JANUARY 2010 Vol.I
Introducing Reading Group Center News!
It's the start of a new year...and the perfect time to launch a new look for the newsletter! Here at the Reading Group Center we took the "New Year, New You" mantra to heart and decided it was time for some major improvements. For starters, we've implemented a fresh design for our enewsletter and renamed it Reading Group Center News. Rest assured, you'll still find the same great discussion recommendations in each issue, but we've added new features like monthly polls, contests, and special content—all exclusive for our newsletter subscribers!
Now, on to the good stuff! Read on for the hottest new book club picks. From a critically acclaimed debut novel to a riveting true-life adventure story and a National Book Award Finalist, these books have us excited to start a year of great reading! And don't miss our exclusive video of author David Grann sharing his favorite discussion topics with reading groups.
Enjoy!
Your friends at the RGC
P.S. Our website has a new look and great new functionality as well, so be sure to visit us online at www.ReadingGroupCenter.com!
 Cutting for Stone
by Abraham Verghese
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
An NPR Best Book Club Book of the Year (Lynn Neary)
"A winner.... Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters.... Verghese is something of a magician as a novelist."
—USA Today
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother's death and their father's disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles-and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.
"A masterpiece.... Not a word is wasted in this larger-than-life saga.... Verghese expertly weaves the threads of numerous story lines into one cohesive opus. The writing is graceful, the characters compassionate and the story full of nuggets of wisdom."
—San Francisco Chronicle
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 The Lost City of Z
by David Grann
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and The Christian Science Monitor
One of the Top Ten Books of the Year,
declares Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times: "Suspenseful.... Rollicking.... Reads with all the pace and excitement of a movie thriller."
In 1925, the legendary British explorer Percy Fawcett ventured into the Amazon jungle, in search of a fabled civilization. He never returned. Over the years countless perished trying to find evidence of his party and the place he called "The Lost City of Z." In this masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, journalist David Grann interweaves the spellbinding stories of Fawcett's quest for "Z" and his own journey into the deadly jungle, as he unravels the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century.
"A riveting, exciting and thoroughly compelling tale of adventure."
—John Grisham
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 Lark & Termite
by Jayne Anne Phillips
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
National Book Award Finalist
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
"Powerful and emotionally piercing.... A novel that conjures with poetic ferocity the...unconscious, almost magical bonds shared by people who are connected by blood or love or memory."
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Lark & Termite is a rich, wonderfully alive novel about seventeen year old Lark and her brother, Termite, living in West Virginia in the 1950s. Their mother, Lola, is absent, while their aunt, Nonie, raises them as her own, and Termite's father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, is caught up in the early days of the Korean War. Award-winning author Jayne Anne Phillips intertwines family secrets, dreams, and ghosts in a story about the love that unites us all.
"Phillips...[knows] how to bypass the reader's brain and inject her words directly into the bloodstream."
—Los Angeles Times
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Video Highlight
Watch a special clip of David Grann talking about what makes The Lost City of Z perfect for discussion!
QUESTION OF THE MONTH!
Is it the more the merrier, or can you really have too much of a good thing? Tell us what your ideal book club size is.
Vote Now!
(Results will be revealed in next month's newsletter.)
And send us an email if you have a question you'd like asked!
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