret, are put in jeopardy. A cryptic drawing, a treasured notebook, a stolen
key, a mechanical man, and a hidden message from Hugo's dead father form
the backbone of this intricate, tender, and spellbinding mystery. The Invention
of Hugo Cabret is a 550 page novel in words and pictures. But unlike most
novels, the images don't just illustrate the story; they help tell it. The
author has created something that is not a exactly a novel, not quite a picture
book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination
of all these things.
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
In
Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning
is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is
taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt
can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is
a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned
Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping
characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of
Brontë's novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career.
Fforde's ingenious fantasy-enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world
of the novel--unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty
mix.
Room with a View by E.M. Forster
This
Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric
cast of characters. Moving between Florence, Italy and a corner of Surrey,
England, the story follows the awakening of a young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch.
After fainting into the arms of George Emerson after witnessing a murder
in a Florentine piazza, Lucy begins a war with the snobbery of her class
and her own conflicting desires.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
Winner
of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering
the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading
other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. The updated
2005 edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn
from the television series. Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still
Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the
rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and
Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild
plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders.
As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start
in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern
world through conquest, displacement, and genocide. The paths that lead from
scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to
do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise?
Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize
Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences
to biological differences. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses
the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing
a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs
and glaciers.
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Margaret
Atwood's mystery novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten
days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They
are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945
is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just
as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-
novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by
two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to
Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of
a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.
Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés
of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely
rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that
follow one another at a breathtaking pace. As everything comes together,
readers will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it
seems to be--but, in fact, much more.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult
How
do you recover the past when it was never yours to lose? Delia Hopkins has
led a charmed life. Raised in rural New Hampshire by her beloved, widowed
father, she now has a young daughter, a handsome fiance, and her own search-and-rescue
bloodhound, which she uses to find missing persons. But as Delia plans her
wedding, she is plagued by flashbacks of a life she can't recall...until
a policeman knocks on her door, revealing a secret about herself that changes
the world as she knows it -- and threatens to jeopardize her future. With Vanishing
Acts, Jodi Picoult explores how life -- as we know it -- might not turn
out the way we imagined; how the people we've loved and trusted can suddenly
change before our very eyes; how the memory we thought had vanished could
return as a threat. Once again, Picoult handles an astonishing and timely
topic with understanding, insight, and compassion.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
Wise,
funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's memoir
of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white
comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages
six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph
of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq.
The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter
of one of Iran's last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely
entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable
portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between
home life and public life. Marjane's child's-eye view of dethroned emperors,
state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn
as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary
family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is
at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and
political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears,
in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible
little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.
The Stolen Child by Keith Donahue
Inspired
by the W.B. Yeats poem that tempts a child from home to the waters and the
wild, The Stolen Child is a modern fairy tale narrated by the child
Henry Day and his double. On a summer night, Henry Day runs away from home
and hides in a hollow tree. There he is taken by the changelings-an unaging
tribe of wild children who live in darkness and in secret. They spirit him
away, name him Aniday, and make him one of their own. Stuck forever as a
child, Aniday grows in spirit, struggling to remember the life and family
he left behind. He also seeks to understand and fit in this shadow land,
as modern life encroaches upon both myth and nature. In his place, the changelings
leave a double, a boy who steals Henry's life in the world. This new Henry
Day must adjust to a modern culture while hiding his true identity from the
Day family. But he can't hide his extraordinary talent for the piano (a skill
the true Henry never displayed), and his dazzling performances prompt his
father to suspect that the son he has raised is an imposter. As he ages the
new Henry Day becomes haunted by vague but persistent memories of life in
another time and place, of a German piano teacher and his prodigy. Of a time
when he, too, had been a stolen child. Both Henry and Aniday obsessively
search for who they once were before they changed places in the world. The
Stolen Child is a classic tale of leaving childhood and the search for
identity. With just the right mix of fantasy and realism, Keith Donohue has
created a bedtime story for adults and a literary fable of remarkable depth
and strange delights.
The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of
Forgery
by Simon Worrall
In The
Poet and the Murderer, acclaimed journalist Simon Worrall takes readers
into the haunting mind of Mark Hofmann, one of the most daring literary
forgers and remorseless murderers of the late twentieth century. He was
a young Mormon boy who loathed what he believed to be the hypocrisy of
his faith, and who devised secret ways to infiltrate and undermine the
church. Mark Hofmann began his career by forging and selling rare Mormon
coins, and quickly moved on to creating false, highly controversial religious
documents that threw the Church of Latter-Day Saints into turmoil. But
it was his infamous Emily Dickinson poem that would prove his greatest
deception, stunning the art and literary worlds and earning him thousands
from the most distinguished Dickinson scholars. It would also prove his
ultimate undoing, when his desperation to keep his greatest forgery a secret
drove him to commit ever more heinous crimes-including acts of shocking
violence. Filled with the page-turning suspense and tantalizing sleuthing
techniques of a literary thriller, The Poet and the Murderer gives
us an unforgettable portrait of a deeply irreligious man and a brilliant
con artist whose greatest talent-and greatest tragedy--was his ability
to conceal his mad genius behind the unique gifts and enduring celebrity
of others.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Richard
Mayhew is a young man with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed
forever when he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk.
His small act of kindness propels him into a world he never dreamed existed.
There are people who fall through the cracks, and Richard has become one
of them. And he must learn to survive in this city of shadows and darkness,
monsters and saints, murderers and angels, if he is ever to return to the
London that he knew.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips
From
the bestselling author of Prague comes a witty, inventive, brilliantly constructed
novel about an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal
king. This darkly comic labyrinth of a story opens on the desert plains of
Egypt in 1922, then winds its way from the slums of Australia to the ballrooms
of Boston by way of Oxford, the battlefields of the First World War, and
a royal court in turmoil. Just as Howard Carter unveils the tomb of Tutankhamun,
making the most dazzling find in the history of archaeology, Oxford-educated
Egyptologist Ralph Trilipush is digging himself into trouble, having staked
his professional reputation and his fiancée’s fortune on a scrap
of hieroglyphic pornography. Meanwhile, a relentless Australian detective
sets off on the case of his career, spanning the globe in search of a murderer.
And another murderer. and possibly another murderer. The confluence of these
seemingly separate stories results in an explosive ending, at once inevitable
and utterly unpredictable.
Arthur Phillips leads this expedition to its unforgettable climax with all the wit and narrative bravado that made Prague one of the most critically acclaimed novels of 2002. Exploring issues of class, greed, ambition, and the very human hunger for eternal life, this staggering second novel gives us a glimpse of Phillips’s range and maturity and is sure to earn him further acclaim as one of the most exciting authors of his generation.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback by Robyn Davidson
A
cult classic with an ever-growing audience, Tracks is the brilliantly written
and frequently hilarious account of a young woman's odyssey through the deserts
of Australia, with no one but her dog and four camels as companions. Davidson
emerges as a heroine who combines extraordinary courage with exquisite sensitivity.
16 pages of photos.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
Pastwatch: the Redemption
of Christopher Columbus
by Orson Scott Card
In
one of the most powerful and thought-provoking novels of his remarkable career,
Orson Scott Card interweaves a compelling portrait of Christopher Columbus
with the story of a future scientist who believes she can alter human history
from a tragedy of bloodshed and brutality to a world filled with hope and
healing.
Anouncement flyer [PDF]
Professor
and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford
English Dictionary
by Simon Winchester
The
Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written,
is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions
of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary--and
literary history. The compilation of the OED, begun in 1857, was one of the
most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the
overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one
man, Dr. W C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee
insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American
Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
A
dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable
story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily
through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential
course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of
time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is
Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional
chronology so vibrantly triumphant. An enchanting debut and a spellbinding
tale of fate and belief in the bonds of love, The Time Traveler's Wife is
destined to captivate readers for years to come.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) by Phillip Pullman
In
a landmark epic of fantasy and storytelling, Philip Pullman invites readers
into a world as convincing and thoroughly realized as Narnia, Earthsea, or
Redwall. Here lives an orphaned ward named Lyra Belacqua, whose carefree
life among the scholars at Oxford's Jordan College is shattered by the arrival
of two powerful visitors. First, her fearsome uncle, Lord Asriel, appears
with evidence of mystery and danger in the far North, including photographs
of a mysterious celestial phenomenon called Dust and the dim outline of a
city suspended in the Aurora Borealis that he suspects is part of an alternate
universe. He leaves Lyra in the care of Mrs. Coulter, an enigmatic scholar
and explorer who offers to give Lyra the attention her uncle has long refused
her. In this multilayered narrative, however, nothing is as it seems. Lyra
sets out for the top of the world in search of her kidnapped playmate, Roger,
bearing a rare truth-telling instrument, the compass of the title. All around
her children are disappearing? victims of so-called "Gobblers"?
and being used as subjects in terrible experiments that separate humans from
their daemons, creatures that reflect each person's inner being. And somehow,
both Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are involved.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Dubner & Levitt
Which
is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo
wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?
How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have
on violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist
to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded
scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life -- from cheating
and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly
turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain
of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death
issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of
study contained in this book: freakonomics.
Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.
What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and -- if the right questions are asked -- is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.
Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
Boston,
1865. A series of murders, all of them inspired by scenes in Dante’s
Inferno. Only an elite group of America’s first Dante scholars?Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and J.
T. Fields' can solve the mystery. With the police baffled, more lives endangered,
and Dante’s literary future at stake, the Dante Club must shed its
sheltered literary existence and find the killer.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream by Paulo Coelho
Paulo
Coelho's enchanting novel has inspired a devoted following around the world,
and this tenth anniversary edition, with a new introduction from the author,
will only increase that following. This story, dazzling in its powerful simplicity
and inspiring wisdom, is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago
who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of
a treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman,
a man who calls himself king, and an alchemist, all of whom point Santiago
in the direction of his quest. No one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago
will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way. But what starts out
as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a discovery of the treasures
found within. Lush, evocative, and deeply humane, the story of Santiago is
an eternal testament to the transforming power of our dreams and the importance
of listening to our hearts.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
From
Connie Willis, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, comes a comedic
romp through an unpredictable world of mystery, love, and time travel...
Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump. It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier.
But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right--not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
Journey Across Tibet: A Young Woman's Trek Across the Rooftop of the World by Sorrel Wilby
In
this inspiring story by a woman "who has few equals, on the trail or
on the printed page" (National Geographic), Sorrel Wilby hikes 1,900
miles across Tibet alone. When she befriends some Tibetan nomads, her trek
quickly evolves from a daredevil adventure to a journey of self-discovery
and personal revelation.
At the age of twenty-five, Sorrel Wilby had already traveled alone on bicycle through Japan, Korea, and China when seized with the idea of taking on an even greater challenge: to walk solo across Tibet. After securing the unexpected cooperation of the Chinese authorities, Wilby embarked on her three-month journey through barren desert plains, across 16,000-foot mountain passes, and into isolated hamlets where no Westerner had ever been seen. With few roads of any significance, following tracks that were often little more than goat trails, Wilby found herself entirely dependent on the help of Tibetan nomads, whose unfailing generosity and kindness amazed and sustained her. From herder to herder, they pointed the way until she reached the next village, regrouped, and recharted her progress. Communicating mainly in the universal language of gesture and goodwill, Wilby found that her trek among these proud people, materially poor but spiritually rich, quickly evolved from a daredevil adventure to a journey of self-discovery and personal revelation.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Taking
us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The
Kite Runner is the unforgettable, beautifully told story of the friendship
between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing
the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan nonetheless grow up in different worlds:
Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of
Amir's father's servant, is a Hazara, member of a shunned ethnic minority.
Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of
the world around them. When the Soviets invade and Amir and his father flee
the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped
his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him.
The Kite Runner is a novel about friendship, betrayal, and the price of loyalty. It is about the bonds between fathers and sons, and the power of their lies. Written against a history that has not been told in fiction before, The Kite Runner describes the rich culture and beauty of a land in the process of being destroyed. But with the devastation, Khaled Hosseini also gives us hope: through the novel's faith in the power of reading and storytelling, and in the possibilities he shows for redemption.
Announcement flyer [PDF]
The Last Fine Time by Verlyn Klinkenborg
By
turns, an elegy, a celebration, and a social history, The Last Fine Time is
a tour de force of lyrical style. Verlyn Klinkenborg chronicles the life
of a family-owned restaurant in Buffalo, New York, from its days as a prewar
Polish tavern to its reincarnation as George & Eddie's, a swank nightspot
serving highballs and French-fried shrimp to a generation of optimistic and
prosperous Americans. In the inevitable dimming of the neon sign outside
the restaurant, we see both the passing of an old world way of life and the
end to the postwar exuberance that was Eddie Wenzek's "last fine time."
Anouncement flyer [PDF]
Blood Money by Thomas Perry
"Thomas
Perry just keeps getting better," said Tony Hillerman, about Sleeping
Dogs--and in this superb new novel by one of America's best thriller writers,
Jane Whitefield takes on the mafia, and its money.
Jane Whitefield, the fearless "guide" who helps people in trouble disappear, makes victims vanish, has just begun her quiet new life as Mrs. Carey McKinnon, when she is called upon again, to face her toughest opponents yet. Jane must try to save a young girl fleeing a deadly mafioso. Yet the deceptively simple task of hiding a girl propels Jane into the center of horrific events, and pairs her with Bernie the Elephant, the mafia's man with the money. Bernie has a photographic memory, and in order to undo an evil that has been growing for half a century, he and Jane engineer the biggest theft of all time, stealing billions from hidden mafia accounts and donating the money to charity. Heart-stopping pace, fine writing, and mesmerizing characters combine in Blood Money to make it the best novel yet by the writer called "one of America's finest storytellers" (San Francisco Examiner).
Anouncement flyer [PDF]
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
An
ancient secret brotherhood. A devastating new weapon of destruction. An unthinkable
target. World-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to
a Swiss research facility to analyze a cryptic symbol seared into the chest
of a murdered physicist. What he discovers is unimaginable: a deadly vendetta
against the Catholic Church by a centuries-old underground organization --
the Illuminati. Desperate to save the Vatican from a powerful time bomb,
Langdon joins forces in Rome with the beautiful and mysterious scientist
Vittoria Vetra. Together they embark on a frantic hunt through sealed crypts,
dangerous catacombs, deserted cathedrals, and the most secretive vault on
earth...the long-forgotten Illuminati lair.
Anouncement flyer [PDF]
City of Light by Lauren Belfer
The
year is 1901. Buffalo, New York, is poised for glory. With its booming industry
and newly electrified streets, Buffalo is a model for the century just beginning.
Louisa Barrett has made this dazzling city her home. Headmistress of Buffalo's most prestigious school, Louisa is at ease in a world of men, protected by the titans of her city. But nothing prepares her for a startling discovery: evidence of a murder tied to the city's cathedral-like power plant at nearby Niagara Falls. This shocking crime--followed by another mysterious death--will ignite an explosive chain of events. For in this city of seething intrigue and dazzling progress, a battle rages among politicians, power brokers, and industrialists for control of Niagara. And one extraordinary woman in their midst must protect a dark secret that implicates them all?
Anouncement flyer [PDF]
Pastwatch: the Redemption
of Christopher Columbus
by Orson Scott Card
In
one of the most powerful and thought-provoking novels of his remarkable career,
Orson Scott Card interweaves a compelling portrait of Christopher Columbus
with the story of a future scientist who believes she can alter human history
from a tragedy of bloodshed and brutality to a world filled with hope and
healing.
Anouncement flyer [PDF]
Last modified: 20 August, 2008 | Content provider: Karen Morse