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Wednesday Book Group
The Wednesday Book Group is WFPL’s monthly book discussion group for adults. Discussions are informal and generally based on personal reactions, not academic analysis.
Join Us!
Wednesday Book Group meets on the first Wednesday of the month, 7 PM, in the Lucia Mastrangelo Meeting Room. Registration is not required.
2022-2023 Wednesday Book Group Titles
- 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 - TBD (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
- 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)
- 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)
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