The following list of proposed books is provided here for your review and consideration for next year's reading list.

Before suggesting a book, please be sure you have read the book yourself, and are willing to serve as a Discussion Leader if the book is selected for the Final Reading List. Also, think about whether the book is discussable or open to some interpretation, giving members something to talk about during the meeting. Do you think it would have appeal to most members? And please, we steer away from patently religious or political books!

To propose a book for next year, click HERE to email me, or phone me at 813-416-8453. I will update the list below so everyone can preview and study your idea.

Thanks for all the fine suggestions and input, everyone.

• Bel Canto (Ann Patchett)
  Proposed by: Kathy S.
  
  
• The Cider House Rules (John Irving)
  Proposed by: Kathy S.
  
  
• Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
  Proposed by: Ray O.
  
  
• The Freedom Riders (Raymond Arsenault)
  Proposed by: Jean K.
  
  Having just read and discussed the womens' movement from Gail Collins book The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, we have the opportunity to read the other half of the story in USFSP professor Ray Arsenault's recent book, The Freedom Riders. Author Collins tied the two movements together during the tumultuous 60s and 70s. I reccomend reading his abbreviated version now in print.
  
  
• The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914 (Barbara Tuchman)
  Proposed by: Nancy R.
  
  From the B&N Overview: "...The fateful quarter-century leading up to the World War I was a time when the world of Privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of Protest was heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate. The age was the climax of a century of the most accelerated rate of change in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny. In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman concentrates on society rather than the state. With an artist's selectivity, Tuchman bings to vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the years leading up to the Great War...."
  
  
• Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust without Reason (Anne Roiphe)
  Proposed by: Susan R.
  
  From the BN website, Library Journal review: "In this bold book, Roiphe, a veteran novelist and memoirist, focuses on her years among the literary icons of the late 1950s and 1960s. Growing up in a wealthy, dysfunctional Jewish family in New York, she looked to artists and writers as her salvation. At 23, she married Jack Richardson, a promising playwright. Putting her own writing ambitions on hold, she typed his manuscripts and ..."
  
  
• A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves (Jane Gross)
  Proposed by: Susan R.
  
  
  
• Unbroken: A World War II Airman's Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (Laura Hillenbrand)
  Proposed by: Susan R.
  
  From the B&N Overview: ":On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys...."
  
  
• Just Kids (Patti Smith)
  Proposed by: Susan R.
  
  From the B&N Overview: "Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation....Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame. "
  
  
• Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger (Jonas Hassen Khemiri)
  Proposed by: Susan R.
  
  From the B&N Overview: "At the start of this dazzlingly inventive novel from Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Abbas, a world-famous photographer and estranged father to a young novelist—also named Jonas Hassen Khemiri—is standing on a luxurious rooftop terrace in New York City. He is surrounded by rock stars, intellectuals, and political luminaries gathered to toast his fiftieth birthday. And yet how did Abbas, a dirt-poor Tunisian orphan and Swedish émigré, come to enjoy such success?..."
  
  
• Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir (Oscar Hijuelos)
  Proposed by: Susan R.
  
  From the B&N Overview: "The beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist turns his pen to the real people and places that have influenced his life and, in turn, his literature. Growing up in 1950's working-class New York City to Cuban immigrants, Hijuelos journey to literary acclaim is the evolution of an unlikely writer. Oscar Hijuelos has enchanted readers with vibrant characters who hunger for success, love, and self-acceptance. In his first work of nonfiction, Hijuelos writes from the heart about the people and places that inspired his international bestselling novels. Born in Manhattan's Morningside Heights to Cuban immigrants in 1951, Hijuelos introduces readers to the colorful circumstances of his upbringing. The son of a Cuban hotel worker and exuberant poetry- writing mother, his story, played out against the backdrop of an often prejudiced working-class neighborhood, takes on an even richer dimension when his relationship to his family and culture changes forever. During a sojourn in pre-Castro Cuba with his mother, he catches a disease that sends him into a Dickensian home for terminally ill children. The yearlong stay . . . "
  
  
• The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr)
  Proposed by: Susan R.
  
  From the B&N Overview: "“Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience... "
  
  
• Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (Michael Norman and Eliabeth Norman)
  Proposed by: Susan R.
  
  An Editorial Review from NY Times Reviewer Dwight Garner: " …stirring and humane …Tears in the Darkness is authoritative history. Ten years in the making, it is based on hundreds of interviews with American, Filipino and Japanese combatants. But it is also a narrative achievement. The book seamlessly blends a wide-angle view with the stories of many individual participants. And at this book's beating emotional heart is the tale of just one American soldier, a young cowboy and aspiring artist out of Montana named Ben Steele. "
  
  
• Everyman (Philip Roth)
  Proposed by: Caroline S.
  
  This book won the Pen/Faulkner Award. The book is a 3rd person account of the end of a man's life when he has to confront his own mortality and what he's done and failed to do. Amazingly well written and very honest in its assessment of the main character who you feel sure is a reflection of the author on himself.
  
  
• Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
  Proposed by: Susan R.
  
  Susan noted that this is a novel about an opinionated women. Pulitzer Prize winner.
  
  
• March (Geraldine Brooks)
  Proposed by: Barbara J.
  
  Barbara says: I just recently read MARCH by Geraldine Brooks. My only reason to read it was that my daughter "handed it down" to me. Glad she did! Found it fascinating. Author "creates" the father, Mr. March, in Alcott's Little Women. Review on back says "As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the Civil War, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause ---- From vibrant New England to the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcott's optimistic children's novel" etc! This book would certainly interest a Civil War buff. Made me want to look up more about the war! The writing draws you in. At any rate - I enjoyed it. Won the Pulitzer in 2006
  
  
• The Exiles (William Stuart Long)
  Proposed by: Ed C.
  
  This book is number 1 in a series of 12. (Ed is up to book 5, he says.) These are historial novels about the forming of Austrailia.
  
  First book in "The Australians" series, historical novels set in the harsh Australian wilderness. In England, widowed Rachel and her fifteen-year-old daughter Jenny mistakenly fall in with thieves. Falsely accused the two are transported on separate convict ships to New South Wales, but only Jenny survives the journey. One of the few settlers to make friends with the natives, her life is complicated by several lovers. Some strong language.
  ISBN-13: 9780440123743
  
  
• The Swan Thieves (Elizabeth Kostova)
  Proposed by: Dorothy B.
  
  Synopses (tw) provided by Dorothy: Psychiatrist Andrew MARLOW desperate to understand the secret that torments renowned painter Robert Oliver embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism. His ordered life thrown into disarray when he begins treating an unstable genius artist who has recently attacked a canvas at the National Gallery of Art, psychiatrist and art hobiest Andrew Marlowe struggles to understand the secret that torments the artist. Dorothy says this book should promote good discussion within the group.
  
  kss note: this came out in Hard Cover in Jan 2010, paperback is being issued soon. Apparently fairly popular....
  
  
• Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
  Proposed by: Gale B.
  
  UPDATED INFO: Kathy found a link to an audio interview by author David Mitchell, on that BBC World Book Club site. Click to listen.
  Gale notes that this book was published a few years ago, written by David Mitchell. It's a tale broken into 6 parts, or narratives, with little obvious connection to each other until the end of the story, when everything comes together clearly. The story takes place in a variety of settings across time; one reviewer referred to this novel as a "puzzle book" genre.
  
  
• The Great Alone (Janet Dailey)
  Proposed By: Ed C.
  An historical saga that begins in the 17th century with Luka, a Russian fur trader. The story follows the stalwart family and their descendants as they move through the harsh landscape and play their parts in Alaskan history. Some strong language and explicit descriptions of sex.
  
  
• The Daily Coyote: A Story of Love, Survival, and Trust in the Wilds of Wyoming (Shreve Stockton)
  Proposed By: Ray O. (NOTE: very limited library availability)
  After leaving NYC and San Francisco, Shreve falls in love with Wyoming. She meets up with a widower, Mike, who is about her age and who shoots coyotes while working for the state of Wyoming. Mike brings her a coyote pup, Charlie, which she raises and in the process starts a web page and sends out daily photos of the Coyote. In need of money, she starts charging a fee to continue receiving the photos as well as developing a calendar showing her coyote photos - also for sale. She also gets a contract to write the book by the same name. Neither her love life with Mike nor the Coyote goes smoothly. Heavily illustrated with colored photos of Charlie, it is an easy read at 288 pages and conceivably could be coupled with another selection in the same month.The book is akin to Marley and Me and Dewey Read More.