BOOK SHARE - December 17

 SoVLBC BOOK SHARE

Approximately 3 minutes

Title of Book & Pub Date:

Author Info:

Tell about the book (genre - setting - characters - other)

Why did you read this book?: 

Similar books: 

August 20 - November Road

November Road by Lou Berney

Set against the assassination of JFK, a poignant and evocative crime novel that centers on a desperate cat-and-mouse chase across 1960s America—a story of unexpected connections, daring possibilities, and the hope of second chances from the Edgar Award-winning author of The Long and Faraway Gone.

Frank Guidry’s luck has finally run out.

A loyal street lieutenant to New Orleans’ mob boss Carlos Marcello, Guidry has learned that everybody is expendable. But now it’s his turn—he knows too much about the crime of the century: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Within hours of JFK’s murder, everyone with ties to Marcello is turning up dead, and Guidry suspects he’s next: he was in Dallas on an errand for the boss less than two weeks before the president was shot. With few good options, Guidry hits the road to Las Vegas, to see an old associate—a dangerous man who hates Marcello enough to help Guidry vanish.

Guidry knows that the first rule of running is "don’t stop," but when he sees a beautiful housewife on the side of the road with a broken-down car, two little daughters and a dog in the back seat, he sees the perfect disguise to cover his tracks from the hit men on his tail. Posing as an insurance man, Guidry offers to help Charlotte reach her destination, California. If she accompanies him to Vegas, he can help her get a new car.

For her, it’s more than a car— it’s an escape. She’s on the run too, from a stifling existence in small-town Oklahoma and a kindly husband who’s a hopeless drunk.

It’s an American story: two strangers meet to share the open road west, a dream, a hope—and find each other on the way.

Charlotte sees that he’s strong and kind; Guidry discovers that she’s smart and funny. He learns that’s she determined to give herself and her kids a new life; she can’t know that he’s desperate to leave his old one behind.

Another rule—fugitives shouldn’t fall in love, especially with each other. A road isn’t just a road, it’s a trail, and Guidry’s ruthless and relentless hunters are closing in on him. But now Guidry doesn’t want to just survive, he wants to really live, maybe for the first time.

Everyone’s expendable, or they should be, but now Guidry just can’t throw away the woman he’s come to love.

And it might get them both killed

Virtual Book Discussion - Zoom - June 18 at 2:00 pm

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

With her disarming, intimate, completely accessible voice, and dry sense of humor, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups and downs in I Feel Bad About My Neck, a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself.

CANCELLED - April 16 - Mansfield Park by Jane Austin

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, our April 16  discussion of Mansfield Park by Jane Austin is canceled.

Stay healthy!

CANCELED - March 19, The Shipping News

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, our March 19 discussion of The Shipping News by Annie Proulx is canceled.

Stay healthy!

March 19 - The Shipping News

The Shipping News , Annie Proulx, 1993

Winner of the Pulitzer 1994 Prize and the National Book Award

Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts.

An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle's Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family's unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives.

Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above 70 degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it's easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels.

In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents).

As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets.

By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover's knot.

February 21 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
Fans around the world adore the bestselling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series and its proprietor, Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma  Ramotswe—with help from her loyal associate, Grace Makutsi—navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, good humor, and the occasional cup of tea.

This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith’s widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witchdoctors.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency received two Booker Judges’ Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement.

January 16 - The Women by T. C. Boyle

The Women by T. C. Boyle 

Welcome to the troubled, tempestuous world of Frank Lloyd Wright. Scandalous affairs rage behind closed doors, broken hearts are tossed aside, fires rip through the wings of the house and paparazzi lie in wait outside the front door for the latest tragedy in this never-ending saga. This is the home of the great architect of the twentieth century, a man of extremes in both his work and his private life: at once a force of nature and an avalanche of need and emotion that sweeps aside everything in its path. Sharp, savage and subtle in equal measure, "The Women" plumbs the chaos, horrors and uncontainable passions of a formidable American icon.

Book Talk - December 19

SVLB Book Talk
December 19, 2019

Lucinda                        My Sister the Serial Killer
                                    Oyinkan Braithwaite

                                    Quichotte
                                    Salman Rushdie

Penny                          The Alice Network
                                    Kate Quinn

Stacy                            The Guardians
                                    John Grisham

Jan                               The Parade
                                    Dave Eggers

Tracey                         Tahoe Deathfall
                                    Todd Borg

Debi                             News of the World
                                    Paulette Jiles

Anne                            The Merci Train?
                                    Jan ???

Jim                               Sapiens
                                    Yuval Noah Harari

Deb                              To Say Nothing of the Dog
                                    Connie Willis

                                    Three Men in a Boat
                                    Jerome K. Jerome

Meredith                     Flavia Series
                                    Alan Bradley

Kenn                            Story of the Road
                                    Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Kay T                           The Overstory
                                    Richard Powers

Sharon                         A Spark of Light
                                    Jodi Picoult

Brenda                        Once Upon a River
                                    Diane Setterfield

Pam                             The Library Book
                                    Susan Orlean

Laurie                          The Day the World Came to Town
                                    Jim Defede

Bari                             Dissolving Illusions
                                    Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk

                                    End of Alzheimers
                                    Dale E. Bredesen