Book Club Kits

Essentially everything you need to get started with your own book discussion group is available from the Durham County Library.

Each Book Club Kit contains 15 copies of one title and a handy tote bag. Book discussion guides along with information about the author can be found next to each title below (click on the pdf icon).

Look for a kit at your location, or request a kit directly from the online catalog.

A Book Club Kit is checked out to a single group member who is responsible for all of the materials (except print outs). The group may keep the kit for 6 weeks.

Book Club Kits are made possible by the Friends of the Durham Library.

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Titles Available

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
An ordinary man finds that his life has been made extraordinary by the catastrophic intrusion of history when, in 1968 his adored daughter plants a bomb that kills a stranger, hurling her father out of the longed-for American pastoral. FICTION

Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown and locally-grown food. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by.” NON-FICTION

Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
An eccentric family falls apart at the seams in an absorbing debut that finds congruencies between the elementary school spelling-bee circuit, Jewish mysticism, Eastern religious cults and compulsive behavior. FICTION

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
How do we think without thinking, seem to make choices in an instant--in the blink of an eye--that actually aren't as simple as they seem? Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, the author reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables. NON-FICTION

Bootlegger’s Daughter by Margaret Maron (North Carolina author)
This first novel in Maron's Imperfect series, which won the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 1993, introduces heroine Deborah Knott, an attorney and the daughter of an infamous North Carolina bootlegger. FICTION, MYSTERY

Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska
This masterwork of American immigrant literature is set in the 1920s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, who rebels against her father's rigid conception of Jewish womanhood. FICTION

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
Immortalized in a film starring Audrey Hepburn, Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is full of sharp wit and in its exuberant cast of characters vividly captures the restless, slightly madcap era of early 1940s New York. FICTION

Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Monica Ali's debut novel chronicles the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi girl so sickly at birth that the midwife at first declares her stillborn. Brick Lane combines the wide scope of a social novel about the struggles of Islamic immigrants in pre- and post-9/11 England with the intimate story of Nazneen, one of the more memorable heroines to come along in a long time. FICTION

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
In what could be construed as a coming-of-age story for thirtysomethings, Gilbert leaves behind an excruciating divorce, tumultuous affair, and debilitating depression as she sets off on a yearlong quest to bridge the gulf between body, mind, and spirit. NON-FICTION

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
The titular Algernon is a laboratory mouse who has undergone surgery to increase his intelligence by artificial means. The story is told as a series of progress reports written by Charlie, the first human test subject for the surgery, and touches upon many different ethical and moral themes such as the treatment of the mentally disabled. FICTION

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen (North Carolina author)
Two gifted sisters draw on their talents to belatedly forge a bond and find their ways in life in Allen's easygoing debut novel. FICTION

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
 Forty years after the disappearance of Harriet Vanger from the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family, her octogenarian uncle hires journalist Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander, an unconventional young hacker, to investigate. FICTION

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby may be the most popular classic in modern American fiction. Since its publication in 1925, Fitzgerald's masterpiece has become a touchstone for generations of readers and writers, many of whom reread it every few years as a ritual of imaginative renewal. FICTION

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation. FICTION

A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind
This nonfiction narrative follows the life of Cedric Jennings, a talented black teenager struggling to succeed in one of the worst public high schools in Washington, D.C. NON-FICTION

The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini
The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir, a young boy from Kabul, who betrayed his best friend Hassan, the son of his father's Hazara servant, and lives in regret. The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of the monarchy in Afghanistan through the Soviet invasion, the mass exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the rise of the Taliban regime. FICTION

The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Set in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. FICTION

Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan
In his 10th novel, Stewart O’Nan explores how the closing of one chain restaurant profoundly affects many lives. Critics praised the novel as a triumph in realism. FICTION

The Last Shot by Darcy Frey
For many adolescents on Coney Island, basketball is their only escape from the urban hell of poverty, crime, and drugs. The Last Shot chronicles a group of teenagers playing for one of the best teams in New York, the Abraham Lincoln Secondary School Railsplitters. These young males continually cope with circumstances beyond their control in a society that has failed miserably to provide a safe environment and, more importantly, a good education. NON-FICTION

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people--from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome who are hypermusical from birth. NON-FICTION

Olive Kitteredge by Elizabeth Strout
At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her. FICTION

O My America by Johanna Kaplan
O my America! is the story of Ezra Slavin, a crusty, unremitting social critic who dies at an anti-war rally in 1972. Told in flashback by his daughter Merry, one of his six children, O my America! chronicles a complicated, free-form and exasperatingly extended "family." FICTION

On Agate Hill by Lee Smith (North Carolina author)
Following her 2001 Southern Book Critics Circle award–winning novel, The Last Girls, Smith's 10th novel chronicles the post–Civil War life of a precocious Southern orphan using a patchwork of journal entries, letters, poems, recipes, songs, catechism and court records. FICTION

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
An autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi depicting her childhood in Iran during and after the revolution. Andrew Arnold of TIME described Persepolis as "sometimes funny and sometimes sad but always sincere and revealing.” FICTION

Plum Wine by Angela Davis-Gardner (North Carolina author)
Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching in Tokyo in the 1960s, is set on a life-changing quest when her Japanese surrogate mother, Michi, dies. FICTION

Proud Shoes by Pauli Murray (North Carolina author)
Pauli Murray, an acclaimed human right activist who grew up in Durham's West End,  interrupted her law career for four years to investigate and document her family's history. Meticulously researched and eloquently written, Proud Shoes provides both an engrossing story of one family and an historical overview of race relations in the United States spanning almost one hundred years. Durham County Library is pleased to provide this “must-read” for Durham residents as a book club kit. NON-FICTION

Something for the Pain by Paul Austin
Durham Reads Together selection for 2009. Something for the Pain explores the everyday life Durham resident and ER doctor Paul Austin: the impact his job has on his family, his faith, his personal relationships, and the lessons he learns along the way. NON-FICTION

The River Wife by Jonis Agee
This engaging family saga, set in Missouri's boot heel, traces the loves and losses of three generations of women. FICTION

Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem
Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the buoyant, compassionate, philosophical, Bible-quoting dairyman whose life story formed the basis for the musical Fiddler on the Roof. FICTION

Things I Want my Daughters to Know by Elizabeth Noble
How do you cope in a world without your mother? When Barbara realizes time is running out, she writes letters to her four daughters, aware that they'll be facing the trials and triumphs of life without her at their side. FICTION

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. FICTION

What is the What by Dave Eggers
A biographical novel traces the story of Valentino Achak Deng, who as a boy was separated from his family when his village in southern Sudan was attacked, and become one of the estimated 17,000 "lost boys of Sudan" before relocating from a Kenyan refugee camp to Atlanta in 2001. NON-FICTION

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum’s classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious
Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil? FICTION

Last Update: March 11, 2010