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Register Your Book Club
with Words Worth Books! |
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Words Worth Books
offers 20% off 5 copies or more to book clubs, provided
that the book is a regular order. Register your book club name in our
database to receive this discount and we will shelve your choices
under your club's name in the store. Also we will reserve event
tickets and choice seating for your book club to our author events
series. And if your not sure of what to read we are happy to come to
your next club meeting to make suggestions OR to host your next
meeting in the store. Email
Dave for more info or to
register.
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Great Book Club Books |
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Many publishers now feature discussion
guides in the back pages of their fiction. This makes it easier to
choose books that work for your club. Below are some of our favorite
book club picks along with accompanying suggestions. At the bottom
of this page are tips on running a book club. |
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Recommended: |
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Further Suggestions: |
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The Ultimate Book Club Organizer (We
use this at the store!) |
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The Ultimate Book Club Organizer -- Book
group enthusiasts rejoice! This one-of-a-kind organizer keeps book
club information in one easily accessible place, with pages for
jotting down reading notes and group members' contact info, a book
log, and a meeting calendar. There are also fun extras like
book-rating stickers, adhesive bookplates, a pocket for storing
clippings and reviews, and handy bookmarks that double as a place
for taking notes and recording the next meeting date while reading.
Includes: 36 perforated bookmarks, 36 adhesive bookplates, 90
stickers, pencil pouch, pocket for storage |
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The Book Of Negroes by Lawrence
Hill
(2009 One Book One Community
Choice) |
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Further Suggestions: |
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Abducted as an 11-year-old child from
her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea
in a coffle - a string of slaves - Aminata Diallo is forced to live
as a slave in South Carolina. Eventually she forges her way to
freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and
registering her name in the historic "Book of Negroes". This book,
an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record
of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US
for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they
sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own. Aminata's
eventual return to Sierra Leone - passing ships carrying thousands
of slaves bound for America - is an engrossing account of an obscure
but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark
on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey. |
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- Roots by Alex Haley
- The Book of Night Women by Marlon
James
- Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo
- See
Bronwyn if you
would like further suggestions for novels of this kind. |
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Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
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Further Suggestions: |
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Orphaned and
penniless at the height of the Depression, Jacob Jankowski escapes
everything he knows by jumping on a passing train—and inadvertently
runs away with the circus. So begins
Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen’s
darkly beautiful tale about the characters who inhabit the
less-than-greatest show on earth. Jacob finds a place tending the
circus animals, including a seemingly untrainable elephant named
Rosie. He also comes to know Marlena, the star of the equestrian
act—and wife of August, a charismatic but cruel animal trainer.
Caught between his love for Marlena and his need to belong in the
crazy family of travelling performers, Jacob is freed only by a
murderous secret that will bring the big top down. Water for
Elephants is an enchanting page-turner, the kind of book that
creates a world that engulfs you from the first page to the last. A
national bestseller in Canada and a New York Times bestseller
in the United States, this is a book destined to become a beloved
fiction classic. |
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- The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
- Clara Callan by Richard Wright
- The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
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The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey
Niffenegger |
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Further Suggestions: |
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This
is the story of 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 finds himself periodically displaced in time, pulled to
moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His
disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable,
alternately harrowing and amusing. The Time Traveler’s Wife
depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare's marriage and
their passionate love for each other, as the story unfolds from both
points of view. Clare and Henry attempt to live normal lives,
pursuing familiar goals -- steady jobs, good friends, children of
their own. All of this is threatened by something they can neither
prevent nor control, making their story intensely moving and
entirely unforgettable. |
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- The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
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The Thirteenth Tale by Diane
Setterfield |
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Further Suggestions: |
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Biographer Margaret
Lea returns one night to her apartment above her father's
antiquarian bookshop. On her steps she finds a letter. It is a
hand-written request from one of Britain's most prolific and
well-loved novelists. Vida Winter, gravely ill, wants to recount her
life story before it is too late, and she wants Margaret to be the
one to capture her history. The request takes Margaret by surprise –
she doesn't know the author, nor has she read any of Miss Winter's
dozens of novels. Late one night, while pondering whether to accept
the task of recording Miss Winter's personal story, Margaret begins
to read her father's rare copy of Miss Winter's Thirteen Tales of
Change and Desperation. She is spellbound by the stories and
confused when she realizes the book only contains twelve stories.
Where is the thirteenth tale? Intrigued, Margaret agrees to meet
Miss Winter and act as her biographer. |
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-Shadow of the Wind by Carlos R. Zafon
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel
Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows |
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Further Suggestions: |
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“ I wonder how
the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret
homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.”
January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second
World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book
subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a
man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has
come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb…. As
Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn
into the world of this man and his friends—and what a wonderfully
eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie
Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were
discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their
island—boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters,
from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all. |
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- The Tenth Gift by Jane Johnson
- The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys
- 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene
Hanff |
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The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara
Kingsolver |
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Further Suggestions: |
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The Poisonwood
Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan
Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and
mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them
everything they believe they will need from home (cake mixes to
embroidery), but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to
Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows
is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable
reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial
Africa. It is also a compelling history of one Africa's most
troubled and resource wealthy countries with each chapter told from
the perspective of a different daughter. This is one of Bronwyn's
all-time favorites! |
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- Unbowed by Wangari Maathai
- Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali |
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The Disappeared by Kim Echlin |
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Further Suggestions: |
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Hamish
Hamilton Canada has just published Kim Echlin's third novel and it's
unreal. The Disappeared is a slim passionate work about the love
between Ann Greaves, a Montrealer and her Cambodian lover Serey, a
musician and student in self-imposed exile in the late 70s during
the time of Pol Pot and the infamous Killing Fields. Echlin takes on
a huge subject with deftness and an extraordinary poetics. She has
effortlessly blended both an evocative language with an almost
anthropological telling of Serey's returning to Cambodia during the
brief period when the borders opened and before the genocide and
Vietnamese invasion. Echlin has compressed the time-line, so I may
be off in that regard. Nevertheless, The Disappeared is
extraordinary--a heartbreaker of a novel possessed of beauty and a
fearless surefootedness. I'd be shocked to read a more affecting
Canadian novel this year.
-Dave Worsley |
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- Touch the Dragon by Karen Connelly
- The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly
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Eat, Pray Love by Elizabeth
Gilbert |
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Further Suggestions: |
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This beautifully
written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and
reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice
to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success
(marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she
truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three
different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures,
Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of
devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the
Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise
and funny author (whom Booklist calls "Anne Lamott's hip, yoga-
practicing, footloose younger sister") is poised to garner yet more
adoring fans |
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- Holy Cow by Sara MacDonald
- Travelling Mercies by Anne Lamott
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People of the Book by Geraldine
Brooks |
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Further Suggestions: |
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In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the
job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed
manuscript, which has been rescued once again from Serb shelling
during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of
the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with figurative
paintings. When Hanna, a caustic loner with a passion for her work,
discovers a series of tiny artifacts in its ancient binding—an
insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—she
becomes determined to unlock the book’s mysteries. As she seeks the
counsel of scientists and specialists, the reader is ushered into an
exquisitely detailed and atmospheric past, tracing the book’s
journey from its creation to its salvation.
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- try Robert Helenga's fiction if you
enjoy this title |
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Amphibian by Carla Gunn |
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Further Suggestions: |
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Nine-year-old Phineas William Walsh has an encyclopedic knowledge of
the natural world. He's obsessed with animals; its practically all
he talks about, and he spends all his spare time watching the Green
Channel or researching obscure facts on the internet or in books.
And he's worried sick about what humans are doing to the planet and
its other animals.
But
although he seems to know absolutely everything about the animal
world, what he doesn't know is why his granddad had to die or why
Lyle the bully always picks on him or why his parents cant live
together.
When
his Grade 4 class gets a pet frog a Whites Tree Frog from Australia
it becomes the perfect focus for all Phin's worrying. He cant bear
to see Cuddles penned up in a cage so very far from his natural
habitat just for the amusement of humans. Its just another example
of how cruel and self-centred humans are. And so Phin and his best
pal, Bird, are spurred to action. |
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- Highest Tide by Jim Lynch |
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Secret History by Donna Tartt |
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Further Suggestions: |
Truly
deserving of the accolade a modern classic, Donna Tartt’s novel is a
remarkable achievement—both compelling and elegant, dramatic and
playful.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group
of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college
discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the
humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond
the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly
and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and
how easy it is to kill. |
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Dismantled
by Jennifer Mcmahon |
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City of Thieves by David Benioff |
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Further Suggestions: |
The hook is fairly simple. Two young
Russians are spared prosecution during the Nazi’s siege of Leningrad
by an influential Soviet colonel. He’s proposed to bury their crimes
if they can procure a dozen eggs for use in his daughter’s wedding
cake. Bodies are stacked like chord wood and even bread is made from
things inedible, but Lev and Kolya pool their talents in a desperate
and at times comic attempt to expedite the impossible request and
save their skins.
An historic city beset by lawlessness and the German war machine
carries the novel along like a tank.
City of Thieves is the whole package, a literary novel with a
knockout punch. -
David Worsley |
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- How I
Live Now by Meg Rosoff |
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Starting & Maintaining a
Book Club |
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Here are some key questions to
answer when laying the foundation of your book club:
How many people
should be in the group? We find 8-10 works best for
conversation.
Can we bring in new
members? Do we want to limit it to gender or age range?
How often should we
meet? Once a month to every six weeks is best.
Where should we meet?
Find a central coffee shop that is book-club friendly or rotate
through homes.
What kind of books
are we going to read? Decide on a broad genre such as Historical
fiction or bestsellers, classics or one prolific author. To
narrow and you limit your reading enjoyment.
How do we pick our
books? Some groups have a committee or rotates through members
who take turns choosing. Other groups will dedicate one meeting to
choosing all the books that they would like to read for the coming
year. If a member chooses the book they should also have discussion
questions prepared.
How do we find books?
Words Worth Books is your first resource. Browse through the
store, ask our staff, join our monthly mailing list. Many paperback
fiction comes with discussion group guides in the back of the book
so that can make discussion leading easier.
What are the secrets
to a successful book club? Have fun. There are no right or wrong
answers. This isn't school so reading the book shouldn't feel like
homework. This is all about laughing, learning and engaging in
thoughtful conversation. Well planned meetings are key. Planning
books around social events can help as well. For example choose
books based on our Author events so you can hear the author speak.
Need Help? Join
one of our in-house book clubs, or
email David to come
and speak to your book club with reading suggestions or add to your
name to our book club list. Once we have ten names then we host the
inaugural meeting at the store.
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