May Book Choice and Zoom 2021

 

April Beehive Book Choice and Zoom 2021

 

Possible Books for 2021

 It is that time again to vote on our next season of books. Here are the nominations. What a wonderful list, it was hard to select 8! 

Afterlife- Julia Alvarez 

American Dirt - Jeanine Cummins 

Anxious People - Fredrik Backman

Apeirogon- Colum McCann

Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver 

Beartown- Fredrik Backman 

Caste - Isabel Wilkerson 

Deacon King Kong- James McBride 

Death of Vivek Oji - Akwaeke Emezi 

Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence - Doris Pilkington 

Ghost Boys - Jewell Parker Rhodes 

Girl with the Louding Voice -Abi Dare 

Giver of Stars - Jojo Moyes 

How to be an Antiracist - Ibram Kendi 

How we Fight For Our Lives - Saeed Jones 

Interior Chinatown- Charles Yu 

Invisible life of Addie LaRue - V.E. Schwab

Life she was GIven - Ellen Wiseman

Memory Police - Yoko Ogawa 

Mexican Gothic- Silvia Moreno Garcia 

Midlight Library - Matt Haig 

Mrs Everything - Jennifer Weiner 

My Dark Vanessa - Kate Elizabeth Russell 

Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead 

Only Harmless Great Things - 

Pale Faced Lie - David Crow 

Sold on a Monday- Kristina McMorris 

Bluest Eyes - Toni Morrison 

Vanishing Half- Bret Bennett 

This is how it always is - Laurie Frankel 

Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom 

When we were Colored - Eva Rutland

Why we Swim - Bonnie Tsui 

Year of Wonder - Geraldine Brooks

December Book Group Choice

 Because of COVID and the health restrictions we were unable to have our annual Holiday cookie exchange and dinner. We set up a recipe exchange to share favorites but we all missed the joyfulness of face to face visiting and laughing. Our year wraps up with a Zoom discussion of our December book choice was interesting and engaging. This Alternative History novel by Ben H. Winters gave us a lot to talk about. 

Below is a brief part of the book review from NPR 2016: 

"Underground Airlines" imagines that the Civil War never happened. Rather, Lincoln was assassinated before he took office. And in an act of compromise, some states were allowed to maintain slavery. Those slave states, known as the Hard Four, consist in the present day of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the reunited Carolinas. They're demarcated from the rest of the U.S. by heavily patrolled borders.

The other states in the Union have agreed that any slave or person bound to labor, as they're called, must be returned to the corporate plantation from which they've escaped. That's where Victor, the anti-hero of this noir-ish novel, comes in. Victor is a bounty hunter working for the U.S. Marshals Service. He's adept at infiltrating abolitionist groups and retrieving runaways because he's black himself. Or rather, as Victor precisely tells us, he's moderate charcoal with brass highlights, which is one of the 172 varietals of African-American skin tone delineated in the U.S. Marshals Service field guide.

When the novel opens, Victor is sitting in a diner in Indianapolis with a Catholic priest who's suspected of running a rescue cell of what's called the Underground Airlines..."