Book clubs choose Fall '17 recommendations

         The fall-to-summer book season has started (yes we know some of you go all year round!), and suggestions for clubs to read during the next year are coming in.

"There was a very good book we read last year in the Leominster UU Church book group called "The Rent Collector," said one reader. "It's about a young couple struggling to survive, with a very sick child, in Cambodia, based on a true story by Camron Wright."

At Bannister Library in Brookfield, members suggest "The Invisible Thread" by Yoshika Uchida.  In Yoshiko Uchida biography, she describes growing up in Berkeley, Calif., as a Nisei, second-generation Japanese-American, and her family's internment in a Nevada concentration camp during World War II.

Ann Young, at Heywood Library in Gardner, recommends "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematorium" by Caitlin Doughty, and "A Hope More Powerful than the Sea" by Doaa Al Zamel, a nonfiction account of her escape from Syria. Club member Pat Darby recommends "Pay It Forward" by Catherine Ryan Hyde.

Off-Track Bookies in Lancaster recommends Trevor Noah's "Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood."  Noah's book is by turns inspiring and amusing, told with the wit he employs as host of "The Daily News" show on Comedy Central. Born to white and African parentage, he was ostracized by people of both races at a time when apartheid still clung to the nation. He describes it this way: "You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all."

Individual readers suggest several books: a World War II novel, "The Lilac Girls," "Waking Up White," a nonfictional exploration of racism by Debbie Irving, and Tess Garritsen's "The Bone Collector" among them. Also mentioned, Kate Moore's "The Radium Girls," about the women who were employed inside radium dial factories during the early stages of radium's introduction to the nation, and the dire impacts of radium on these "shining" women.

"The Underground Railroad," imagined as an actual railway used to transport slaves to freedom, is another novel making the rounds. Ann Young at Gardner's Heywood Library says they'll read it this year. Author Colson Whitehead (he also wrote "The Intuitionist") is now the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and several other prestigious awards for the book.

In 2017-18, Holden readers will meet frequently, says Betsy Johnson. This season, she said, "We'll tackle 'Daniel Deronda' (Eliot), 'Angle of Repose' (Stegner), 'Everybody's Fool' (Russo), and 'State of Wonder' (Patchett), as well as a few short Trollope stories.  We meet weekly, with a few breaks, so we digress, but always in pertinent ways."

FSU, Leominster visit 'Girls of Atomic City'

On Tuesday, Sept. 26, Leominster Public Library readers participated in the Fitchburg State University discussion of "The Girls of Atomic City," a selection that is popping up in book club suggestions and is sure to stimulate conversation.
This program will also be offered at Fitchburg Public Library on at 6:30 p.m., Oct. 17.

 Professor Rob Carr, of the FSU Department of Communications Media, will moderate a discussion as part of the university's 2017/18 community read. Deborah Kiernan wrote the book, a true story of the top-secret World War II town of Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the young women brought there unknowingly to help build the atomic bomb. Registration is required. Free copies of the book are available to registrants and can be picked up at the Information Desk at Leominster Public Library. For more information call 978-534- 7522, ext. 3.