1. A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League, by Ron Suskind (non-fiction)
At Ballou Senior High, a crime-infested school in Washington, D.C., honor students have learned to keep their heads down. Like most inner-city kids, they know that any special attention in a place this dangerous can make you a target of violence. But Cedric Jennings will not swallow his pride, and with unwavering support from his mother, he studies and strives as if his life depends on it and it does. >>more

2. Free Food For Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee (fiction)
"Competence can be a curse." So begins Min Jin Lee's epic novel about class, society, and identity. Casey Han's four years at Princeton have given her many things: "a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, a popular white boyfriend, an agnostic's closeted passion for reading the Bible, and a magna cum laude degree in economics. But no job and a number of bad habits.>>more

3. A General Theory of Love, by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini & Richard Lannon (non-fiction)
Poor, poor science--it gets blamed for everything. While it might be true that some of our alienation and unhappiness stem from a too-rational misunderstanding of emotion, it's also true that science is its own remedy. A General Theory of Love, by San Francisco psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, is a powerfully humanistic look at the natural history of our deepest feelings, and why a simple hug is often more important than a portfolio full of stock options. >>more-go to bottom of screen

4. The Romanov Prophecy: A Novel, by Steve Berry (fiction)
With this second Russian suspense novel, which focuses on the restoration of the Romanov dynasty, Berry shows he's honed his craftsince his somewhat shaky debut, The Amber Room (2003). Miles Lord, a workaholic African-American lawyer from Atlanta, is in Moscow to help Stefan Baklanov, the Romanov claimant his high-powered firm is backing. … A series of exotic clues propel the pair on an international scavenger hunt. Berry uses Russia—past and present—to excellent effect and makes sharp observations about the contemporary Russian scene...
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5. Married to Africa: A Love Story, by G. Pascal Zachary (visiting lecturer at Stanford U.) (fiction)

G. Pascal Zachary is a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal when he finds love in, of all places, the zoo in Accra, Ghana. That is where he meets Chizo Okon, the surrogate mother for an orphaned chimpanzee. In Married to Africa, Zachary tells their warm and humorous story, which is as much about the marriage of two cultures as it is about the marriage of two people.>>more

6. Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (professor of internal medicine at Stanford University) (fiction)
A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel—an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. >>more- go to bottom of screen

7. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Dorothy Kearns Goodwin (non-fiction)
The Pulitzer-winning historian examines the political career and leadership abilities of Abraham Lincoln by focusing on his cabinet and its unusual inclusion of three of the President's former rivals for the job. In this immense and immensely readable work, Ms. Goodwin uncovers how Lincoln's unusual combination of forgiving human spirit and savvy political instincts converted his enemies into (mostly) loyal friends and advisers.

8. No Ordinary Times, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (non-fiction)
A superb dual portrait of the 32nd President and his First Lady, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose extraordinary partnership steered the nation through the perilous WW II years.>>more-upper right-hand corner

9. The House Of Mondavi, by Julia Flynn Siler (non-fiction)
A story of 4 generations of the Mondavi family of vintners, their rise and fall. It’s a "Greek" tragedy, but also the story of family, fortune and CA history.>>more

10. Astrid and Veronika, by Linda Olsson (fiction)
A Swedish-born New Zealander who writes in English (fiction)A young writer from New Zealand rents a house in a small village in the middle of the harsh Swedish winter. She slowly befriends an elderly, reclusive neighbor who harbors dark secrets from her past. >>more

11. Sonata for Miriam, by Linda Olsson (fiction)
Swedish-born New Zealander who writes in English (fiction)Set partly in New Zealand and then in Krakow, Poland, where the protagonist, Adam, seeks to uncover his family's past and learn of his parents' fate during WW11, and finally to Sweden where he meets the mother of his child for the first time in 20 years and must face the impossible choice she once forced him to make.>>more

12. Leaving Mother Lake : A Girl at the End of the World, by Yang Erche Namu and Christine Mathieu (non-fiction).
With the help of anthropologist Mathieu, singer Namu describes growing up on the Chinese-Tibetan border in Moso country, "the Country of the Daughters." Detailing her late-1960s, early-'70s upbringing-she was known in her village as "the girl who was given back three times"-she sheds light on the unique matrilineal Moso culture, with its "walking marriages," where women take as many lovers as they want and the men continue to reside in their mothers' homes. Namu's determination to have a worldly life despite her family's poverty and her own inability to read and write lend this tale poignancy.>>more

13. My Half of the Sky by Jana McBurney- Lin (fiction)
A book about the life of an educated Chinese woman and women's roles in that society today.>>more
The author is local and she volunteered to come to our book group! Her contact e-mail is jmcburneylin@msn.com. Her blog is www.myhalfofthesky.blogspot.com

14. The Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell (non-fiction)
Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: Now that he's gotten us talking about the viral life of ideas and the power of gut reactions, Malcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the "self-made man," he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don't arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: "they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.">> more

15. Saint Joan of Arc, by Vita Sackville-West (non-fiction)
Joan of Arc was fourteen when she first heard the voices. She was seventeen when she took command of the armies of France - a peasant girl in the early fifteenth century in charge of a nation's forces. At nineteen she was captured by the British and tried as a witch by a church court. Before her twentieth birthday she was burned at the stake. In 1920 she was canonized as a saint.

V. Sackville-West, one of the great writers of the century - an eminent novelist, poet, and biographer and, along with Virginia Woolf, one of the central figures of the Bloomsbury group, tells one of the most extraordinary tales of history with a brilliance attuned to the religious and feminist implications of Joan's tragic life. Relying on the detailed historical records from her trial, Sackville-West reconstructs the scenes of the story: the slow growth of Joan's convictions, the great victories and the pathos of her death. We see Joan's courage in her trial, an illiterate teenager facing the learned churchmen of Rouen in a fatal battle of wits.

And my own postscript: Some of you may have visited Sissinghurst in England. It is the house and garden of V. Sackville-West and has a famous white garden, among other treasures. Joan's house is also open to visitors in Domremy, France, but it is most unlikely that it is original. The general area of her burning at the stake is in Rouen together with a very modern church, which seems very out-of-place for her in this so beautiful medieval town. Go figure. Though the subject of this book is Saint Joan, it is not really a religious book, being more political and historical.

16. Pretty Birds, by Scott Simon (fiction)
Irena Zaric, a high-school basketball star in Sarajevo, is more preoccupied with game strategy and an affair with her coach than with her Muslim ethnicity. But when the Bosnian Serbs begin their campaign of ethnic cleansing, Irena and her parents find themselves among throngs of Muslims brutalized and driven from their homes. They take refuge in her grandmother's apartment and begin a regime for survival that has the father digging ditches for the military. Irena brings home beer and cigarettes from an ersatz job in a brewery that provides cover for a team of snipers led by Tedic, a Muslim with a knack for spotting talent he can use. Irena becomes disturbingly good at her task, growing a veneer of cynicism even as she pores over outdated Western magazines for fashion news and the latest antics of Madonna and Michael Jackson. Simon, who has covered the siege of Sarajevo for NPR, puts the events in a war-torn land into human perspective with memorable characters struggling with issues of ethnicity, survival, friendship, and betrayal.

17. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrow (fiction).
As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton discovers her next subject in a book club on Guernsey--a club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.

18. Replay, by Ken Grimwood (fiction)
The possibility of traveling back in time to relive one's life has long fascinated science fiction writers. Without a single gesture toward an explanation, this mainstream novel recounts the story of a man and a woman mysteriously given the ability to live their lives over. Each dies in 1988 only to awaken as a teenager in 1963 with adult knowledge and wisdom intact and the ability to make a new set of choices. Different spouses, lovers, children, careers, await them in each go-round of the past 25 years, as well as slightly altered versions of world events. Their deep commitment to one another continues through the centuries of their many lifetimes. This delightful and completely engrossing story will appeal to a wide variety of readers.

19. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky (non-fiction) This book was recommended by Jon Saxe (Myrna Marshall’s husband….every time we talked about good books, he mentioned it. Only when I found it in my daughter’s bookcase, started I reading it….and couldn’t put it down. Fascinating read!>>more

20. Atonement, by Ian McEwan (fiction)
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony’s sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge.
By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl’s scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life..>>more

21. Shakespeare: The World as Stage, by Bill Bryson (fiction)
From Publisher’s Weekly: ….bestselling author Bryson (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid) does what he does best: marshaling the usual little facts that others might overlook—for example, that in Shakespeare's day perhaps 40% of women were pregnant when they got married—to paint a portrait of the world in which the Bard lived and prospered. Bryson's curiosity serves him well, as he delves into subjects as diverse as the reliability of the extant images of Shakespeare, a brief history of the theater in England and the continuing debates about whether William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon really wrote Shakespeare's works. Bryson is a pleasant and funny guide to a subject at once overexposed and elusive—as Bryson puts it, he is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron—forever there and not there.

22. Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay (fiction)
From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself. Already translated into 15 languages, the novel is De Rosnay's 10th (but her first written in English, her first language). It beautifully conveys Julia's conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah's trials so riveting, her innocence so absorbing, that the book is hard to put down.

23. China Road, by Rob Gifford (non-fiction)
Here is China end to end, told from its equivalent of Route 66 as Gifford journeys from Shanghai to the distant west, talking to truck drivers, merchants, hermits and whores. Gifford's historical knowledge and understanding of the country's contradictions help the reader understand the challenges that confront China's future.

24. Still Alice, by Lisa Genova (fiction)
Neuroscientist and debut novelist Genova mines years of experience in her field to craft a realistic portrait of early onset Alzheimer's disease. Alice Howland has a career not unlike Genova's—she's an esteemed psychology professor at Harvard, living a comfortable life in Cambridge with her husband, John, arguing about the usual (making quality time together, their daughter's move to L.A.) when the first symptoms of Alzheimer's begin to emerge. >> more

25. Old Filth, by Jane Gardam (fiction)
Sir Edward Feathers has progressed from struggling young barrister to wealthy expatriate lawyer to distinguished retired judge, living out his last days in comfortable seclusion in Dorset. The engrossing and moving account of his life, from birth in colonial Malaya, to Wales, where he is sent as a "Raj orphan,"to Oxford, his career and marriage, parallels much of the 20th century's torrid and twisted history.>> more

26. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver (non-fiction)
Barbara, her husband and daughter move from Arizona to a farm in the southern region of Appalachia where they enter into a yearlong project of eating local. They abandoned the industrial food pipeline to live a rural life--vowing that, for one year, they'd only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves or learn to live without it.

27. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan (non-fiction)
Pollan follows each of the food chains--industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves--from the source to the final meal, always emphasizing our coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. The surprising answers Pollan offers have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral impact.

28. A Crack in the Edge of the World, by Simon Winchester (non-fiction)
This is the story of America and the great earthquake of 1906. Simon Winchester tells us the geological story behind the earthquake of 1906, and its impact on San Francisco, California and the world.

29. American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, by Jon Meachem (non-fiction)
Andrew Jackson, his intimate circle of friends, and his tumultuous times are at the heart of this remarkable book about the man who rose from nothing to create the modern presidency. Jon Meacham delivers the definitive : human portrait of a pivotal president who forever changed the American presidency–and America itself.

30. Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History, by Patrick Hunt, Stanford University Archaeologist (non-fiction)
The world's greatest archaeological finds and what they tell us about lost civilizations and how these discoveries permanently altered our worldview. Included are: The Rosetta Stone; Troy; Nineveh's Assyrian Library; King Tut's Tomb; Machu Picchu; Pompeii; the Dead Sea Scrolls; Thera; Olduvai Gorge and the Tomb of 10,000 Warriors.

31. Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan (fiction)
It is a novel with a strong historical background about Frank Lloyd Wright and his love affair with Mamah Cheney, a married woman and mother of 2 children.>>more

32. The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, (fiction)
Balram Halwai, the central character, grows up in a rural part of India. Later he moves to Delhi and lastly Bangalore. He is servant, philosopher, entrepreneur, and murderer. He tells his fascinating story over the course of seven nights of how he came to be a success in life, having only his own wits to help him. A real page-turner set in modern day India illustrating its duality of poverty and success. (Man Booker Prize).

33. The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink (fiction)
The story takes place in postwar Germany. A young man, Michael Berg, who narrates his story, is rescued by a woman, Hanna, when he falls ill on the way home from school. Soon after they become lovers but then one day Hanna disappears. Eight years later Michael unexpectedly encounters Hanna and learns of the secrets she has been carrying for all these years. Beautifully written and thought provoking.

34. The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson (fiction)
It's about the 1893 World Fair in Chicago: the preparations, the architects, the building, and the event itself - during which a serial killer is at large. These two stories alternate, and make for fascinating reading.>>more

35. The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Ehrlich (fiction)
A great story, about an immigrant from Germany and his descendants in the US - a story of love, death, redemption, and resurrection, according to the Amazon review, and very well told.>>more