THE FACULTY AND FRIENDS CLUB @ FSU

Readings Previous Years

Faculty & Friends Club of FSU: Book Discussion Group

2012

  • A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
  • Alex & Me: How a Scientist & a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence & Formed a Deep Bond in the Process by Irene Pepperberg
  • Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
  • England and Another Shore by Audrey Wilson
  • In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson
  • Infidel: My Life by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
  • Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About The Event That Changed History by William Ryan and Walter Pitman
  • Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
  • Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
  • State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
  • The Color of Lies by Donna Meredith
  • Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy by Carlos Eire

2011

  • Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
  • Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
  • Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by SC Gwynne
  • Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
  • The Gendarme by Mark Mustian
  • The Glass Madonna by Donna Meredith
  • The Glassblowers of Murano by Marina Fiorato
  • The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Other Family by Joanna Trollope

2010

  • Agent ZigZag by Macintyre, Ben
  • From May to December by MacEnulty, Pat
  • John Adams by McCullough, David
  • Olive Kitteredge by Strout, Elizabeth
  • The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Shaffer, Mary Ann & Barrows, Annie
  • The Help by Stockett, Kathryn
  • The Red Tent by Diament, Anita
  • The Villagers by Field, Edward & Derrick, Neil
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston, Zora Neale
  • Unaccustomed Earth by Lahiri, Jhumpa
  • When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa by Godwin, Peter

2009

  • A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
  • Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama
  • Vivaldi’s Virgins by Barbara Quick
  • Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
  • Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and D.A. Relin
  • The Best Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov (ed. John Kulka)
  • Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter
  • The House on Boulevard Street by David Kirby
  • The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
  • The Fall by Albert Camus

2008

  • Saturday, Ian McEwen
  • The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie (was at FSU)
  • June Bug’s Grocery and the Cornfield Jook, Mary Sterner Lawson
  • The Summer before Dark, Doris Lessing
  • Flights of Love, Bernhard Schlink
  • The Year 1000, Robert Lacey
  • Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
  • Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
  • Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa
  • The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
  • Saving Fish from Drowning, by Amy Tan

2007

  • The Story of Lucy Gault, William Trevor
  • The Lost Painting:  The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece, Jonathan Harr
  • March, Geraldine Brooks
  • Bread and Wine, Ignazio Silone
  • One Thousand White Women, Jim Fergus
  • The Interpreter, Suki Kim
  • 1776, David McCullough
  • Runaway, Alice Munro
  • Emma, Jane Austin
  • Wings of Fire, Charles Todd

2006

  • Babel, Barbara Hamby
  • The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
  • Wild Swans, Jung Chang
  • Amsterdam, Ian McEwen
  • Unless, Carole Shields
  • The Sound of the Mountain, Yanunari Kawabata
  • A Different Drummer, William Melvin Kelley
  • The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
  • American Prometheus:  The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Kai Bird
  • The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon

2005

  • Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller
  • Crabwalk, Gunter Grass
  • Girl Talk, Julianna Baggott
  • Victoria’s Daughters, Jerrold Packard
  • Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
  • The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
  • A Hole in Texas, Herman Wouk
  • The Piano Tuner, Daniel Philippe Mason
  • Cane River, Lalita Tademy

2004

  • The Next Step in the Dance, Tim Gautreaux
  • Life is So Good, George Dawson and Richard Glaubman
  • Colors of the Mountain, Da Chen
  • Buddha, Karen Armstrong
  • Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman
  • Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
  • Alas, Babylon, Pat Frank
  • Life of Pi, Yann Martel
  • The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Kidd Monk
  • Killing Mr. Watson, Peter Matthiessen

2003

  • Soul Mountain, Xiangian Gao
  • Nickle and Dimed: on Not Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich
  • Five Quarters of the Orange, Joanne Harris
  • Atonement, Ian McEwan
  • Empire Falls, Richard Russo
  • Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
  • What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, Bernard Lewis
  • Mid-Passage, Wendy Bishop
  • Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler
  • The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany, Martin Goldsmith

2002

  • The Monkey’s Raincoat, Robert Crais
  • The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, Timothy Ryback
  • High Tide in Tucson, Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
  • Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee
  • Seven Daughters of Eve, Bryan Sykes
  • Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
  • Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declar of Indepen, John Hockenberry
  • Two Old Women, Velma Wallis
  • The Arcanum, Janet Gleeson

2001

  • The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Melissa Bank
  • Thirteen Stories, Eudora Welty
  • A Lesson before Dying, Ernest Gaines
  • The Reader, Bernhard Schlink
  • The Smile of the Acrobat, Audrey Wilson
  • The Professor and the Madman: a Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford Dictionary, Simon Winchester
  • The Samurai’s Garden, Gail Tsukiyama
  • The Love of a Good Woman, Alice Munro
  • Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. I, Blanche Wiesen Cook
  • The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie
  • The Hours, by Michael Cunningham

2000

  • Sperm Wars, Dr. Robin Baker
  • Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom, and Reinventing Womanhood, Carolyn Heilbrun
  • Slaves in the Family, by Edward Ball
  • Travels of William Bartram, William Bartram
  • The Alphabet of Desire, Barbara Hamby
  • What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, Pearl Cleage
  • Dancing at the Rascal Fair, Ivan Doig
  • To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  • Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
  • Baltasar and Blimunda, José Saramago

1999

  • Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
  • Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt
  • Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
  • All Over But the Shoutin’, Rick Bragg
  • The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
  • The Paperboy, Pete Dexter
  • Three mysteries: A Certain Justice, P.D. James
  • The Seville Communion, Arturo Perez-Reverte
  • Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, Walter Mosley
  • Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  • Little Altars Everywhere, Rebecca Wells
  • The Concubine’s Children, Denise Chong

1998

  • How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, Julia Alvarez
  • Stones from the River, Ursula Hegi
  • Original Sin, P.D. James
  • The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris
  • The Cunning Man, Robertson Davies
  • Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester
  • A Civil Action, Jonathan Harr
  • Bridges to Humanity, Bruce Grindal
  • Faith and Treason, Antonia Fraser

1992

  • Eva Luna, Isabelle Allende
  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
  • The Irish R.M., E. Sommerville and Martin Ross
  • What Mad Pursuit, Francis Crick
  • Joshua, Joseph Girzone
  • Whose Body, Dorothy Sayers, and Indemnity Only, S. Paretsky
  • Necessary Losses, Judith Viorst
  • Burden of Proof, Scott Turow
  • Jump and Other Stories, Nadine Gordimer
  • Life and Death in Shanghai, Nien Cheng

1991

  • My Antonia, Willa Cather
  • Exit the Rainmaker, Jonathan Coleman
  • The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
  • The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
  • The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
  • The Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck
  • Soviet Women, Francine Duplessix Gray
  • Fair and Tender Ladies, Lee Smith
  • The Oldest Living Confederate Widow, Allan Gurganus

1990

  • Beloved, Toni Morrison
  • The House of the Spirits, Isabelle Allende
  • Her Mother’s Daughter, Marilyn French
  • The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
  • The Old Gringo, Carlos Fuentes
  • Wedding Song, Naguib Mahfouz
  • Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy
  • Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

1989

  • The Country Girls’ Trilogy, Edna O’Brien
  • The Dead and the Living, Sharon Olds
  • The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
  • A Short History of a Small Place, T. Pearson
  • The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin
  • Bonfire of the Vanities, Thomas Wolf
  • The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  • Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Barcia Marquez
  • Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
  • The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty

1988

  • Womenfolk:  Growing Up Down South, S. Abbot
  • Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell
  • The Weaker Vessel, Antonia Frazer
  • West with the Night, Beryl Markham
  • The Beet Queen, Louise Erdich
  • Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Burns
  • Emma, Jane Austin
  • Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
  • Gone to Soldiers, Marge Piercy
  • Three mysteries, by Dorothy Sayer, Tony Hillerman, and Dick Francis

1987

  • Opening Nights, Janet Burroway
  • Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Anne Dillard
  • The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
  • The Good Apprentice, Iris Murdoch
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
  • Love Medicine, Louise Erdich
  • Her First American, Lore Segal
  • Foreign Affairs, Alison. Lurie
  • Children of Sanchez, Oscar Lewis
  • The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
  • Not Wanted on the Voyage, T. Findley

1986

  • The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
  • Nectar in a Sieve, K. Markanduyer
  • Burmese Days, George Orwell
  • Middlemarch, George Eliot
  • Old Wives’ Tales, A. Bennet
  • Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
  • Lucky Jim, K. Amis
  • The Once and Future King, T. H. White
  • Out of Africa,  Isak Dinesen
  • Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  • I, Claudius, Robert Graves

1983

  • The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux
  • The Lost Steps, Carlos Fuentes

1982

  • The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
  • Vanity Fair,  W.M. Thackery
  • Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
  • The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
  • Fifth Business, Robertson Davies
  • Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin
  • October Light, Gardner
  • Small is Beautiful,

1978

  • Trinity, Lion Uris
  • Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
  • Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  • Kinflicks, Lisa Alther
  • The Sacred and the Profane, Iris Murdoch

1977

  • Old Age, Simone de Beauvoir
  • Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
  • Orlando, Virginia Woolf’
  • Memoirs of a Survivor, Doris Lessing
  • Unfinished Woman, Lillian Hellman
  • Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
  • Raw Silk, Janet Burroway
  • A Mass for the Dead, William Gibson
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • Fathers and Sons, Turgenev
  • Faculty & Friends Club of FSU: Book Discussion Group