Book Club Picks, Meetings and Resources
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Book Club Picks
If you’re in need of new selections for your book club, we can help! Our quarterly picks lists below are filled with engaging titles sure to spark lively discussion. For each title, we:
- purchase multiple copies so they’ll be available to book club members
- purchase multiple formats so you can read the way you like best
- commit to keeping the titles for 18 months from the time we pick them so you can plan ahead
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Whatcom READS
Join the 2025 Whatcom READS community discussion by reading No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister with your book group. Then watch for upcoming events starting in Fall 2024 that explore themes from the book.
WINTER 2024 PICKS
“A four-year-old girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that will remain unsolved for nearly fifty years. A stunning debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction, The Berry Pickers is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma and the persistence of love across time.”
Fiction
“Burnt is a captivating memoir of trailblazing and firefighting from California’s first — and only — female chief of fire protection, a pioneering woman in a male-dominated field.”
Nonfiction
“An epic love story in the vein of Cold Mountain and The Great Circle, about a young reindeer herder and a minister’s daughter in the nineteenth century Arctic Circle.” (Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award)
Fiction
“A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.”
Nonfiction
“A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism.”
Nonfiction
“Inspired by the author’s love for her family, and peopled by warm, larger-than-life characters who jostle alongside the ghostly absences of others, The Rooster House is at once a riveting journey into the complex history of a wounded country and a profoundly moving tribute to hope and the refusal of despair.”
Nonfiction
“A modern love story about two childhood friends, Sam, raised by an actress mother in LA’s Koreatown, and Sadie, from the wealthy Jewish enclave of Beverly Hills, who reunite as adults to create video games, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives.”
Fiction
“A woman risks everything to end her family’s centuries-old curse, solve her mother’s disappearance, and find love in this mesmerizing novel from the author of Spells for Forgetting.”
Fiction
“The Martian meets 127 Hours in this epic and scientifically accurate thriller about a scuba diver who’s been swallowed by an eighty-foot, sixty-ton sperm whale and has only one hour to escape before his oxygen runs out.”
Fiction
“Reminiscent of the works of Mary Karr and Terese Marie Mailhot, a memoir of family and survival, coming-of-age on and off the reservation, and of the frictions between mainstream American culture and Native inheritance; assimilation and reverence for tradition.”
Nonfiction