Forbes Library 2nd Monday Book Group

This book group, which meets at the library in Northampton, MA, began in January 2003. We meet at 6:30pm on the second Monday of the month, except when there is a Monday holiday. Please check the Forbes calendar for details. Email hcethatsme@gmail.com to be added to the notification list.

Upcoming books

October 7, 2024 (2nd Monday is Indigenous People's Day): The Pole, by J.M. Coetzee (2022), 176 pp
November 4, 2024 (2nd Monday is Veteran's Day): The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa (translated, 1992), 282 pp - Linda will lead
December 9, 2024: The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison (banned book, 1970), 226 pp - Hilary may lead
January 13, 2025: Western Lane, by Chetna Maroo (2023), 149 pp

Booklist so far....

2003

Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan
Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty
Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Isiguro
Cannibal Galaxy, by Cynthia Ozick
Empire Falls, by Richard Russo
Sea Glass, by Anita Shreve
The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
Waiting, by Ha Jin
The Bone People, by Keri Hulme
We Were the Mulvaneys, by Joyce Carol Oates

2004

Atonement, by Ian McEwan
Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
Headlong, by Michael Frayn
The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
Anil's Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje
Soul Mountain, by Gao Zingjian
Emma, by Jane Austen
The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx

2005

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
A Personal Matter, by Kenzaburo Oe (read with The Shawl)
The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick (read with A Personal Matter)
A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Golden Bowl, by Henry James
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter
Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner
The Known World, by Edward P. Jones
Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

2006

Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth
A Home at the End of the World, by Michael Cunningham
Absalom, Absalom, by William Faulkner
Thinking in Pictures, by Temple Grandin
The Great Fire, by Shirley Hazzard
The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif
The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri
Saturday, by Ian McEwan
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
"Brokeback Mountain" from Close Range, by Annie Proulx

2007

Lost in Translation, by Eva Hoffman
Graceland, by Chris Abani
Fall on Your Knees, by Ann-Marie Macdonald
Heir to the Glimmering World, by Cynthia Ozick
No Great Mischief, by Alistair Macleod
The Sea, by John Banville
The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch
Speciman Days, by Michael Cunningham
The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai
The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Snow, by Orhan Pamuk
The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields

2008

Four Souls, by Louise Erdrich
The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard
Typical American, by Gish Jen
Flower Children, by Maxine Swann
The Street, by Ann Petry
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor
Blindness, by Jose Saramago
Flesh and Blood, by Michael Cunningham
A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley

2009

Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem
Mao II, by Don DeLillo
Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
First Light, by Charles Baxter
The Conservationist, by Nadine Gordimer
Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
Arthur and George, by Julian Barnes
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
The Leopard, by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
In the Pond, by Ha Jin
A Case of Exploding Mangoes, by Mohammed Hanif
The Gathering, by Anne Enright

2010

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
Persuasion, by Jane Austen
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger
Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver
A Passage to India, by E M Forster
On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan
A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson
Regeneration, by Pat Barker

2011

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
A Room with a View, by E M Forster
People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks
The Eye in the Door, by Pat Barker
Mr. Pip, by Lloyd Jones
A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khalid Hosseini
The Inn at Lake Devine, by Elinor Lipman
Veronika Decides to Die, by Paulo Coelho
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
Bridge of Sighs, by Richard Russo
The Poet and the Murder, by Simon Worrall

2012

The Darling, by Russell Banks
The Ransom, by David Malouf
Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels
The Ghost Road, by Pat Barker
Last Man in Tower, by Aravind Adiga
To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
Blackwater Lightship, by Colm Tóibín
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss
The Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich
A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

2013

The Privileges, by Jonathan Dee
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
The Master, by Colm Tóibín
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon
Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor
Italian Shoes, by Henning Mankell
Continental Drift, by Russell Banks
My Antonia, by Willa Cather
Quarantine, by Jim Crace
Home, by Toni Morrison
Ancient Light, by John Banville

2014

The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller
The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz
The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey
Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
Ru, Kim Thúy
Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
Tinkers, Paul Harding
White Dog Fell from the Sky, Eleanor Morse
The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson
Mission to America, Walter Kirn

2015

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Alice Munro
The Road Home, by Alice Tremain
The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst
The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd
Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson
The Harvest, by Jim Crace
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by R L Stevenson; Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
A Moveable Feast, by Earnest Hemingway
The Last Time They Met, by Anita Shreve

2016

The Enchanted, by Rene Denfeld
The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
I Curse the River of Time, Per Petterson
Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen
Etta and Otto and Russell and James, by Emma Hooper
The Children Act, by Ian McEwan
Nora Webster, Colm Tóibín
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
"The Dead" (from Dubliners), by James Joyce

2017

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy
Pompeii, by Robert Harris
Snowdrops, by Andrew Miller
The Museum of Extraordinary Things, by Alice Hoffman
Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong
The Noise of Time, by Julian Barnes
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds
Claire of the Sea Light, by Edwidge Danticat
The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane
My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante

2018

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather
Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh
How to Be Both, by Ali Smith
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mary Haddon
Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré
A Bend in the River, by V S Naipaul
The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin
Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler
The Great Passage, by Shion Miura

2019

NOTE: In 2020 we met through March when the Forbes Library closed in-person meetings due to COVID; our group switched to using Zoom in April for Angle of Repose, then took a break from May through September. We resumed Zoom meetings in October for the rest of 2020, all of 2021, and most of 2022 when we switched to a hybrid version in late summer.

Homecoming, by Yaa Gyasi
The Sellout, by Paul Beatty
Moon Tiger, by Penelope Lively
A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki
Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders
Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje
The Welsh Girl, by Peter Davies
Liars Club, by Mary Karr
An Artist of the Floating World, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Indian Killer, by Sherman Alexie
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E Butler
A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby

2020

Disobedience, by Jane Hamilton
Housegirl, by Michael Donker
Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry
Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner(Zoom)

---hiatus May-September---

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
Over Story, by Richard Powers

2021

Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson
Machines Like Me, by Ian McEwan
Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker
Howards End, by E M Forster
Autumn, by Ali Smith
The Only Story, by Julian Barnes
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K Dick
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Hot Milk, by Deborah Levey
Agent Running Through the Field, by John Le Carré
The House in the Cerulean Sea, T J Klune

2022

Red at the Bone, by Jacqueline Woodson
Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks
Heart's Invisible Furies, by John Boyne
Sea Monsters, by Chloe Aridjis
Justine, by Lawrence Durrell
The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett
Improvement, by Joan Silber
Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters
Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee
Hamnet, by Magggie O'Farrell
Winter, by Ali Smith
The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford

2023

Jan Milkman, by Anna Burns
Feb Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo
Mar The Enormous Room, by e e cummings
Apr Spring, by Ali Smith
May Light in August, by William Faulkner
Jun The Trees, by Percival Everett
Jul The Colony, by Audrey Magee
Aug The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton
Sep Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng
Oct 2: Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan (2021)
Nov 13: Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead (2021)
Dec 11: The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, Joshua Cohen (2021)

Jan 8, 2024: The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Ruth Ozeki (2021)
Feb 12, 2024: Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk (translated, 2007) 416 pp
Mar 11, 2024: This Other Eden, by Paul Harding (2023), 222 pp
Apr 8, 2024: The Quiet American, by Graham Greene (1955), 209 pp
May 13, 2024: Time Shelter, by Georgi Gaspadinov (2020), 304 pp
June 10, 2024: My Russian Grandmother and her American Vacuum Cleaner, by Meir Shalev (2018), 224 pp
July 8, 2024: Summer, by Ali Smith (2020), 393 pp
August 12, 2024: If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery (2022), 272 pp
September 9, 2024: Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart (2020), 448 pp