A selection of challenging and entertaining discussion books plus a binder full of reviews and information about the authors is available for a checkout period of 6 weeks.

Ali, Monica. Brick Lane
After an arranged marriage to a man twenty years older, Nazneen is taken to London, leaving her home and heart in the Bangladeshi village where she was born.

Ambrose, Stephen. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
This is nonfiction but it reads like fiction. There was only one death on this 1804-06 expedition and that man is buried in Iowa. DVD 917.8042 LE, VIDEO 917.8042 LE Lewis and Clark; VIDEO 917.8043 LE Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery

Austen, Jane. Emma
Beautiful, clever, rich-and single-Emma Woodhouse is perfect content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others.
DVD ROMANCE EMMA, VIDEO FIC EMMA Emma

Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park
Fanny Price is a young girl from a poor family raised by her rich uncle and aunt. She grows up with 4 cousins but is always treated as a inferior; only Edmund shows any kindness. Fanny's gratitude for that secretly grows into love.
DVD ROMANCE MANSFIELD, VIDEO FIC MANS Mansfield Park

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey
During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences fashionable society for the first time. DVD ROMANCE NORTHANGER Northanger Abbey

Austen, Jane. Persuasion
"All the privilege I claim for my own sex...is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone." Anne Elliot's heartfelt words strike the keynote of Austen's last completed novel. DVD ROMANCE PERSUASION Persuasion

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice
In this sparkling comedy of manners, Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial 19th century English middle-class life. DVD ROMANCE PRIDE, VIDEO FIC PRID Pride and Prejudice

Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility
Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister's warning that her impulsive behavior leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. DVD ROMANCE SENSE, VIDEO FIC SENS Sense and Sensibility (all pub.info. and all titles Fiction) see also: DVD COMEDY BRIDE Bride & Prejudice; DVD DRAMA BECOMING Becoming Jane

Bank, Melissa. The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
Jane Rosenal sets out on a personal and spirited expedition through the perilous terrain of sex, love, and relationships, and the treacherous waters of the workplace. (Fiction)

Barrett, Andrea. The Voyage of the Narwhal
In the mid-1800s two parallel stories take place: one concerns the male explorers and the Inuit in the Arctic and the other concerns the women back in the U.S. waiting for them and traveling only in their imaginations. (Fiction)

Barrett, Paul. American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion
The reader ventures into Muslim homes, mosques, and private gatherings from West Virginia to Los Angeles in 7 representative stories portraying American Muslims. (Nonfiction) DVD 297 IS Islam; VIDEO 297 ST Story of Islam

Biggers, Jeff. In the Sierra Madre
This groundbreaking and extraordinary memoir chronicles the history of one of the most famous yet unknown regions in the world. Based on his one-year sojourn among the Raramuri/Tarahumara, award-winning journalist Biggers uncovers the remarkable treasures of the Sierra Madre. (Nonfiction)

Bloom, Stephen. Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America
In 1987, a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews opened a kosher slaughterhouse just outside Postville, Iowa (pop. 1,465), both reviving and dividing the town. (Nonfiction)
VIDEO 305.8 PO Postville

Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code
An ingenious code hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. A desperate race through the cathedrals and castles of Europe. An astonishing truth concealed for centuries...unveiled at last. (pub. info.) (Fiction) DVD MYSTERY DAVINCI Da Vinci Code; see also DVD 813.54 OR Origins of the Da Vinci Code, 813.54 OR Where Facts and Fiction Meet: The Biblical Christ in a Da Vinci Code Society

Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood
As Capote reconstructs the apparently motiveless 1959 murder of the Clutter Family in rural Kansas, followed by the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates suspense and empathy in what he called a "nonfiction novel". (Nonfiction)
DVD MYSTERY IN, VIDEO FIC IN In Cold Blood; see also DVD DRAMA CAPOTE Capote, DVD DRAMA INFAMOUS Infamous

Chapman, Fern Schumer. Motherland
Twelve-year-old Edith Westerfeld escaped the Nazis, but most of her family perished in the death camps. Fifty-four years later, she returned to Stockstadt with her grown daughter Fern to reconnect and reconcile with her past. (pub. info.) (Nonfiction)

Chevalier, Tracy. Girl With a Pearl Earring
Set in Holland in the 1660s in the painter Vermeer's Delft household, a 16-year-old hired servant girl becomes increasingly involved with her employer. (Fiction) DVD DRAMA GIRL, VIDEO FIC GIRL Girl With a Pearl Earring

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness
Marlow, a seaman and wanderer, recounts his physical and psychological journey into the African continent in search of the enigmatic Kurtz. (Fiction)

Crutcher, Chris. Deadline
Grade 9 Up-After being diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia, 18-year-old Ben Wolf elects to forgo treatment and keep his illness secret from his family and friends in an attempt to have a "normal" senior year at his small Idaho high school. (School Library Journal) (Fiction)

Danticat, Edwidge. The Dew Breaker
The violent past of the "dew breaker" (a torturer of Haitian dissidents under Duvalier) is revealed, chapter by chapter, by those who knew him. (Fiction)

Dai Sijie. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Two hapless boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for re-education during China's infamous Cultural Revolution. There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. (pub. info.) (Fiction) DVD FOREIGN BALZAC Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Diamant, Anita. The Red Tent
The little known Biblical story of Dinah, daughter of the patriarch Jacob and his wife Leah, is told from the perspective of its women. (Fiction)

Enger, Leif. Peace Like a River
A father and his two young children go on a journey into the Badlands in the heart of winter in the 1960s. They are searching for the oldest son, who escaped from jail in Minnesota. ("All Iowa Reads"--Fiction)

Erdrich, Louise. The Master Butchers Singing Club
Erdrich tells the story of a WWI sniper and master butcher with a "talent for stillness" and for singing. After marrying Eva, he emigrates to America, settling in Argus, North Dakota. ("All Iowa Reads"--Fiction)

Fowler, Karen Joy. The Jane Austen Book Club
A novel about how we engage with a novel (Fiction) DVD ROMANCE JANE The Jane Austen Book Club

Fredriksson, Marianne. Hanna's Daughters: A Novel of Three Generations
Holding vigil at her mother's bedside, Anna tries to piece together the fragments of her past through tattered letters, diaries, and old photographs. (Fiction)

Gaines, Ernest. A Lesson Before Dying
Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a crime. He is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. A teacher from the plantation school is compelled to impart his learning and pride to Jefferson before he dies. ("Oprah Book"--Fiction) DVD DRAMA LESSON; VIDEO FIC LESS A Lesson Before Dying

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia
Gilbert grafts the structure of romantic fiction upon the inquiries of reporting in this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery. (Publishers Weekly) (Nonfiction)

Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley
Tom Ripley is sent to Italy in order to coax Dickie Greenleaf back to the U.S. Ripley becomes very fond of Dickie. In fact, he's so fond that he wants to be like him-EXACTLY like him. (Fiction) DVD DRAMA TALENTED The Talented Mr. Ripley

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner
A story of fierce cruelty and fierce, yet redeeming, love. Both transform the life of Amir who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the Afghan monarchy, just before his country's revolution and its invasion by Russian forces. (NY Times Bk. Review) (Fiction) DVD DRAMA KITE The Kite Runner

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God
This novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston's use of dialect in 1937 outraged other African American writers who accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they expected. (from Amazon.com) (Fiction)

Kafka, Franz. Metamorphosis: And other Stories
"When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed." (first sentence) (Fiction)

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible
This story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. ("Oprah Book"-Fiction)

Kinsella, Sophie. Can You Keep a Secret?
When her plane en toute from Glasgow to London experiences horrible turbulence, Emma Corrigan is convinced she is going to die. She babbles all of her most intimate thoughts and secrets to the handsome American man sitting next to her. The plane lands safely. (Booklist) (Fiction)

Kluger, Jeffrey. Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio
(All Iowa Reads 2007) Compelling true story of the man who provided a crucial turning point in the quest to eradicate polio and, in the process, became a cultural icon. (pub. info.) ("All Iowa Reads-Nonfiction)

coming soon - Krauss, Nicole. The History of Love
Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness by finding the author of an old book her mother is lovingly translating. (pub.info.) (Fiction)

Kyle, Aryn. The God of Animals
When her older sister runs away to marry a rodeo cowboy, 12-year-old Alice Winston is left to bear the brunt of her family's troubles on a run-down horse ranch in Colorado. (Fiction)

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies
Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In stories that travel from India to America and back again, Lahiri speaks with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. (Fiction)

coming soon - Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird
The classic novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it. (Fiction) DVD DRAMA TO, DVD VIDEO TO To Kill a Mockingbird

Loewen, James. Lies My Teacher Told Me
Thought provoking, nonpartisan, and often shocking, Loewen unveils the real America in this iconoclastic classic beloved by high school teachers, history buffs, and enlightened citizens across the country. (pub. Info.) (Nonfiction)

Lowry, Lois. The Giver
Jonas's world is perfect and when he turns 12, he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver, who holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. (pub.info.) (Fiction)

Maguire, Gregory. Wicked
When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about the witch's side of the story? (Fiction)

Mahfouz, Naguib. Palace Walk
This is the first part of Nobel Prize winner Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. His descriptions of the streets, alleys, houses, palaces, and mosques of Cairo in the 1920s are reminiscent of Charles Dickens' descriptions of 19th century London. This is a really unusual look into the historic customs and culture of a relatively unfamiliar society. (Fiction)

Mason, Daniel. The Piano Tuner
In 1886 a shy, middle-aged piano tuner receives an unusual commission from the British War Office: to travel to the remote jungles of Burma to repair a rare piano belonging to an eccentric army officer. (pub. info.) (Fiction)

McBride, James. The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
The author's mother was a rabbi's daughter, born in Poland, and raised in the South. She fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a Baptist church, and put twelve children through college. (Nonfiction)

McCracken, Elizabeth. Niagara Falls All Over Again
Mose Sharp is the only boy among six sisters in a close-knit Jewish family in Valley Junction, Iowa. Instead of taking over the family business, he heads for the vaudeville circuit and teams up with Rocky Carter. ("All Iowa Reads"-Fiction)

Min, Anchee. Red Azalea
A celebrated memoir of growing up in the last years of Mao's China. (Nonfiction)

Morgan, Robin. The Burning Time
When the Catholic Church brought the Inquisition to Ireland, Dame Alyce Kyteler refused to grant it power over her, her lands, or her people and refused to stop the practice of the Old Religion. (pub.info.) (Fiction)

Munro, Alice. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
In the nine stories that make up this collection, Munro achieves new heights, conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves. (pub. info) (Fiction)

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita
The story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel (publisher info.) (Fiction)

Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
For two years in Tehran, a bold and inspired teacher secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. (Nonfiction)

Nye, Naomi Shihab. 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East
Nye writes about being Arab-American, about Jerusalem, about the West Bank, about family. (Nonfiction)

Nye, Naomi Shihab. Habibi
Liyana's father suddenly moves the family from St. Louis to his Palestinian homeland. She is homesick until she meets Omer, but her friendship with him is silently forbidden because he is Jewish. ("QCA Reads"--Fiction)

Nye, Naomi Shihab. Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places
These essays are autobiographical and lyrical-they'll make the reader laugh, cry, reflect, and think about life from another point of view. (School Library Journal) (Nonfiction)

Nye, Naomi Shihab. Habibi
Liyana's father suddenly moves the family from St. Louis to his Palestinian homeland. She is homesick until she meets Omer, but her friendship with him is silently forbidden because he is Jewish. ("QCA Reads"--Fiction)

Nye, Naomi Shihab. Never in a Hurry: Essays on People and Places
These essays are autobiographical and lyrical-they'll make the reader laugh, cry, reflect, and think about life from another point of view. (School Library Journal) (Nonfiction)

Oates, Joyce, Carol. We Were the Mulvaneys
Set in upstate New York, the Mulvaneys were blessed with everything that makes life good. But something happens on Valentine's Day 1976 that changes everything, their relationships with each other and their places in the social and economic structure of the town. ("Oprah Book"-Fiction) DVD DRAMA WE We Were the Mulvaneys

Pamuk, Orhan. My Name Is Red
A 16th century Turkish Sultan has commissioned the most acclaimed artists in the land to illuminate a book celebrating the glories of his realm, but in the western style, which can be deemed an affront to Islam. (Fiction)

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar
This is a chronicle of the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under-maybe for the last time. A haunting American classic. (pub. info.) (Fiction)

Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead
In 1956, toward the end of Rev. John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. ("All Iowa Reads"-Fiction)

Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America
In an alternate version of American history, Charles Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President in 1940. For one Jewish boy, Lindbergh's eleciton is the first threat to his small, safe corner of America. (pub. info.) (Fiction)

Seiffert, Rachel. The Dark Room
Seiffert's debut novel explores the experiences of three ordinary people: a young photographer's assistant kept out of the war by a physical disability, a teenage girl whose parents have been taken into Allied custody, and a teacher searching for the reason the Russians imprisoned his beloved grandfather.

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus
At one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir, and a comic book (Jules Feiffer) (Graphic Novel genre)

This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman ("One Book One Bettendorf"--Nonfiction)

Trevor, William. The Story of Lucy Gault
The Gault family leads a life of privilege in early 1920s Ireland, but the threat of violence leads them to England. Nine-year-old Lucy runs away, hoping to convince her parents to stay in Ireland. (Fiction)

Tyler, Anne. Digging to America
The very American Donaldsons and the Iranian American Yazdans meet by chance at the Baltimore airport both picking up an adopted infant daughter from Korea. ("All Iowa Reads"-Fiction)

Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle
When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them how to live fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity. (pub. info.) (Nonfiction)

Welty, Eudora. The Ponder Heart
Uncle Daniel Ponder, whose fortune is exceeded only by his desire to give it away, is the talk of Clay County and a constant source of vexation for his niece, Edna Earle. This DIBS includes the Masterpiece Theatre videocassette version of the book. ("QCA Reads" -Fiction) VIDEO FIC POND The Ponder Heart

Thanks to the Friends of the Bettendorf Public Library, the Bettendorf Public Library Foundation, and SAU-READ for funds and donations to help make these DIBS possible.

Updated 9/2008