Take Five Book Club - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Take Five Book Club meets to talk about this month's read, "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle."

November Book: Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

Product Description David Sedaris's beloved holiday collection is new again with six more pieces, including a never before published story. Along with such favoritesas the diaries

Loving Frank

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the

The Story of Edward Sawtelleby David Wroblewski

Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generations, the

The Last Lecture

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand." --Randy Pausch

A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

Girls' Poker Night

For fans of Elinor Lipman and Laura Zigman comes the hilarious and poignant tale of a cub reporter, her poker-playing sidekicks, and the devilish pas de deux of workplace romance.

Ursula, Under:

In Michigan's upper peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and eyes of the entire country. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft-"the only sound is an astonished tiny intake of breath from Ursula as she goes down, like a penny into the slot of a bank, disappeared, gone." It is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in the rescue of this little girl, the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband. One TV viewer following the action notes that the Wong family lives in a decrepit mobile home and wonders why all this time and money is being "wasted on that half-breed trailer-trash kid."

Skinny Dip

"Hiaasen's latest heroine is mad as hell, at least when she's off her meds, and she's not going to take it anymore. When a telemarketer who's interrupted dinner with her son Fry to peddle waterlogged Florida real estate responds to her gentle reproof with obscenities, Honey Santana, deciding he needs to be taught a lesson, sets out to entice Boyd Shreave to the Everglades to give him a taste of his own medicine.

The Rest of Her Life - March 2008

In The Rest of Her Life, Laura Moriarty delivers a luminous, compassionate, and provocative look at how mothers and daughters with the best intentions can be blind to the harm they do to one another.

Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy - the effects of which not only divide Leigh's family, but polarize the entire community. We see the story from Leigh's perspective, as she grapples with the hard reality of what her daughter has done and the devastating consequences her actions have on the family of another teenage girl in town, all while struggling to protect Kara in the face of rising public outcry.

March: Inkheart

Mortimer is a bookbinder and has passed on his great love of books to his daughter Meggie, but he has never read aloud to her. When a stranger named Dustfinger appears at their home, Meggie's world turns upside down. She soon learns some startling truths --- about her mother's disappearance nine years earlier, and the mysterious book called INKHEART that her father tries desperately to hide at the book-filled home of Elinor, Meggie's great aunt. She learns that the reason Mo has never read aloud to her is because he has a secret, mysterious, dangerous gift --- when he reads aloud, objects and charaters come out of the books --- a skill he discovered when Capricorn, the dark villain of INKHEART, came into the world when Meggie was three. Teresa, Meggie's mother, disappeared at the same time, presumably into the story.

February: Their Eyes Were Watching God

At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology.

January Book - Best American Short Stories 2007 - click here

Best American Short Stories 2007 - America's best-selling story anthology, featuring guest editor Stephen King and new series editor Heidi Pitlor Edited by the best-selling author and pop culture icon Stephen King. Contributors include Richard Russo, John Barth, Jim Shepard, Alice Munro, William Gay, T.C. Boyle, Mary Gordon, Kate Walbert, Ann Beattie, and Louis Auchincloss.