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Wednesday Book Group
First Wednesdays | 7 PM | Lucia Mastrangelo Meeting Room
The Wednesday Book Group is a monthly book discussion group for adults. Discussions are informal and generally based on personal reactions, not academic analysis.
Wednesday Book Group meets on the first Wednesday of the month at 7 PM in the Lucia Mastrangelo Meeting Room. Registration is not required. All are welcome!
2022-2023 Wednesday Book Group Titles
Copies of the upcoming book are available for checkout at the Circulation Desk!
- September - The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
- October - Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
- November - The Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Keefe
- December - True Biz by Sara Novic
- January - Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
- February - Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult
- March - Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (One Book, One Watertown selection)
- April - The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
- May - "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination by Annette Gordon-Reed
- June - Book selection meeting
- July - A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
- August - The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict
Wednesday Book Group Previous Titles
Historical lists compiled by Sandra Howard, Kathy Diamond and Alison Clapp.
2020s
- Circe by Madeline Miller (September)
- Florence Gordon by Brian Morton (October)
- Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History by Keith O'Brien (November)
- Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (December)
- Saints for All Occasions by J. Courtney Sullivan (January)
- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (February)
- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (March – One Book, One Watertown)
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (April)
- American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins (May)
- On the Plain of Snakes: a Mexican Journey by Paul Theroux (July)
- Three Junes by Julia Glass (August)
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (September)
- An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (October)
- The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantu (November)
- Bossypants by Tina Fey (December)
- Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (January)
- If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (February)
- The Humans by Matt Haig (March – One Book, One Watertown)
- A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (April)
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (May)
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (July)
- A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (August)
2010s
- Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change by Andrew Solomon (September)
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (October)
- Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance (November)
- The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery (December)
- The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild by Lawrence Anthony (January)
- LaRose by Louise Erdrich (February)
- The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott (March – One Book, One Watertown)
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (May)
- The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve (June)
- The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann (July)
- The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee (August)
- Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky (September)
- Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (October)
- A Piece of the World by C.B. Kline (November)
- The Human Comedy by William Saroyan (December)
- Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (February)
- The Library Book by Susan Orlean (March – One Book, One Watertown)
- The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende (April)
- Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell (May)
- The Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney (July)
- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (August)
- The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (September)
- Dead Wake: The Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson (October)
- Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (November)
- The Children Act by Ian McEwan (December)
- The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George (January)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (February)
- Refuge by Dina Nayeri (March – One Book, One Watertown)
- Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult (April)
- The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith (May)
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (July)
- The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker (August)
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (September)
- Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande (October)
- Defending Jacob by William Landay (November)
- Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks (December)
- Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline (January)
- Lila by Marilynne Robinson (February)
- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (March – One Book, One Watertown)
- All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (April)
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (May)
- 1984 by George Orwell (July)
- Citizens of London by Lynne Olson (August)
- Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd (September)
- Ireland by Frank Delaney (October)
- The Sixth Extinction: an Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (November)
- All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld (December)
- Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (January)
- Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande (February)
- The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Build America’s First Subwayby Doug Most (March – One Book, One Watertown)
- The Reivers by William Faulkner (April)
- A Spy Among Friends by Ben MacIntyre (May)
- My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor (September)
- Salvage the Bones by Jessmyn Ward (October)
- Infidel by Ayaan Hersi Ali (November)
- The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh (December)
- Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation by Cokie Roberts (January)
- The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout (February)
- The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian (March – One Book, One Watertown)
- A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League by Ron Siskind (April)
- The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure (May)
- Wool by Hugh Howey (September – One Book, One Watertown)
- Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue (October)
- The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True by Richard Dawkins (November)
- The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (December)
- Rules of Civility: A Novel by Amor Towles (January)
- The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (February)
- Maine by Courtney Sullivan (March)
- In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson (April)
- Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather (May)
- Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (September)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (October – One Book, One Watertown)
- Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Steven Puleo (November)
- State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (December)
- The Good Life by Jay McInerney (January)
- By Nightfall: A Novel by Michael Cunningham (February)
- Room by Emma Donoghue (March)
- The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High-Stakes Game Played Inside Lehman Brothers by Vicky Ward Wiley (April)
- Map of True Places by Brunonia Barry (May)
- Rocket Boys by Homer H. Hickam, Jr. (September – One Book, One Watertown)
- The Widower’s Tale by Julia Glass (October)
- Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia by Janet Wallach (November)
- The Bone People: A Novel by Keri Hulme (December)
- The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti by Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell (January)
- The Imperfectionists: A Novel by Tom Rachman (February)
- Little Bee by Chris Cleave (March)
- Brooklyn by Colm Toibin (April)
- The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (May)
- The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (September)
- March by Geraldine Brooks (October – One Book, One Watertown)
- Abigail Adams by Woody Holton (November)
- Old Filth by Jane Gardam (December)
- Fools of Fortune by William Trevor (January)
- Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (February)
- The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel with Brett Witter (March)
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (May)
2000s
- Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (September)
- Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America by Thomas Friedman (October – One Book, One Watertown)
- The Hill Bachelors by William Trevor (November)
- West with the Night by Beryl Markham (December)
- Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd (January)
- The American Wife: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld (February)
- A Summer Bird Cage by Margaret Drabble (March)
- The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper (April)
- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (May)
- The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (September)
- The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (January)
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (September)
- Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith (October)
- Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick (November)
- Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (December)
- Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language by Melvin Bragg (January)
- The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad (February)
- Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace – One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson (March)
- Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards (April)
- Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (May)
- Zappo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems by Gail Mazur (July)
- Shadow of the Wind by Luis Ruiz Zafon (September)
- Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (October)
- March by Geraldine Brooks (October)
- On Beauty by Zadie Smith (November)
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (November)
- Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism by Megan Marshall (November)
- Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler (December)
- My Life in France by Julia Child (January)
- 1776 by David McCullough (January)
- Queen of the South by Arturo Perez-Reverte (February)
- The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman (March)
- The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffeneger (April)
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (May)
- The Known World by Edward P. Jones (September)
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (October)
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon (October)
- Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester (November)
- Women of the Silk by Gail Tsukiyama (November)
- The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard (December)
- The Good Earth by Pearl Buck (December)
- Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X by Deborah Davis (January)
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (January)
- The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck (February)
- The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (February)
- Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian (March)
- Brick Lane by Monica Ali (March)
- The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (April)
- The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (April)
- Embers by Sandor Marai and Carol Brown Janeway (May)
- Saturday by Ian McEwen (May)
- Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder (September)
- The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor (October)
- Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (October)
- Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (November)
- Three Junes by Julia Glass (November)
- The Founding Fish by John McPhee (December)
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith (December)
- The Piano Tuner by David Mason (January)
- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman by Richard Feynman and Jeffrey Robbins (January)
- Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross (February)
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel (February)
- Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer (March)
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (March)
- Annunciation of Francesca Dunn by Janis Hallowell (April)
- What Lips My Lips Have Kissed by Daniel Mark Epstein (April)
- The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (May)
- Blue Calhoun by Reynolds Price (May)
- Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi (June)
- Empire Falls by Richard Russo (October)
- The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama (October)
- Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer by Sena Jeter Naslund (November)
- Peace Like a River by Leif Enger (November)
- Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (December)
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (January)
- Atonement by Ian McEwan (January)
- The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community (February)
- In the Bleak Mid-Winter by Julia Spencer-Fleming
- Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (February)
- Portrait in Sepia by Isabelle Allende (March)
- Dancing After Hours: Stories by Andre Dubus (March)
- House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (April)
- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai (April)
- The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman (May)
- No Other Life by Brian Moore
- White Noise by Don DeLillo
- Are You Somebody? by Nuala O’Faolain
- Inventing the Abbots by Sue Miller
- A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
- In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
- A Simple Habana Melody by Oscar Hijuelos
- Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Bully for Brontosaurus by Stephen Jay Gould
- The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
- The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
- Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (see also 1991)
- The Dive from Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer
- Back Then by Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan
- The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland
- Boomeritis: A Novel that Will Set You Free by Ken Wilber
- Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes by Atul Gawande
- Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt
- Collected Stories; One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty (September)
- Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (October)
- House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus (October)
- Personal History by Katharine Graham (November or May)
- Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (November)
- Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
- Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland (December or June)
- Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler (January)
- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (January)
- Paradise Park by Allegra Goodman (February)
- Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood (February)
- Weight of Water by Anita Shreve (March)
- Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis (April)
- The Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen (April)
- Stolen Lives by Malika Oufkir (May)
- The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powell (January)
- From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman (January)
- The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber (February)
- The Reader by Bernhard Schlink (February)
- Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout (March)
- Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks (March)
- Utz by Bruce Chatwin (April)
- Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai (April)
- While I Was Gone by Sue Miller (May)
- Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike (May)
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (June)
1990s
- Roxanna Slade by Reynolds Price (September)
- Selections from Written by Herself, Jill Kerr Conway, ed. (September)
- Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind (October)
- Dusk by F. Sionil Jose (October)
- All Over But the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg (November)
- Orly Farms by Anthony Trollope (December)
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (December)
- Your Blue-Eyed Boy by Helen Dunmore (January)
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I’d Never Do Again: Essays and Other Arguments by David Foster Wallace (January)
- The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (February)
- Longitude by Dava Sobel (February)
- Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (March)
- Charming Billy by Alice McDermott (March)
- The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich (April)
- The Whereabouts of Eneas McMulty by Sebastian Barry (April)
- The Finishing School by Gail Godwin (May)
- Death in Summer by William Trevor (May)
- Bucking the Sun by Ivan Doig (September)
- A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr (December)
- Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat (December)
- A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton (January)
- Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (January)
- Midwives by Chris Bohjalian (February)
- Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (February)
- The Mirror by Lynn Freed (March)
- The Italian Lesson by Janice Elliott (March)
- Sleeping at the Starlite Motel by Bailey White (April)
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (April)
- Life Estates by Shelby Hearon (May)
- I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn (August)
- Audrey Hepburn’s Neck by Alan Brown (September)
- Nobody Nowhere by Donna Williams (September)
- Salt Dancers by Ursula Hegi (October)
- Synonym for Love by Alison Moore (October)
- Moo by Jane Smiley (November)
- Red Azalea by Anchee Min (December)
- The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken (December)
- Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya (January)
- Summer by Edith Wharton (January)
- Jackie by Josie by Caroline Preston (February)
- She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb ((February)
- Independence Day by Richard Ford (March)
- Rapture of Canaan by Sherri Reynolds (March)
- The Little House by Philippa Gregory (April)
- Larry’s Party by Carol Shields (April)
- Mrs. Hornstien by Fredrica Wagman (May)
- Selections from Best Short Stories of 1997, Annie Proulx, ed. (May)
- The Good Husband by Gail Godwin (June)
- Before and After by Rosellen Brown (November)
- The Fragile Species by Lewis Thomas (November)
- Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen (December)
- Felicia’s Journey by William Trevor (January)
- One True Thing by Alice Quindlen (February)
- Life and Death in Shanghai by Cheng Nien (March)
- The Sacrifice of Tamar by Naomi Ragen (April)
- In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien (May)
- Paula: A Memoir by Isabel Allende (June)
- Silent Passengers by Larry Woiwode
- The Beet Queen by Louis Erdrich
- Borrowed Time by Paul Monette
- Anatomy of an Illness by Paul Monette
- The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
- Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
- Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (December)
- The Music Room by Dennis McFarland (January)
- At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott (January)
- In a Country of Mothers by A.M. Homes (February)
- Possession by A.S. Byatt (March)
- Blue River by Ethan Canin (March)
- Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston (April)
- The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (April)
- The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood (May)
- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (May)
- Broken Vessels by Andre Dubus
- A Dangerous Woman by Mary McGarry Morris
- Postcards by Annie Proulx
- How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents by Julia Alvarez
- Goodness by Tim Parks
- Fools of Fortune by William Trevor
- The Thief and the Dogs by Maguib Mahfouz
- Charms for the Easy Life or Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (January)
- Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates (January)
- Household Saints by Francine Prose (March)
- She Devil by Fay Weldon (March)
- A River Sutra by Gita Mehta (April)
- All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (May)
- In Troubled Waters by Beverly Coyle (May)
- Remembering Babylon by David Malouf (June)
- Consider This, Senora by Harriet Doerr (June)
- Black Ice by Loren Cary (September)
- The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (September)
- Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro (October)
- Two Lives by William Trevor (October)
- The Tongues of Angels by Reynolds Price (November)
- Meridian by Alice Walker (November)
- The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor (January)
- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg (January)
- Patchwork by Karen Osborn (February)
- Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (February)
- Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler (March)
- In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason (March)
- Fields of Glory by Jean Rouard (April)
- A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean (April)
- Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone (May)
- Bingo by Rita Mae Brown (May)
- Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton
- An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
- Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
- Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
- The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Cathedral by Raymond Carver
- Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
- During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase
- Mr. Bedford and the Muses by Gail Godwin
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (see also 2003)
- The Joke by Milan Kundra
- Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
- Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
- The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro