We are happy to provide resources for Book Clubs. Everything a person needs to hold a book club is supplied—just add people excited about reading! We have two different ways for you to get the books for your club: (1) multiple copies of the same book that check out individually or (2) book club kits that include all the copies of the book and help for your book club.
Questions may be directed to Jackie at the Library 208-232-1263 ext. 112 or jwood@marshallpl.org.
Individual Copies
If you like the ease of choosing a title and having your book club members pick up/return their own books, this is the choice for you! This option makes it easy for book club members to be responsible for their own copies and takes some of the stress off of whoever is organizing the group. We keep these books stored together, and they are available for placing holds and checking out. Some titles check out quite frequently. Click here for a list of titles and make sure to check our catalog for availability.
Book Club Kits
If you like having everything in one place and the ease of having one person pick up everything you need for your book club, this is the choice for you! This option makes it easy to pick up and return materials while providing a lot of helpful information to your book club. Just remember that all of the books must be returned together in the kit.
What’s in the Kit?
- Approximately six (6) copies of the book
- Discussion questions that accompany each book
- Book reviews
- Author biography
- Tips for holding a book club
- Sign-out sheet to keep track of the books
Guidelines
- Limit of one Book Club Kit per card
- Check-out period is six (6) weeks
- Overdue fine is $1.00 per day
- No renewals
- No reservations. Kits are on a first-come, first-served basis.
- Kit must be returned containing all pieces
- There will be a replacement charge of $15.00 for each missing paperback book and $25.00 for each hardback book. No refunds.
Questions may be directed to Becky at the Library at 208-232-1263 ext. 112 or bhadley@marshallpl.org.
Book Club Kits by Title
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
It is the story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness.
Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani
It’s 1978 and 35-year-old Ave Maria Mulligan is the self-proclaimed spinster of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, a sleepy hamlet in the Blue Ridge Mountains. As the local pharmacist, she’s been keeping the townfolks’ secrets for years, but she’s about to discover a skeleton in her own family’s tidy closet that will blow the lid right off her quiet, uneventful life. Soon she finds herself juggling two marriage proposals, conducting a no-holds-barred family feud, directing the prestigious Outdoor Drama and keeping the town’s dysfunctional Rescue Squad on its toes. The crazy-quilt of characters includes Jack MacChesney (“Jack Mac” to his friends), the stoic miner with coal dust on his hands but love in his heart; Iva Lou Wade, the sex pot Bookmobile librarian; Theodore Tipton, band leader extraordinaire; Preacher Elmo Gaspar, the snake-handling Freewill Baptist; and Pearl Grimes, a coal-miner’s daughter on the verge of a miraculous transformation, thanks to Ave’s intervention.
Cane River by Lalita Tadmy
Beginning with Tademy’s great-great-great-great grandmother Elisabeth, this is a family saga that sweeps from the early days of slavery through the Civil War into a pre-Civil Rights South-a unique and moving slice of America’s past that will resonate with readers for generations to come.
The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
The Dante Club starts out with the murder of fictional State Supreme Court Justice Healey, hit in the head and then left out in his back garden to be eaten alive by maggots. A series of murders later occur- a priest who embezzled money is buried upside-down and his feet are burned off, the head of the school where many of the poets lectured is sliced open exactly down the middle- all in extreme and undeniable resemblance to the punishments of people in Dante’s Inferno. Members of the Dante Club (A group of poets translating Dante into English), including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, J.T. Fields and James Russell Lowell, notice this, and set out to solve the murder.
Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay
Meet Dexter, a polite wolf in sheep’s clothing…a monster who cringes at the site of blood…a serial killer whose one golden rule makes him immensely likable: he only kills bad people.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson’s spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men—the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World’s Fair, striving to secure America’s place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.
Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron
Dewey’s story starts in the worst possible way. Only a few weeks old, on the coldest night of the year, he was stuffed into the returned book slot at the Spencer Public Library. He was found the next morning by library director Vicki Myron, a single mother who had survived the loss of her family farm, a breast cancer scare, and an alcoholic husband. Dewey won her heart, and the hearts of the staff, by pulling himself up and hobbling on frostbitten feet to nudge each of them in a gesture of thanks and love. For the next nineteen years, he never stopped charming the people of Spencer with his enthusiasm, warmth, humility (for a cat), and, above all, his sixth sense about who needed him most.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
When the author was growing up, in nineteen-seventies Rhodesia, her parents kept loaded guns by the bed. “Don’t startle us when we’re sleeping,” her mother warned her. “We might shoot you.” This memoir of a stubborn, down-on-their-luck, often drunk white family making a last stand against African independence reads like a hard ride over unsafe roads: hair-raising, horrific, and thrilling. One moment Fuller’s mother is shooting a cobra in the pantry, the next her sister is calmly baking a cake while armed black soldiers surround the house. The author’s honesty about her family’s racism is exacting—she recounts how they cheered when they heard mines detonate along the border, because that meant Africans might have been killed—and she delivers an intimate portrait of fierce, flawed lives. Her prose bristles with an unappeased love for Africa and its intense physicality.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Often described as Steinbeck’s most ambitious novel, East of Eden brings to life the intricate details of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, and their interwoven stories. The novel was originally addressed to Steinbeck’s young sons, Thom and John (then 6½ and 4½ respectively). Steinbeck wanted to describe the Salinas Valley for them in detail: the sights, sounds, smells, and colors. According to his last wife Elaine, he considered this to be a requiem for himself – his greatest novel ever. Steinbeck states about East of Eden: “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.” He further claimed: “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
It’s 2070, forty years since a devastating alien invasion was barely turned back, and the world is desperately searching for soldiers to lead them to victory when the “Buggers” come again. That’s why they’re drafting young children who pass a rigorous screening, and sending the best of them to the orbiting Battle School, where they are trained from childhood to be ready for war in the vertiginous reaches of space. Into the unending pressure of military training comes six-year-old Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, who struggles to keep his humanity even as the adult teachers, rivals among his fellow students, and the strange unseen influence of the alien invaders all threaten either to destroy him or to make him into someone he can’t bear to be.
John Adams by David McCullough
A complete biography of the life and times of John Adams, from his days at Harvard and his courtship of Abigail, through the American Revolution and birth of a nation, his days as Vice President and President, and ending with his reflections in retirement. Through extensive use of letters and journal entries, McCullough captures both the character of Adams and the spirit of the times in the founding days of the United States of America.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present. The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption and it is also about the power of fathers over sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies.
Little Bee by Chris Cleave
The lives of a sixteen-year-old Nigerian orphan and a well-off British woman collide in this page-turning #1 New York Times bestseller and book club favorite from Chris Cleave. We don’t want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn’t. And it’s what happens afterward that is most important. Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.
The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich
Waldvogel returns to Germany from the horrors of World War I and marries his late friend’s pregnant fiancee. He immigrates to America with her and his stepson and settles in Argus, N.D. He becomes a small-town butcher and a well-liked member of the community. Delphine Watzka and her acrobat husband have returned to Argus to care for her alcoholic father. Delphine is envious of Eva, Fidelis’s wife, for the warm homespun family she has. Meanwhile, her father is so drunk that he’s unaware of the corpses in his basement. This all sets the stage for a marvelous novel where love and life clash among different cultures in Middle America.
Murder on the Middle Fork by Don Ian Smith and Naida West
In primitive isolation Frieda lives by the laws of the wilderness with her outlaw husband — until she finds something more important than raw survival. Based on one of Idaho’s strangest murders. Set in 1917 on the Salmon River.
Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
In 1932, two North Carolina teenagers from opposite sides of the tracks fall in love. Spending one idyllic summer together in the small town of New Bern, Noah Calhoun and Allie Nelson do not meet again for 14 years. Noah has returned from WWII to restore the house of his dreams, having inherited a large sum of money. Allie, programmed by family and the “caste system of the South” to marry an ambitious, prosperous man, has become engaged to powerful attorney Lon Hammond. When she reads a newspaper story about Noah’s restoration project, she shows up on his porch step, re-entering his life for two days. Will Allie leave Lon for Noah?
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith’s widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witch doctors.
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called “a tour de force”by the San Francisco Chronicle , this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding-an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair-only begin to unlock its deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics.
The Persian Pickle Club by Sandra Dallas
It is the 1930s, and hard times have hit Harveyville, Kansas, where the crops are burning up and there’s not a job to be found. For Queenie Bean, a young farm wife, a highlight of each week is the gathering of the Persian Pickle Club, a group of local ladies dedicated to improving their minds, exchanging gossip, and putting their quilting skills to good use. When a new member of the club stirs up a dark secret, the women must band together to support and protect one another. In her magical, memorable novel, Sandra Dallas explores the ties that unite women through good times and bad.
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Of all Jane Austen’s great and delightful novels, Persuasion is widely regarded as the most moving. It is the story of a second chance. Anne Elliot, daughter of the snobbish Sir Walter Elliot, is woman of quiet charm and deep feelings. When she was nineteen she fell in love with—and was engaged to—a naval officer, the fearless and headstrong Captain Wentworth. But the young man had no fortune, and Anne allowed herself to be persuaded to give him up. Now, eight years later, Wentworth has returned to the neighborhood, a rich man and still unwed. Anne’s never-diminished love is muffled by her pride, and he seems cold and unforgiving. What happens as the two are thrown together in the social world of Bath—and as an eager new suitor appears for Anne—is touchingly and wittily told in a masterpiece that is also one of the most entrancing novels in the English language.
The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason
In 1886 a shy, middle-aged piano tuner named Edgar Drake receives an unusual commission from the British War Office: to travel to the remote jungles of northeast Burma and there repair a rare piano belonging to an eccentric army surgeon who has proven mysteriously indispensable to the imperial design. From this irresistible beginning, The Piano Tuner launches readers into a world of seductive, vibrantly rendered characters, and enmeshes them in an unbreakable spell of storytelling.
Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder
About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered a reprieve. She’ll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace, and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia. And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly’s Dust, and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison. As Yelena tries to escape her dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and she develops magical powers she can’t control. Her life’s at stake again and choices must be made. But this time the outcomes aren’t so clear!
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen & Seth Grahame-Smith
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield. Can Elizabeth vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry?
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany. When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
First-person narrative which tells the story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and sister of Joseph, a talented midwife and proto-feminist. The book’s title refers to the tent in which women of Jacob’s tribe must, according to the ancient law, take refuge while menstruating or giving birth, and in which they find mutual support and encouragement from their mothers, sisters and aunts.
Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand
Seabiscuit was an unlikely champion. For two years he floundered at the lowest level of racing, before his dormant talent was discovered by three men. One was Tom Smith, an arthritic old mustang breaker. The second was Red Pollard, a half-blind jockey. The third was Charles Howard, a former bicycle repairman who made a fortune by introducing the automobile to the American West. Bought for a bargain-basement price by Howard and rehabilitated by Smith and Pollard, Seabiscuit overcame a phenomenal run of bad fortune to become one of the most spectacular, charismatic performers in the history of sports.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult
Fourteen-year-old Trixie has been a ghost for fourteen days, seven hours, and thirty-six minutes now, not that she is officially counting. Trixie’s protective father has been consumed with attempts to shield her from a new life, one that includes a boy with a proprietary hand around his daughter’s waist. But Daniel Stone never for a moment suspected that the same boy might inflict upon his daughter the worst possible harm. Could the boy who once made Trixie’s face fill with light when he came to the door have drugged and then raped her? She says that he did, and that is all it takes to make Daniel, a man with a past hidden even from his family, consider taking matters into his own hands in order to protect his daughter.
Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: Periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity in his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.
Too Close to the Falls by Catherine Gildiner
It is the mid-1950s in Lewiston, a sleepy town near Niagara Falls, famous only for the invention of the cocktail. Divorce is unheard of, mothers wear high heels to the beauty salon, and television has only just arrived. But with no siblings to provide role models; a workaholic father chosen by most of her class as Lewiston’s present-day saint; a mother who looks the part of the perfect, fifties housewife but refuses to play it and a gambling-obsessed best friend, Roy, who is 30 years older, perhaps it’s hardly surprising that Cathy grows up a little eccentric. Especially considering that the family doctor’s prescription for her hyperactivity is a full-time job in her father’s pharmacy–at the age of four.
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Alborn
This true story about the love between a spiritual mentor and his pupil has soared to the bestseller list for many reasons. For starters: it reminds us of the affection and gratitude that many of us still feel for the significant mentors of our past. It also plays out a fantasy many of us have entertained: what would it be like to look those people up again, tell them how much they meant to us, maybe even resume the mentorship? Plus, we meet Morrie Schwartz—a one of a kind professor, whom the author describes as looking like a cross between a biblical prophet and Christmas elf. And finally we are privy to intimate moments of Morrie’s final days as he lies dying from a terminal illness. Even on his deathbed, this twinkling-eyed mensch manages to teach us all about living robustly and fully.
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum’s classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?
Women of the Silk by Gail Tsukiyama
A first novel exceptional for its exquisite writing and for its rich portrait of a woman’s life in a China now lost. Her story is rendered with exceptional grace, with the clear, shining dignity of legend or song; Tsukiyama lends her voice to figures of women emboldened by their dream of growth and personal power.
