About SCPLS

Library Facilities 

Library Services

Card Catalog

Online Reference

Genealogy

Search Engines 

Reading Resources

Weekly Press Release 

Library Events

Friends Groups 

Employee Webmail

Contact Us

Home 

Date

Title

Author

April 8, 2005 - 10:00 a.m.

The Saving Graces

Patricia Gaffney

Unlike the Graces of Greek mythology, the ones in Patricia Gaffney's feel-good novel, The Saving Graces, are not in the business of dispensing charm and beauty. Though they possess some measure of good looks, Gaffney's Graces are more focused on the less ethereal problems of life: men, careers, babies, death. And there are four, rather than three, of them (Emma, Rudy, Lee, and Isabel), who have been getting together for regular dinners in their Washington , D.C. , homes for 10 years.

May 13, 2005 - 10:00 a.m.

Ava’s Man

Rick Bragg

With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a national bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South . This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression; a moon shiner who drank exactly one pint for every gallon he sold; an unregenerate brawler, who could sit for hours with a baby in the crook of his arm.
In telling Charlie’s story, Bragg conjures up the backwoods hamlets of Georgia and Alabama in the years when the roads were still dirt and real men never cussed in front of ladies. A masterly family chronicle and a human portrait so vivid you can smell the cornbread and whiskey, Ava’s Man is unforgettable.

June 10, 2005 - 10:00 a.m.

The Living

Annie Dillard

THE LIVING is a vivid, populous, old-fashioned novel about the Pacific Northwest frontier. It tells the rich and serious story of Whatcom, a rough settlement founded in the 1850s on Bellingham Bay , ninety miles north of Seattle .
Here is the intimate, murderous tale of three men. Clare Fishburn believes that greatness lies in store for him. John Ireland Sharp, an educated orphan, abandons hope when he sees socialists expel the Chinese workers from the region. Beal Obenchain, who lives in a cedar stump, threatens Clare Fishburn's life.
Lummi and Nooksack Indian people fish and farm while explorers climb into the Cascade Mountains to survey. Men struggle to clear the forests. Hermits pay their debts in sockeye salmon while miners track gold-bearing streams. A killer lashes a Chinese worker to a wharf piling at low tide. Settlers launch a boat and sing by a beach fire. People give birth, drown, burn, inherit rich legacies, and commit expensive larcenies. Settlers pour into Whatcom, the harbor town, to catch the boom the railroads bring. All this takes place more than a hundred years ago, when these vital, ruddy men and women were "the living."

July 8, 2005 - 10:00 a.m.

East of the Mountains

David Guterson

A surgeon who has lead a good life has to come to terms with his wife's death and his own illness--an illness he has kept secret from his family. This is the story of a physical journey in which everything seems to go wrong, but which leads him to make a mental journey he would not otherwise have made.

August 12, 2005 - 10:00 a.m.

P.S. I Love You

Cecelia Ahern

Holly couldn't live without her husband Gerry, until the day she had to. They were the kind of young couple who could finish each other's sentences. When Gerry succumbs to a terminal illness and dies, 30-year-old Holly is set adrift, unable to pick up the pieces. But with the help of a series of letters her husband left her before he died and a little nudging from an eccentric assortment of family and friends, she learns to laugh, overcome her fears, and discover a world she never knew existed. The kind of enchanting novel with cross-generational appeal that comes along once in a great while, PS, I Love You is a captivating love letter to the world!

September 9, 2005 - 10:00 a.m.

Charming Billy

Alice McDermott

Billy Lynch's family and friends have gathered at a small Bronx bar. They have come to comfort his widow and to eulogize one of the last great romantics, trading tales of his famous humor, immense charm, and unfathomable sorrow. As they linger on into this extraordinary night, their voices form Billy's tragic story and their mourning becomes a gentle homage to all the lives in their small community fractured by grief, shattered by secrets, and sustained by the simple dream of love.

October 14, 2005 - 10:00 a.m.

Bee Season

Myla Goldberg

Nine-year-old Eliza Naumann has never considered herself remarkable, and her teachers and family have done little to convince her otherwise. All notions are challenged when Eliza wins her fourth grade class spelling bee. This seemingly small victory turns out to be just the beginning; within weeks she earns a seat on the high-pressure stage of the national spelling competition. As the accidentally-gifted child comes to terms with her new sense of self, the patchwork of her family begins to unravel.

November 11, 2005 - 10:00 a.m.

We were the Mulvaneys

Joyce Carol Oates

 From Publishers Weekly
Elegiac and urgent in tone, Oates's wrenching 26th novel (after Zombie) is a profound and darkly realistic chronicle of one family's hubristic heyday and its fall from grace. The wealthy, socially elite Mulvaneys live on historic High Point Farm, near the small upstate town of Mt. Ephraim , N.Y. Before the act of violence that forever destroys it, an idyllic incandescence bathes life on the farm. Hard-working and proud, Michael Mulvaney owns a successful roofing company. His wife, Corinne, who makes a halfhearted attempt at running an antique business, adores her husband and four children, feeling "privileged by God." Narrator Judd looks up to his older brothers, athletic Mike Jr. ("Mule") and intellectual Patrick ("Pinch"), and his sister, radiant Marianne, a popular cheerleader who is 17 in 1976 when she is raped by a classmate after a prom. Though the incident is hushed up, everyone in the family becomes a casualty. Guilty and shamed by his reaction to his daughter's defilement, Mike Sr. can't bear to look at Marianne, and she is banished from her home, sent to live with a distant relative. The family begins to disintegrate. Mike loses his business and, later, the homestead. The boys and Corinne register their frustration and sadness in different, destructive ways. Valiant, tainted Marianne runs from love and commitment. More than a decade later, there is a surprising denouement, in which Oates accommodates a guardedly optimistic vision of the future. Each family member is complexly rendered and seen against the background of social and cultural conditioning. As with much of Oates's work, the prose is sometimes prolix, but the very rush of narrative, in which flashbacks capture the same urgency of tone as the present, gives this moving tale its emotional power. 75,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

December 9, 2005 - 10:00 a.m.

The Christmas Train

David Baldacci

From Publishers Weekly
Recently, Baldacci has ventured with success beyond the thrillers that made his reputation, first in 2000 with the historical melodrama Wish You Well, then earlier this year with the SF mystery novella The Mighty Johns. Here's another stretch, one that he performs with good spirit, a lot of humor and only a bit of strain a Christmas charmer set aboard a cross-country train. Tom Langdon's life hasn't been the same since his all-time love, Eleanor Carter, left him years ago while the two were hotshot journalists, and since he's quit serious reporting for writing fluff. Banned from flying for a year because of an air rage incident, he's decided to write about riding the rails over the Christmas holidays, planning to link up with his erstwhile girlfriend, a Hollywood star, in L.A. Aboard the Capitol Limited, running from D.C. to Chicago, Tom meets a host of unusual fellow travelers, including rambunctious train personnel, lonely wanderers and a pair of elopers; he also runs into Eleanor, now a screenwriter for a legendary film director who's on board researching a possible film about trains. Matters complicate further aboard the Southwest Chief, running from Chicago to L.A. , as Tom's Tinseltown girlfriend shows up and proposes marriage just as Tom and Eleanor are working their way back together; a sneak thief nabs valuables; and an avalanche traps the train in the midst of a historic blizzard. The narrative is loaded with cool train lore (Baldacci dedicates the book to "everyone who loves trains and holidays") and plenty of romance and good cheer, though suspense is low who can doubt how things will work out? and the author gets a bit preachy about the advantages of train travel and the lessons of Christmas. This is a more warmhearted and enjoyable novel than Grisham's comparable holiday offering last year, Skipping Christmas, and Baldacci's fans will snap it up as the Yuletide treat it is. Expect this to stuff plenty of stockings on December 25; all aboard!
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.