Lunch and a Book meets the second Thursday of the month from 12:00-1:00PM.  No registration required, participation encouraged.

Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking by Susan Cain — January 9th

Defending Jacob: a novel by William Landay — February 13th

Before you know kindness: a novel by Chris Bohjalian — March 13th

The dog stars by Peter Heller — April 10th

The round house by Louise Erdrich — May 8th

The housekeeper and the professor by Yoko Ogawa ; translated by Stephen Snyder — A beautiful story about family, memory, and math. Yes, math. Ever since a traumatic head injury, a brilliant math professor has had only eighty minutes of short-term memory.  The housekeeper hired to care for the Professor returns to her job every morning to find that the Professor has forgotten her. Though he cannot create new memories, the Professor's mind is alive with elegant equations from his past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a new and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son.

The round house by Louise Erdrich — In the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. Joe tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. While his father, who is a tribal judge, tries to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.

The dog stars [kit] by Peter Heller — Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. He lives in the hangar of an abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope that a better life--something like his old life--exists beyond the airport. Knowing he will not have fuel to fly home, he follows the trail of the static-broken voice on the radio.

The dog stars by Peter Heller — Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. He lives in the hangar of an abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. But when a random transmission beams through his radio, the voice ignites a hope that a better life--something like his old life--exists beyond the airport. Knowing he will not have fuel to fly home, he follows the trail of the static-broken voice on the radio.

Before you know kindness: a novel by Chris Bohjalian — On a balmy July night in New Hampshire a shot rings out, and a man falls to the ground, terribly wounded. The hurt man is Spencer McCullough an animal rights  advocate. The shot that hit him was fired–accidentally?–by his adolescent daughter Charlotte at what she thought was a deer in the distance. Bohjalian uses his trademark emotional heft to create a literate page-turner is suspenseful, wryly funny, and humane.

Defending Jacob: a novel by William Landay — Andy Barber has been an Assistant District Attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than 20 years. He is respected in his community and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But after a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: His 14-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.

Every year CPL's Lunch and a Book Club picks our favorite reads of the year. These are our favorite reads for 2013. Feel free to join us! We meet on the second Thursday of every month at noon in CPL's Community Room.

Fiction

And the mountains echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor

The aviator's wife: a novel by Melanie Benjamin

The birth house: a novel by Ami Mckay

The cutting season: a novel by Attica Locke

Defending Jacob: a novel by William Landay

The fault in our stars by John Green

On Thursday January 9 at noon, we will be discussing:

Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking by Susan Cain — At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. People who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over brainstorming in teams. Although often labeled "quiet," it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society--from van Gogh's Sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer. Passionately argued, impressively researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so.

The Paris wife [kit]: a novel by Paula McLain — Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness-until she meets Ernest Hemingway. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in the fabled Lost Generation. Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging

On Thursday November 14 at noon, we will be discussing:

The Paris wife: a novel by Paula McLain — Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness-until she meets Ernest Hemingway. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in the fabled Lost Generation. Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging.

On Thursday October 10 at noon, we will be discussing the Everyone's Reading 2013 selection:

The secrets of happy families: improve your mornings, rethink family dinner, fight smarter, go out and play, and much more by Bruce Feiler — Squeezed between caring for aging parents and raising his children, bestselling author and New York Times family columnist Bruce Feiler set out on a three-year journey to find the smartest solutions and the most cutting-edge research about families. Instead of the usual family "experts," he sought out the most creative minds--from Silicon Valley to the Green Berets--and asked them what team-building exercises and problem-solving techniques they use with their families. A timely, counterintuitive book that answers the questions countless parents are asking: How do we manage the chaos of our lives? How do we teach our kids values? How do we make our family happier?

Say nice things about Detroit by Scott Lasser — The author will be joining us via Skype as we discuss this compelling urban portrait and touching love story. In a racially polarized, economically collapsing city a man struggles with the double shooting death of a high school classmate and her brother while still mourning the death of his own teenage son and coping with his mother's dementia. A starred review Booklist suggests: "Forget the grime and crime, political corruption and economic decay. Lasser's Detroit may be a troubled city, but it is one whose vibrant soul is writ large in the small actions of its loyal citizens. With a serene and steady hand, Lasser's spare but intense tale is a smart, intimate homage to the power of second chances."

October is National Book Group Month. In celebration, enter your group in a drawing for 10 copies of the Everyone's Reading book, The Secrets of Happy Families by Bruce S. Feiler. Drop off a photo of your book group at the Library Help Desk, or send a .jpg attachment to brandowk@cantonpl.org or use the form below. Please identify members of your group (first names are okay) from left to right.

Photos become the property of Canton Public Library and may be displayed in the library, on the library's webpage and social media.

Entry Deadline: September 20, 2013.

On Thursday, June 13 at noon, we will be discussing:

11/22/63: a novel by Stephen King — Jake Epping's friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession: to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson, in a different world of Ike and JFK and Elvis, of big American cars and sock hops and cigarette smoke everywhere. From the dank little city of Derry, Maine, to the warmhearted small town of Jodie, Texas, where Jake falls dangerously in love, every turn is leading eventually, of course, to a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and to Dallas, where the past becomes heart-stoppingly suspenseful, and where history might not be history anymore. Time-travel has never been so believable. Or so terrifying.

The tiger's wife: a novel by Téa Obreht — Natalia, a young doctor, arrives in a Balkan country on a mission of mercy. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. But Natalia is also confronting a private mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather's recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel. Searching for clues, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. "These stories," Natalia comes to understand, "run like secret rivers through all the other stories" of her grandfather's life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for.