I went to the July Book Tasting at the Canal Winchester Branch of the Columbus Public Library yesterday. I love these monthly gatherings when we talk about what we’re reading. It’s just like Thursdays here on my blog, although it’s in person. The two women who lead it do a great job of keeping it moving, and making it a comfortable place for everyone.
Here are the four books they’re going to talk about in August. We can read and talk about these, and some of the members of the group read or have read all of them. The books are at least a year old so readers can get copies. However, and this is a good however. Anyone is welcome to just come and listen, or just talk about what we’re reading. Sometimes, I don’t get around to reading their selections. That’s okay. They talk about them for about twenty minutes, and then we talk for about an hour about our own reading. As I said, it’s sort of like “Thursdays at Lesa’s”.
Jennifer Weiner’s The Breakaway is one choice. Thirty-three-year-old Abby Stern has made it to a happy place. True, she still has gig jobs instead of a career, and the apartment where she’s lived since college still looks like she’s just moved in. But she’s got good friends, her bike, and her bicycling club in Philadelphia. She’s at peace with her plus-size body—at least, most of the time—and she’s on track to marry Mark Medoff, her childhood sweetheart that she met at the weight-loss camp that her perpetually dieting mother forced her to attend.
Yet Abby can’t escape the feeling that something isn’t right…or the memories of one thrilling night she spent with a man named Sebastian two years previously. When Abby gets a last-minute invitation to lead a cycling trip from NYC to Niagara Falls, she’s happy to have time away from Mark, a chance to reflect and make up her mind.
But things get complicated fast. First, Abby spots a familiar face in the group—Sebastian, the one-night stand she thought she’d never see again. Despite their undeniable chemistry, Abby is determined to keep her distance. Then there’s a surprise last-minute addition to the trip: her mother, Eileen, the woman Abby blames for a lifetime of body shaming and insecurities she’s still trying to undo.
Over two weeks and more than seven hundred miles, strangers become friends, hidden truths come to light, a teenage girl with a secret unites the riders in unexpected ways…and Abby is forced to reconsider everything she believes about herself, her mother, and the nature of love.
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate was my first choice, but I’ve changed my mind. I know my friend, Donna, liked this book, but I’m picking a different book. Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty.
Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption.
Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.
I’ve never read Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, and I’m going with that one. Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
I like a good romance, but I’m just not in the mood for one about first love, Anna Todd’s The Last Sunrise. (And, I really don’t like the alternate cover, a movie poster.) Twenty-two-year-old Oriah Pera feels like she’s stuck waiting for her life to begin. Between managing her health conditions and her overprotective mother, she struggles to find her independence. But when her mother’s job takes them to Majorca, Ry know this summer will be the start of her new life.
In her first small act of rebellion, she heads off to the beach alone—and meets an infuriatingly charming Spaniard. Julian makes Ry feel even more naive and inexperienced than she normally does, but she can’t help her growing attraction to him.
As the summer continues, Julian pulls Ry out of her shell and into the adventure she’s always craved. But with her return to America looming, Ry must decide if she’s brave enough to follow her heart and seek out the life she wants for herself.
Is there something here that you want to read? Better yet, is there something on the list that you already read? Did you like it, or not?
