Book Club Reading Lists

Brainerd Book Club

Meets the 4th Wednesday of each month at 6:30pm

Join us for discussion, refreshments, and sharing as we meet each month to discuss our latest book selection. Originally founded by beloved librarian Pat Coleman, this book club seeks to carry on her love of reading. Members take turns suggesting books.

All are welcome to join. The library orders books in advance which can be checked out as needed.

They meet on the 4th Wednesday of each month at 6:30pm in the large Conference Room in the Library.

May 27th 6:30pm “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë

Not just grief. Not just love. Something wilder than both

Wuthering Heights enters the heart where feeling has gone past reason and become fate. Attachment so fierce it outlives tenderness, restraint, even death; a book in which longing does not fade into memory, but hardens, returns, and leaves its mark on everyone it touches.

Emily Brontë’s only novel and a gothic classic—a gripping story of obsession, revenge, and tragedy endures as a work of tremendous and far-reaching influence.

Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before. What unfolds is the tale of the intense love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine, forced to choose between passionate, tortured Heathcliff and gentle, well-bred Edgar Linton, surrenders to the expectations of her class. As Heathcliff’s bitterness and vengeance at his betrayal is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.

June 24th 6:30pm “Trust” by Hernan Diaz

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Even through the roar of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. They have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation—and in tension with one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans a century and becomes more exhilarating with each revelation. An immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions at the heart of relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

April 22nd 6:30pm “The Smell of Other People’s Houses” by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

In Alaska, 1970, being a teenager here isn’t like being a teenager anywhere else. Ruth has a secret that she can’t hide forever. Dora wonders if she can ever truly escape where she comes from, even when good luck strikes. Alyce is trying to reconcile her desire to dance, with the life she’s always known on her family’s fishing boat. Hank and his brothers decide it’s safer to run away than to stay home—until one of them ends up in terrible danger.

Four very different lives are about to become entangled.

March 25th 6:30pm “Water Moon” by Samantha Sotto Yambao

On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see only a cozy ramen restaurant. And just the chosen ones – those who are lost – will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.

Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen and her father missing. Then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike other customers. For he offers help, instead of seeking it.

Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice – through rain puddles, hitching rides on paper cranes, across the bridge between midnight and morning and through a night market in the clouds. But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own – and risk making a choice she will never be able to take back.

Step into the captivating and romantic fantasy novel that will sweep you away on an unforgettable adventure – perfect for fans of Studio Ghibli, Erin Morgenstern and Before the Coffee Gets Cold!

Feb 25th 6:30pm “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” by Deesha Philyaw

FINALIST for the 2020 National Book Award; WINNER of the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award; WINNER of the 2020 Story Prize; WINNER of the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize*

“Beguiling.” —The New Yorker
“Tender, fierce, proudly black and beautiful, these stories will sneak inside you and take root.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Triumphant.” —Publishers Weekly

This book explores the places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The 9 stories in this collection feature 4 generations grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions.

There is 14-year-old Jael, who has a crush on the preacher’s wife. At 42, Lyra realizes that her discomfort with her own body stands between her and a new love. As Y2K looms, Caroletta’s “same time next year” arrangement with her childhood best friend is tenuous. A serial mistress lays down the ground rules for her married lovers. In the dark shadows of a hospice parking lot, grieving strangers find comfort in each other. With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are seductive, vulnerable, unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be.

PAST BOOK SELECTIONS 2025

Oct 22nd 6:30pm “Persuasion” by Jane Austen

Jane Austen’s beloved and subtly subversive final novel of romantic tension and second chances. Now a motion picture from Netflix starring Dakota Johnson and Henry Golding, and a TikTok Book Club Pick.

At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen’s last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.

**Sept 24th 6:30pm “Thursday Murder Club” by Richard Osman**

Four septuagenarians with a few tricks up their sleeves
A female cop with her first big case
A brutal murder
Welcome to…
THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club. When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case. As the bodies begin to pile up, can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer, before it’s too late?

Wednesday, January 22nd at 6:30pm

The Beans of Egypt, Maine

By Carolyn Chute

The Beans of Egypt, Maine introduced the world to the notorious, unforgettable Bean clan of small town Egypt, Maine from wild man Reuben, an alcoholic who can’t seem to keep himself out of jail; to his cousins, the perpetually pregnant Roberta, and Beal, a man gentle by temperament but violent in defeat who marries his pious neighbor, Earlene Pomerleau before poverty kills him. Through her story of the Beans’s struggle with their inner demons to survive against hardship and societal ignorance, Chute emerged as a writer of immense humanity and unparalleled insight into a world most of us knew little of, if we’d recognized it at all.

Wednesday, May 28th at 6:30pm

Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel Paperback – May 1, 2017

by Mark Sullivan

Based on the true story of a forgotten hero, bestseller Beneath a Scarlet Sky is the triumphant, epic tale of one young man’s incredible courage and resilience during one of history’s darkest hours.

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He’s a normal Italian teenager―obsessed with music, food, and girls―but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior.

In an attempt to protect him, Pino’s parents force him to enlist as a German soldier―a move they think will keep him out of combat. But after Pino is injured, he is recruited at the tender age of eighteen to become the personal driver for Adolf Hitler’s left hand in Italy, General Hans Leyers, one of the Third Reich’s most mysterious and powerful commanders.

Now, with the opportunity to spy for the Allies inside the German High Command, Pino endures the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation by fighting in secret, his courage bolstered by his love for Anna and for the life he dreams they will one day share.

Fans of All the Light We Cannot See, The Nightingale, and Unbroken will enjoy this riveting saga of history, suspense, and love.

Wednesday, June 25th at 6:30pm

My Brilliant Friend

By Elena Ferrante

Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence.

Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between two women