2023: A Year of Reader's Choice
Join us to discuss some of our Lifelong members' treasured books. New members are always welcome!
August 30 – Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier (2010)
From the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring comes a stunning historical novel that follows the story of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, two extraordinary 19th century fossil hunters who changed the scientific world forever. Recommended by Beth Ramos
September 27 – The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)
Donna Tartt, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Goldfinch, writes about a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college who, under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality. Recommended by Amy Noznesky
October 25 – Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (2021)
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. The novel was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Recommended by Julie Himbert
December 6 – Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X by Deborah Davis (2004)
Strapless is a historical novel about John Singer Sargent’s most famous painting, Portrait of Madame X, and its subject, Virginie Amelie Gautreau, an American expatriate living in Paris. Drawing on documents from private collections and other previously unexamined materials, and featuring a cast of characters including Oscar Wilde and Richard Wagner, Strapless is a tale of art and celebrity, obsession and betrayal. Recommended by Cindy Perry
January 3 – Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)
Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize and 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Demon Copperhead is loosely based on Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, but instead addresses contemporary issues faced by a boy born into poverty in Southern Appalachia. At times hilarious, at times heartbreaking, “Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.” Recommended by Dolores Salvo