We’re Indee Books
7 pm, first Monday of each month
A small, informal adult reading group that reads and discusses one book each month. New members always welcome!

At our April 2012  meeting we discussed Alice Hoffman’s, The Dovekeepers.
After the fashion of Anita Diament’s The Red Tent, Hoffman tells the story of the ancient Roman siege of the mountain fortress of Masada from the perspective of 4 women who were among the 900 Jews who sought refuge there.  

At our March 2012 meeting we discussed both Lost in Shangri-la by Michael Zuckoff, and also The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman.

At our September 2011 meeting we discussed Michael Connelly’s book The Lincoln Lawyer and also the movie. We liked both.

At our August 2011 meeting: we discussed Judith Viorst’s Murdering Mr. Monti, “A merry little tale of sex and violence.” It was exactly that!

At our July 2011 meeting: we discussed Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier, a novel based on the life of the pioneer fossilist, Mary Anning, who challenged the gender barrier of the eighteenth century British scientific community.

At our June 2011 meeting: we discussed Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, set in rural Mississippi in the early 1970′s, the disappearance of a girl revives the mystery of an earlier, unsolved disappearence.

At our May 2011 meeting: we discussed Ape House by Sara Gruen, the author of Water for Elephants.

At our April 2011 meeting: we discussed David Grunn’s The Lost City of Z, the true story of the author’s journey into the Amazon Jungle, following in the footsteps of British explorer Percy Fawcett, whose expedition was lost in 1927 while on a quest to discover the ruins of an ancient city he referred to as Z. We learned that the character Indiana Jones was loosely based on Percy Fawcett, however Jones encounters Fawcett in the Rob Macgregor’s fiction work, Indiana Jones in the Seven Veils. Also, Fawcett’s lost city was the inspiration of Conan Doyle’s novel, The Lost World.

At our March 2011 meeting: we discussed both Sweeping Up Glass by Carolyn Wall, and The False Friend by Myra Goldberg, the author of Bee Season.

No January or February meetings. Too cold!

At our December2010 meeting: we discussed The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle, a story of the haves and the have-nots of the American dream.

At our November 2010 meeting: we discussed The Ghost Writer by John Harwood, our Halloween read about long kept family secrets.  

At our October 2010 meeting: we discussed Labor Day by Joyce Maynard, the story of a lonely, thirteen year old boy and his isolated mother whose lives are changed one Labor Day weekend when they allow an injured, escaped convict to hide in their home.   

At our September 2010 meeting: we  discussed Mao’s Last Dancer, the memoir of Li Cunxin, born in 1961 on a communal farm in Northern China and chosen at age 11 to be trained as a ballet dancer as part of the cultural revolution of Mao Tse Tung.  We decided it would be interesting to also read Dragon Rising by Jasper Becker to better understand the changing China.

At our August 2010 meeting :we discussed the fifth of Sharyn McCrumbs Appalachian Ballad series, The Ballad of Frankie Silver.  In this novel McCrumb shifts back and forth between the true story of 18 year old Frankie Silver, convicted and hung for the ax murder of her husband in 1830, and the fictitious story of another teenager convicted and sentenced to death for a brutal double murder in the present time.

At our July 2010  meeting: we discussed Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife.  This second novel is the story of two generations of twins and a haunted apartment bordering on the famous Highgate Cemetery in London.

At our June 2010  meeting: we  discussed The Poker Bride by Christopher Corbett,  which describes the early Chinese immigration to the American West after the discovery of gold in California.  The title refers to the woman known as Polly Bemis  who was sold by her parents in China,  brought to America as a concubine, and eventually lost in a poker game in an Idaho mining town.  Our library also owns the book A Thousand Pieces of Gold, an earlier version of the Polly Bemis story which was made into a movie.

At our May 2010  meeting: we discussed Lisa Scottoline’s thriller,  Look Again, which recounts the dilemma of an investigative reporter who discovers what appears to be a photograph of her young, adopted son on a missing child flyer.

At our April 2010  meeting: we discussed Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: 365 days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, the story of the author’s year cooking her way through Julia Child’s classic cookbook, The Art of French Cooking.  Our library has the movie based on this book starring Meryl Streep and also the book Appetite for Life, the Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch,  published in 1997.