Books Read by the LIRA Book Discussion Group

Fall 1999

• Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balkanian
• Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
• The Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
• Damascus Gate by Robert Stone

Spring 2000

• Home Town by Tracy Kidder
• The Satanic Verses by Salmon Rushdie
• My Home is Far Away by Dawn Powell
• Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel

Fall 2000

• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
• Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden
• Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
• The Spirit Catches You and Then You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

Spring 2001

• The Black Rose by Tananarive Due
• An American Requiem: God, My Father and the War that Came Between Us by James Carroll
• The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey
• I’d Hate Myself in the Morning by Ring Lardner, Jr

Fall 2001

• Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis
• Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
• In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
• Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Spring 2002

• Several books by V.S. Naipaul (readers' choices)
• The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas Friedman
• Typical American by Gish Jeri
• John Adams by David McCullough
• A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten by Julie Winch
• Native Son by Richard Wright

Fall 2002

• Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips
• Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
• A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir by lain Levison
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam

Spring 2003

• The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro
• What Went Wrong! by Bernard Lewis
• American Ground: The Unbuilding of the World Trade Center by William Langewiesche
• The Physician by Noah Gordon

Fall 2003

• Personal History by Katharine Graham
• A Declaration of Interdependence: Why American Should Join the World by Will Hutton
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Winter 2004

• The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
• Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• Backstory: Inside the Business of News by Ken Auletta
• The Town and the City by Jack Kerouac

Fall 2004

• Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
• What's the Hatter with Kansas! by Thomas Frank
• War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
• Pushkin and the Queen of Spades by Alice Randall
• High Tide by Mark Lynas

Winter 2005

• The Late George Apley by John T. Marquand
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• In America by Susan Sontag

Spring 2005

• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

Fall 2005

• The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
• Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry
• Bread and Roses: Hills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream by Bruce Watson
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Winter/Spring 2006

• God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It by Jim Wallis
• The Affluent Society by John Galbraith
• John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics by Richard Parker
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Collapse by Jared Diamond

Fall 2006

• Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• Sacco and Vanzetti, the Anarchist Background by Paul Avrich
• To Kill a Hocking Bird by Harper Lee

Winter / Spring 2007

• Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
• The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
• Persuasion by Jane Austen
• Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
• March by Geraldine Brooks
• The Looming Tower. Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/1I by Lawrence Wright

Fall 2007

• The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal by David McCullough
• Snow by Orhan Panuk
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• Thunderstruck by Erik Larsen

Winter/Spring 2008

• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Einstein, His Lile and Times by Walter Isaacson
• The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
• The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean ·war by David Halberstam
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

2009

• January-August unavailable
• The Great Bridge by David McCullough
• Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer
• The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan

2010

• January - April unavailable
• The Woman Behind the New Deal by Kirstin Downey
• Last of the Mohicans by James F. Cooper
• The Big Burn by Timothy Egan
• The Madonnas of Leningrad by Deborah Dean
• The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles

2011

• Man from St. Petersburg by Ken Follett
• Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
• South of Broad by Pat Conroy
• Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
• The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
• American Lion, Biography of Andrew Jackson by Jon Meacham
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped out Nation by Cokie Roberts
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

2012

• The Social Animal by David Brooks
• The World to Come by Dana Horn
• Tinkers by Paul Harding
• The Warmth of Other Suns: America' s Great Migration by I. Wilkerson
• The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
• Townie by Andre Dubus III
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• The Right Hand Shore by Christopher Tilgham
• Destiny of the Republic by Diane Millard
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

2013

• Citizens of London: Americans who stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour by Lynne Olsen
• Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe by Charles Dickens
• Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
• Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
• The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
• Making our Democracy Work: A Judge's View by Stephen Breyer
• Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage by Jeffrey Frank
• The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis
• My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayer
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald