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Research Guides

Hit the Book(s) Club : This semester's book choices

The home base for all information about the Book Club run and sponsored by the University of Idaho Library

Roll 1, book 1

Contemporary:

The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin

An extraordinary friendship. A lifetime of stories.
Their last one begins here.

Life is short. No-one knows that better than seventeen year old Lenni living on the terminal ward. But as she is about to learn, it's not only what you make of life that matters, but who you share it with.

Dodging doctor's orders, she joins an art class where she bumps into fellow patient Margot, a rebel-hearted eighty three year old from the next ward. Their bond is instant as they realize that together they have lived an astonishing one hundred years.

To celebrate their shared century, they decide to paint their life stories: of growing old and staying young, of giving joy, of receiving kindness, of losing love, of finding the person who is everything.

As their extraordinary friendship deepens, it becomes vividly clear that life is not done with Lenni and Margot yet. (from Goodreads)

Reading Schedule & Metting times 

Discussing pages 1-106

  • Meeting in the Library's Team Room 2 (Room 132), 1st floor, straight back along the back wall. 
  • Friday August 30th from 3:30-4:30pm

Discussing pages 107-214

  • Meeting in the Library's Team Room 2 (Room 132), 1st floor, straight back along the back wall. 
  •  Friday September 13th from 3:30-4:30pm

Discussing pages 214-end 

  • Meeting in the Library's Team Room 2 (Room 132), 1st floor, straight back along the back wall. 
  • Friday September 27th from 3:30-4:30pm

Roll 2, Book 2

Horror

House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland

 

Seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow has always been strange. Something happened to her and her two older sisters when they were children, something they can’t quite remember but that left each of them with an identical half-moon scar at the base of their throats.

Iris has spent most of her teenage years trying to avoid the weirdness that sticks to her like tar. But when her eldest sister, Grey, goes missing under suspicious circumstances, Iris learns just how weird her life can get: horned men start shadowing her, a corpse falls out of her sister’s ceiling, and ugly, impossible memories start to twist their way to the forefront of her mind.

As Iris retraces Grey’s last known footsteps and follows the increasingly bizarre trail of breadcrumbs she left behind, it becomes apparent that the only way to save her sister is to decipher the mystery of what happened to them as children.

The closer Iris gets to the truth, the closer she comes to understanding that the answer is dark and dangerous – and that Grey has been keeping a terrible secret from her for years. (from Goodreads) 

 

Reading Schedule & Metting times 

  • Discussing chapters 1-9

    • Meeting in the Library's Team Room 2 (Room 132), 1st floor, straight back along the back wall. 
    •  Friday October 18th 3:30-4:30pm
  • Discussing chapters 10-16

    • Meeting in the Library's Team Room 2 (Room 132), 1st floor, straight back along the back wall. 
    • Friday November 1st 3:30-4:30pm
  • Discussing chapters 17-end 

    • Meeting in the Library's Team Room 2 (Room 132), 1st floor, straight back along the back wall. 
    • Friday November 15th 3:30-4:30pm

Bonus book!

Wild and Distant Seas by Tara Roberts 

Evangeline Hussey has made a home for herself on Nantucket, though she knows she is still an outsider to the island’s small, close-knit community, one that by 1849 has started to feel the decline of a once-thriving whaling industry. Her husband, Hosea, and the life they built together, was once all she needed—but now Hosea is gone, lost at sea. Evangeline is only able to hold on to his inn, and her place on the island, by employing a curious gift to glimpse and re-form the recent memories of those who would cast her out.

One night, an idealistic sailor appears on her doorstep asking her to call him Ishmael. He seeks only a warm bed and a bowl of chowder, and yet suddenly, unsettlingly, her careful illusion begins to fracture. He soon sails away with Ahab to hunt an infamous white whale, and Evangeline is left to forge a new life from the pieces that remain.

Her choices ripple through generations, across continents, and into the depths of the sea, in a narrative that follows Evangeline and her descendants from mid-nineteenth century Nantucket to Boston, Brazil, Florence, and Idaho. Moving, beautifully written, and elegantly conceived, Wild and Distant Seas takes Moby-Dick as its starting point, but Tara Karr Roberts brings four remarkable women to life in a spellbinding epic all her own. --from publisher

Meetings

  • Discussing the whole book

    • Meeting in the Library's Team Room 2 (Room 132), 1st floor, straight back along the back wall. 
    • Friday October 25th 3:30-4:30pm
    • Discussing the whole book

  • Q&A with Tara Roberts

    • Meeting in the Library's Instruction Room 212A, 2nd floor (where we had the movie party) 
    • Friday November 8th 3:30-4:30pm

Reviews of book 1

Web Reviews

 

 

BookTube Reviews

 

 

 

Reviews of book 2

Web Reviews

 

BookTube Reviews