Order of all Books - February 2012
This Table presents all the books read by the erstwhile-legendary Last Thursday Book Club, listed in order of quality based on the averaged numerical votes of the club members.  This list is 
reconstituted at the end of each calendar year to integrate the most current 12 selections.  In general see the Review Summaries for details on what the Club liked, did not like. When the book 
title is hyperlinked in the table below, e.g., The Old Man and the Sea  then do a Ctrl-click on that hyperlink to directly view the specific LTBC members summary/reviews for that entry.





We are currently hard at work reading and evaluating books during the year 2012.  We are exhausted from our efforts in 2011:  we entered only one book into our top fifty,
and (sadly) also one into our bottom 50.   In contrast, nothing we read in the year 2007 was deemed outstanding enough to make it into our top 30 books.   You will have to search deep to 
find Ulysses on our list.  The second column provides the date of the LTBC meeting during which the book was discussed.





Here is our table revised as of 20 February 2012 representing our Club selections read throughout our existence  ...  contact the webmaster with any questions or corrections.





Order LTBC  date
 Title Author Notes
1 29-Jan-98 The Grapes of Wrath  John Steinbeck  (580 pgs) Our choice for best of all
2 29-Apr-93 A River Runs Through It Norman Maclean  
3 25-Feb-99 Endurance:  Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage  Alfred Lansing  
4 29-Oct-98 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov  
5 28-Feb-08 Infidel Ayaan Hirshi Ali Ali was the Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament who faced death threats after collaborating on a film about domestic violence against Muslim women 
6 25-May-00 To Kill a Mockingbird  Harper Lee When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow....
7 27-Feb-94 The Killer Angels Michael Sharra  (1974)
8 26-May-94 The Good Earth  Pearl Buck (1937)
9 27-Jul-06 The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway Man is not made for defeat.  A man can be destroyed but not defeated.   Pull the boat, fish. 
10 28-Aug-94 Red Badge of Courage Stephan Crane  
11 31-Jul-97 Undaunted Courage Stephen Ambrose  
12 22-Aug-97 All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy  
13 30-Jul-98 A Fan’s Notes  Frederick Exley  
14 27-Apr-00 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  Samuel L. Clemens  
15 28-May-09 When A Crocodile Eats The Sun Peter Godwin This story of a family was highly emotional. The author was watching his father die and his country die - what will it take (in time) to improve the situation in Zimbabwe? The father said whites in Africa are like Jews anywhere - waiting for the next crisis to erupt. 
16 29-Oct-09 In Cold Blood  Truman Capote It has been said of Mr. Clutter that his shoulders were broad, his hair had held its dark color, his square-jawed, confident face retained a healthy-hued youthfulness, and his teeth, unstained, and strong enough to shatter walnuts, were still intact. 
17 28-Jul-94 Monsignor Quixote Graham Greene  
18 28-Jan-99 All The King’s Men   Robert Penn Warren  
19 27-May-99 Angela’s Ashes   Frank McCourt When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all.  It was, of course, a miserable childhood:  the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. 
20 25-Mar-04 Life of Pi Yann Martel a transformative novel, an astonishing work of imagination that will delight and stun readers in equal measure.
21 22-May-08 Out Stealing Horses Per Petterson The author as Trond Sander:  "All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this."
22 18-Nov-04 Disgrace JM Coetzee the least given to sentimentality of the talented novelists to have come out of South Africa.
23 25-Jul-96 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”  
24 19-Dec-96 The Spy Who Came In From the Cold John LeCarre  
25 25-Mar-10 Three Cups of Tea Greg Mortensen One man's mission to promote peace, one school at a time.  In 1996, Mortenen returned to Korphe to build the promised school.
26 30-Dec-93 The Assault Henry Mulisch  
27 26-Jan-95 Winter of our Discontent John Steinbeck  
28 29-Sep-05 The Actual Saul Bellow The worldly and clever Harry Trellman, a grand noticer of things, tells the familiar Bellow story of an old adolescent love which is finally admitted to and resumed.
29 14-Dec-10 Hitch-22 Christopher
Hitchens		 What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.
30 27-Jul-95 The Moviegoer Walker Percy  
31 27-Mar-03 Master and Commander Patrick O'Brian the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels.  Title provides links to Smithsonian articles on how this series came to be.
32 31-Aug-95 A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole the funniest book on the list; memorable characters
33 25-Jan-01 The Professor and the Madman Simon Winchester Creating the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the major contributors was a US Army surgeon who murdered a man in London and was in a lunatic asylum.
34 31-May-01 The Shipping News E. Annie Proulx From all outward appearances, Quoyle has gone through his first 36 years  on earth as a big schlump of a loser.
35 22-Nov-01 This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind Ivan Doig The grandson of homesteaders and the son of a ranch hand and a ranch cook, Ivan Doig was born in Montana in 1939.
36 28-Apr-05 Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson I have observed that, in the way people are strange, they grow stranger, says Ruth, our narrator. When she was young, her mother returned with her and her sister to Fingerbone, Idaho. Once there, she left the two of them on the front porch of her mother's house, then committed suicide by driving her car into a nearby lake.
37 27-Mar-08 Man in the Holocene Max Frisch Erosion was a theme; Geiser’s mind was eroding.  At the same time, Geiser remembers every minute on the Matterhorn. 
38 20-Nov-08 The Yiddish Policeman's Union Michael Chabon "He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker."  "...collecting himself like a beggar chasing scattered dimes along the sidewalk." 
39 24-Jun-04 The Reader Bernhard Schlink the story of a man whose adolescent affair with an older woman returns to haunt him years later.
40 30-Dec-05 The Nigger of the Narcissus Joseph Conrad "The Narcissus came gently into her berth; the shadows of souless walls fell upon her, the dust of all the continents leaped upon her deck, and a swarm of strange men, clambering up her sides, took possession of her in the name of the sordid earth.  She had ceased to live."
41 29-Jun-06 Gilead Marilyn Robinson "I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me."
42 30-Apr-09 The Reluctant Mr. Darwin David Quannem "He didn't foresee being swallowed up by barnacle taxonomy for eight years ... His study must have smelled like a pub, from the evaporation of pickling alcohol off his specimens." Darwin anecdotes: Little son George asking his playmates, "Where does your father do his barnacles?" 
43 29-Jul-10 The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler “I’ve been around,” he said.  “Know the boys and such.  Used to do a little liquor-running down from Huenene Point.  A tough racket, brother.  Riding the scout car with a gun in your lap and a wad on your hip that would choke a coal chute. Plenty of times we paid off four sets of law before we hit Beverly Hills.  A tough racket.”
    “Terrible.”  I said
    He leaned back and blew smoke at the ceiling from the small tight corner of his small tight mouth.
    “Maybe you don’t believe me,” he said.
    “Maybe I don’t.”  I said.  “And maybe I do.  And then again maybe I haven’t bothered to make my mind up.  ....”
44 27-Sep-07 Deliverance James Dickey Dickey's writing is gripping - the rape scene actually hurt to read it.  Some of his poetic descriptions were carried away.  Provided unspoken interaction between the four guys, most of whom wanted to be macho like Lewis.
45 17-Dec-09 Mutiny on the Bounty Charles Nordhoff et al The story of the Bounty will be told as long as men sail the sea. The storytelling genius of the authors finds here a canvas filled with color, action and adventure. Readers will realize, as did the authors, that so large a drama could not be confined to the compass of an ordinary book. Nordoff and Hall chose to tell the story of the Bounty in three acts.  We read the first.
46 28-Oct-93 Bless Me Ultima Rudolpho Anaya   
47 22-Dec-94 The Painted Bird Jerzy Kosinski  
48 23-Dec-99 The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway Everyone enjoyed the bull fighting descriptions, wanted more.
49 27-Jul-00 Citizen Soldiers: Normandy to the Bulge  Stephen Ambrose combines history and journalism to describe how American GIs battled their way to the Rhineland.
50 26-Feb-04 The Debt to Pleasure John Lanchester If Humbert Humbert had written a cookbook rather than about his nymphet, this would have been the book.
51 25-May-06 As I Lay Dying William Faulkner It takes two people to make you, and one people to die.  That's how the world is going to end. 
52 28-Sep-06 Blood Meridian
or The Evening Redness in the Sky		 Cormac McCarthy War endures. … Before man was, war waited for him. ...  Men are born for games.  Nothing else. ... (every child) knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard.
53 25-Feb-10 The Road Cormac McCarthy In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.
54 29-Mar-07 Ironweed William Kennedy  Ironweed is only secondarily about Albany. It is primarily about survival - about an ordinary man, a bum by his own admission, whose extraordinarily bad luck has brought him to rock bottom but also to the discovery, within himself, of an inner strength that he cannot understand. 
55 28-Oct-10 The Last Picture Show Larry McMurtry We enter the one-stoplight town of Thalia, Texas, where Duane Moore, his buddy Sonny, and his girlfriend Jacy are all stumbling along the rocky road to adulthood. The trip includes naked swimming parties, a visit to a blind heifer, mean high school coach, dancing with erections, the real Merc (1948-1951), and road trips to Mexico. 
56 30-Jun-05 The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from the final days of Afghanistan’s monarchy to the atrocities of the present.
57 26-Aug-99 Snow Falling on Cedars  David Guterson                                                                         
58 30-Nov-00 Flashman: From the Flashman Papers George MacDonald Fraser  
59 29-Jul-04 Benjamin Franklin:  An American Life Walter Isaacson Transforms marble men into flesh-and-blood figures, complex and admirable if hardly perfect.
60 29-Sep-04 Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Dai Sijie lot of laughs as well as having our eyes opened again concerning Mao's Cultural Revolution
61 27-Jan-05 Beowulf - the new verse translation Seamus Heaney In the introduction to his translation, Seamus Heaney argues that Beowulf's role as a required text for many English students obscured its mysteries and "mythic potency."   We are treated to a world view in which a thane's allegiance to his lord and to God is absolute.  
62 25-Aug-05 Beloved Toni Morrison Race, slavery, and the effects and banality of evil.  Sethe, Paul D, and Stamp Paid have each endured a furious past, complete with the worst horrors imaginable.
63 31-Aug-00 Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade  Kurt Vonnegut Extra Credit:  Timequake
64 30-May-02 My Antonia Willa Cather  
65 27-Feb-03 Blue Latitudes Tony Horwitz Boldly Going Where Capt. Cook Has Gone Before
66 26-Jul-07 The Things They Carried  Tim O'Brien Included The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong (story of Mary Anne and the Greenies) and On the Rainy River (story of the old man Elroy and The Trip (almost) to Canada).
67 29-Sep-95 The Reivers William Faulkner more great humor
68 25-Jun-98 The Crossing   Cormac McCarthy Extra credit:  Blood Meridian 
69 17-Dec-98 Cities of the Plain  Cormac McCarthy  
70 2-Aug-01 The Last Battle Cornelius Ryan Battle for Berlin: Ryan stressed realism and was meticulous in attention to detail and his extensive research notes.                                                  
71 30-Dec-04 The Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence "All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."
72 28-Dec-06 The Brave Cowboy Edward Abbey  Taking place in the fictional town of "Duke City, New Mexico"
73 31-Mar-11 The Optimists Daughter Eudora Welty  The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.
74 7-Aug-08 A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini  Plot more believable than The Kite Runner.  A page-turner synopsis of Afghanistan with women as third class citizens.  Mariam's hatred of Laila turn into Friendship.
75 18-Dec-08 What is the What Dave Eggers Valentino Achak Deng, the real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war - the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath - of the 1980s and 90s.  The fictionalized memoir by Salon.com's Dave Eggers.
76 27-May-93 The Education of Little Tree Forrest Carter  
77 22-Nov-94 Tortuga  Rudolpho Anaya   
78 26-Jan-96 Glory Vladimir Nabokov  
79 25-Jun-96 Life on the Mississippi Mark Twain  
80 4-Oct-96 The Best of Edward Abbey [or Slumgullion Stew] Edward Abbey  
81 24-Oct-96 The Warrior Woman Maxine Hong Kingston  
82 26-Jun-97 The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad  
83 22-Sep-97 Recapitulation Wallace Stegner  
84 18-Dec-97 Lie Down in Darkness William Styron  
85 26-Oct-00 Cold Mountain Charles Frazier  
86 31-Mar-05 Flyboys James Bradley Over the remote Pacific island of Chichi Jima, nine American flyers - Navy and Marine pilots sent to bomb Japanese communications towers were shot down. Eight were captured by Japanese soldiers on Chichi Jima and held prisoner. Then they disappeared.
87 27-Oct-05 No Ordinary Time Doris Kearns Goodwin A compelling chronicle of a nation and its leaders during the period when modern America was created.
88 25-Jan-07 Saturday Ian McEwan a novel set within a single day -- 15 February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon.
89 27-Jan-00 The Perfect Storm   Sebastian Junger an extended Reader's Digest true-adventure article, except the heroes don't survive
90 25-Apr-02 Longitude Dava Sobel  
91 29-Aug-02 The Chosen Chaim Potok                                                                       
92 26-Sep-02 Julian Gore Vidal Gore Vidal's fictional recreation of the Roman Empire teetering on the crux of Roman Empire teetering on the crux of Christianity and ruled by an emperor who was an  inveterate dabbler in arcane hocus-pocus, a prig, a bigot, and a dazzling and brilliant leader.
93 23-Oct-03 Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than fifty years.
94 29-Jan-04 Girl with A Pearl Earring Tracy Chevalier The novel isn't perfect, but provides a view into a fascinating period of history and a portrait of perhaps the world's greatest painter.
95 23-Feb-06 The Plot Against America Phillip Roth A "what-if" historical novel  -- the isolationist, Nazi sympathizer, and anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh runs against Roosevelt in 1940 and wins. 
96 3-Jan-08 Terrorist John Updike From the first chapter one hears the ticking of a bomb in the background. Ahmad was a U.S. citizen who didn't adopt to the outside world as his home country. Jack Levy defused him.
97 26-Mar-09 Blindness Jose Saramago Saramago's apocalyptic novel provides yet another view of man's animal nature. Chaos seems to inevitably bring out the worst in us.  On the other hand, Saramago also portrayed some of the love and tenderness we associate with human behavior.
98 19-Nov-09 The Untouchable John Banville  It was not about spying but about relationships. Protagonist was a twit in the true English tradition.  The writing was at times very special - such as "a tracery of raindrops' and "Sodden sycamore leaves lolloping about the road like injured toads." 
99 5/26/2011 In the Heart of the Sea Nathaniel Philbrick "It was," he later remembered, "the most pleasing moment of my life" - the moment he stepped aboard the whaleship Essex for the first time. He was fourteen years old, with a broad nose and an open, eager face, and like every other Nantucket boy, he'd been
100 10/27/2011 The River of Doubt Candace Millard It quickly became clear that the inexperienced Father Zahm was not capable of organizing this new expedition, and a new guide was sought out.  The Brazilian government provided Roosevelt with perhaps the most capable guide in all of South America, Colonel
101 21-Nov-96 God:  A Biography Jack Miles (won Pulitzer Prize in April, 1996)
102 28-Dec-00 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison  
103 26-Apr-01 Crossing to Safety Wallace Stegner [be sure to see the review by the Literary Society of San Diego]
104 27-Jun-02 A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul Naipaul was 2001's Nobel winner in literature.
105 29-Apr-04 The Maltese Falcon Dashiel Hammett The best known, and considered the best, of Hammett's Sam Spade novels.
106 26-Jun-08 Lord of the Flies William Golding Golding described theme as an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature and that the "shape of society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system..." 
107 28-Jun-07 Bang the Drum Slowly Mark Harris “It might or might not probably ever happen” - Good story, clever dialogue held true throughout the 243 pages (even the doctors talked like baseball players), minor league characters working toward teamwork.
108 27-Jan-11 Still Alice Lisa Genova "Okay, Alice, can you spell the word water backwards for me?" he asked.
She would have found this question trivial and even insulting six months ago, but today, it was a serious question to be tackled with serious effort. She felt only marginally worried 
109 28-Oct-04 Invitation to a Beheading Vladimir Nabokov Cincinnattus lives.
110 26-Oct-06 White Noise Don DeLillo Captures the particular strangeness of life in a time where humankind has finally learned enough to kill itself.  Naturally, it's a terribly funny book, and the prose is as beautiful as a sunset through a particulate-filled sky. 
111 6-Nov-08 Winter in the Blood James Welch  “…Long Knife had become shrewd in the way dumb men are shrewd.  He had learned to give the illusion of work, even to the point of sweating as soon as he put his gloves on, while doing very little.”  
112 29-Apr-10 Suite Francaise Irene Nemirovsky Published more than sixty years following the author's death at Auschwitz, a remarkable story of life under the Nazi occupation includes two parts--"A Storm in June," set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, and "Dolce," set in a German-occupied provincial village rife with jealousy, resentment, resistance, and collaboration.
113 25-Mar-99 The Day of the Locust  Nathanael West   [#73; movie c. 1975]
114 30-Oct-99 A Walk in the Woods Bill Bryson  Katz!
115 19-Dec-02 Founding Brothers Joseph Ellis non-fiction
116 25-Jun-03 the works of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe any poem, short story, work
117 30-Jul-09 Water for Elephants Sara Gruen Gruen framed the story with Jacob as a 90 or 93 year old, and overpopulated it with characters (over 40 named).  The nursing home scenes were entertaining, but the circus story itself was not so well written and not so credible.  The characters seemed to change character.  E.g., Jacob the vet loves animals, but Jacob stands by while the elephant in his care is brutalized.  
118 18-Nov-10 Exiles in the Garden Ward Just Alex had the usual habits of one who lived alone:  a fixed diet, a weekly visit to the bookstore, a scrupulously balanced checkbook, and a devotion to major league baseball and the PGA Tour.
119 30-Mar-00 Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko  
120 28-Sep-00 Of Love and Shadows Isabel Allende  
121 31-Jan-02 Kim Rudyard Kipling  
122 20-Nov-03 Atonement Ian McEwan  
123 6/30/2011 Tinkers Paul Harding Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing.
124 3-May-07 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Mark Haddon Focuses on one character and gives the character more autistic traits than are normally seen in one individual. 
125 28-Jan-10 Italian Shoes Henning Mankell "I always feel more lonely when it's cold. The cold outside my window reminds me of the cold emanating from my own body. I'm being attacked from two directions. But I'm constantly resisting. That's why I cut a hole in the ice every morning. If anyone were to stand with a telescope on the ice in the frozen bay and saw what I was doing, he would think that I was crazy and was about to arrange my own death. A naked man in the freezing cold, with an axe in his hand, opening up a hole in the ice?"  
126 27-Oct-95 Mozart Marcia Davenport [extra credit:  view Amadeus]
127 29-Feb-96 Death Comes for the Archbishop Willa Cather not at all the compelling book it's made out to be
128 29-Aug-96  I Heard the Owl Call My Name Margaret Craven The Indian knows his village and feels for his village as no white man for his country, his town, or even for his own bit of land. 
129 27-Feb-97 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad  (novella, 1902)
130 29-May-97 Roughing It  Mark Twain  
131 28-May-98 Dandelion Wine  Ray Bradbury  
132 19-Nov-98 Hiroshima John Hersey  
133 24-Feb-00 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  James Joyce  extra credit:  Dubliners
134 27-Sep-01 A Rumor of War Philip Caputo What the experience of Vietnam meant to a young college graduate, a 'gung-ho' lieutenant in the marine corps who enlisted for the 'heroic experience' of war.
135 22-Dec-01 Band of Brothers Stephen E. Ambrose The saga of Easy Company, whose 147 members Ambrose calls the nonpareil combat paratroopers on earth circa 1941-45. 
136 29-May-03 In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead James Lee Burke The restless specters wait in the shadows for cajun cop Dave Robicheaux
137 18-Dec-03 All the Little Live Things Wallace Stegner many consider one of his three best.
138 27-May-04 The Map That Changed the World Simon Winchester In the early years of the nineteenth century, William Smith created the first geological map of Great Britain, a time-consuming, solitary project.
139 26-Aug-04 Reading Lolita In Tehran Azar Nafisi a memoir based on an underground book club in Tehran.
140 24-Feb-05 The Ornament of the World María Rosa Menocal The history of medieval Spain under the Muslims, from the eighth through the fifteenth centuries.This was a rare period in history, when Christianity, Judaism, and Islam flourished side by side, borrowing language, art, and architecture from each other.
141 31-Jan-08 Charming Billy Alice McDermott  The grandmother "cooking the toughness into a roast."  Her belief that vegetables and Brussels sprouts had no intrinsic taste but only received flavor from the salt and butter.  The young lady awaiting word from her former suitor: Tell him "I am still here."
142 25-Sep-08 To A God UnKnown William Steinbeck In this short novel, Steinbeck explores the relationship of man to his land. The plot follows a man, Joseph Wayne, who moves to California in order to establish a homestead, leaving his father, who soon dies. 
143 25-Jun-09 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Diaz The life of Oscar Wao and the  fukú. The curse served as a bridge across time and space. Diaz' ability to take depressing, brutal sequences under Trujillo and get us through them with a sparkling sense of humor. Example: "And you thought your committee was tough!"    
144 11/17/2011 Cleopatra - A Life Stacy Schiff Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons.  Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order.
145 24-Feb-11 Queen of the South Arturo Pérez-Reverte "There is one necessary skill in this business.   Looking at a man and instantly knowing two things.   First, how much he's going to sell himself for.   And second, when you're going to have to kill him."
146 26-Feb-95 Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway  
147 6-Jun-96 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Philip K. Dick  
148 28-Feb-02 Bend Sinister Vladimir Nabokov  
149 21-Nov-02 The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene                                                                       
150 1-Nov-07 The Friends of Eddie Coyle George V. Higgins When Higgins wrote this, his first novel, he was a federal prosecutor for the Boston district.
151 27-May-10 Pompeii Robert Harris Pompeii is a blend of fictional characters with the real-life eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 that overwhelmed Pompeii and its surrounding towns. The author references various aspects of vulcanology, use of the Roman calendar, and Roman aqueducts, which were built in all parts of the Roman Empire. 
152 4/28/2011 Half Broke Horses Jeannette Walls When people kill themselves, they think they're ending the pain, but all they're doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.
If I owned hell and west Texas, he said, I do believe I'd sell west Texas and live in hell.
153 19-Feb-98 Laughing Boy  Oliver La Farge   (187 pgs)
154 23-Aug-01 The Time Machine H. G. Wells 1894 novel (his first)  describes the adventures of his hero, the time-traveler, mostly in the year A.D. 802,701, when he encounters a class-ridden battle between the decadent Eloi and the primitive Morlocks. 
155 24-Oct-02 It's Not About The Bike Lance Armstrong                                                                        
156 31-Aug-06 The Devil in the White City Erik Larson Their fates were linked by the magical Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, nicknamed the “White City” for its majestic beauty. Architect Daniel Burnham built it; serial killer Dr. H. H. Holmes used it to lure victims to his World’s Fair Hotel.
157 28-Aug-03 seldom disappointed: a memoir Tony Hillerman  
158 25-Sep-03 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Stephen King When a young girl finds herself lost in the woods, she tunes her Walkman to a Boston Red Sox game
159 29-Jul-93 The House at Otowi Bridge P. P. Church  
160 26-Aug-93 Sidhartha  Herman Hesse  
161 28-Aug-98 On the Road     Jack Kerouac  
162 28-Jun-01 The Sparrow Mary Doria Russell Religion-based framework for First Contact with clever clashing of ideas, humor & pathos.                                                      
163 30-Mar-06 Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border Ken Ellington It's a timely issue, a local issue, a political issue, and a human issue of major proportions. 
164 28-Aug-08 Bel Canto Ann Patchett Fictionalizing the Peru kidnapping.  "Years later, when this period of internment was remembered by the people who were actually there, they saw it in two distinct periods: before the box and after the box." (re when a box of opera scores was brought in).  
165 7-Dec-06 The World is Flat Thomas L. Friedman  . . .  A Brief History of the 21st Century
166 30-Mar-95 If Morning Ever Comes Anne Tyler  
167 28-Dec-95  A Thousand Acres  Jane Smiley  [extra credit:  King Lear by W. Shakespeare] Iowa farmers really get down in the dirt.  Jane should have left  it to the bard.
168 29-Mar-01 Sons and Lovers D. H. Lawrence There appears to be much autobiographical material in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.
169 28-Jul-05 Florence of Arabia Christopher Buckley They handed her a pamphlet titled 'What American Women Should Understand When They Marry a Wasabi National.' The State Department's reflexive response to any American in extremis overseas is to hand them a pamphlet…"
170 29-Nov-07 That Old Ace in the Hole Annie Proulx Proulx presents the Texas Panhandle through the eyes of 25-year-old Bob Dollar, a newcomer arriving by car.
171 24-Jun-99 The Life of Samuel Johnson  Robert Boswell Most read the 430 page version, abridged from the 1799 edition. One of the most-frequently quoted men of the 18th Century. One should at least become familiar with it, but don't read every word.
172 27-Apr-06 The Year of Magical Thinking  Joan Didion Writer Joan Didion's best-selling memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking" is about the death of her husband and her daughter's ultimately fatal illness.
173 17-Nov-05 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe First published in 1958, a relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism.
174 24-Jun-93 Talking God Tony Hillerman  
175 30-Sep-93 The City at the Edge of the World V. B. Price  
176 29-Mar-94 Hard Choices:  Health Care at What Cost? Mark Jaffe et al  
177 31-Mar-96 Kingsblood Royal Sinclair Lewis  
178 30-Jan-97 The Thief of Time Tony Hillerman  
179 22-Oct-97 MidAir  Frank Conroy [short stories]
180 20-Nov-97 The Bean Trees Barbara Kingsolver  
181 26-Mar-98 Brave New World  Aldous Huxley   (270 pgs)
182 29-Apr-99 The Sea of Grass Conrad Richter the triangle of rancher Colonel Jim Brewton,  his unstable Eastern wife Lutie, and the ambitious Brice Chamberlain.
183 23-Sep-99 Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller                                           
184 29-Jun-00 Tuesdays with Morrie - Life's Greatest Lesson   Mitch Albom  
185 25-Oct-01 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone J.K. Rowling Harry Potter knows a miserable life with the Dursleys, his horrible aunt and uncle, and their abominable son, Dudley.  Then an owl arrives.
186 31-Jul-03 To The Lighthouse Virginia Woolf  
187 22-Feb-07 Young Men and Fire Norman Maclean   Studying the Missouri River fire of 1949 was his passion for over two decades, and the book is still used as training material in firefighting schools.
188 29-Jan-09 The Other Dave Guterson Was John William truly “The Other” for Neil Countryman?  Or a confused character who latched onto an enabler for his hare-brained schemes of wilderness and survival.
189 31-May-07 A Question of Loyalty Douglas Waller Plunges into the seven-week Washington trial of Gen. William "Billy" Mitchell, the hero of the U.S. Army Air Service during World War I and the man who proved in 1921 that planes could sink a battleship.
190 9/242009 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress Robert Heinlein Heinlein celebrating our 200th anniversary of our own revolution by having us witness it again, but this time the colony was perhaps more like Australia:  a penal colony that constituted the basis of the population of the moon in 2076. 
191 22-Feb-01 Timeline Michael Crichton His Andromeda Strain was very well done, and so was Jurassic Park.   Not Timeline.
192 30-Jan-03 A Little Yellow Dog Walter Mosley an Easy Rawlins Mystery
193 27-Oct-94 You Just Don’t Understand Deborah Tannen  
194 1-May-08 The Birth of Venus Sarah Dunant Historical view of Florence.  The Strange Case of the Tattooed Nun. 
195 24-Jun-10 The Land of Green Plums Herta  Mũller The Land of Green Plums is the story of a group of young people in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania.
196 26-Aug-10 The Lone Survivor Marcus Luttrell et al The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing:  Push 'em out.  Gentlemen, I'm your instructor for the next two weeks.  I'll help you, if you need help, over matters of personal concerns.  If you get injured, go to medical and get it fixed and get back into training.  I'm your instructor.  Not your mother.  I'm here to teach you.  You stay in the track, I'll help you.  You get outside the track, I'll hammer you.  Understood? Get wet and get sandy.
197 4-Feb-94 The Children of Men P. D. James  
198 28-Apr-94 Einstein’s Dreams Alan Lightman  (fiction)
199 26-Jan-06 The March of Folly Barbara Tuchman From Troy to Vietnam.  "no experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence."
200 26-May-05 Acqua Alta Donna Leon Complex, moral, gracious, and fiercely loyal, Commissario Guido Brunetti is a husband, father, detective, and, above all, a proud resident of the enchanted floating city of Venice.
201 4-May-95 Hole in the Sky - A Memoir William Kittredge a life examined that shouldn't have been
202 2-Apr-02 Man and Superman George Bernard Shaw  
203 9/23/2011 The Ancient Child N. Scott Momaday   "Set imagined it was to please, but it was to astonish God that he painted. His presumption and arrogance were pronounced and dangerous, for they would certainly lead to the Sin of Despair, thence to death and nothingness. Bent said so, half in jest..."
204 7/28/2011 The Storyteller Mario Vargas Llosa  “But what do I have? The things I'm told and the things I tell, that's all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly.” 
205 29-Sep-94 The Devil at Home Oliver Lange  
206 23-Apr-98 Rabbit is Rich  John Updike extra credit:  Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux
207 23-Sep-98 Buffalo Girls  Larry McMurtry  (350 pgs)
208 24-Apr-03 Ulysses James Joyce the major imaginative work in English prose of the 20th century.
209 27-Aug-09 The Kill Artist   Daniel Silva Story of international intrigue and the global fight against terrorism with focus on Israeli intelligence efforts.Some intriguing questions about morality, particularly on the part of Ari Shamron who allowed the killing of a terrorist who was dying of a brain tumor.
210 22-Jun-95 Magister Ludi:  The Glass Bead Game Herman Hesse intellectual life vs. real life:  choose one
211 22-Apr-97  Ride With Me Mariah Montana Ivan Doig  
212 30-Aug-07 The Castle Franz Kafka the new translation by the Kafka scholar, Mark Harman, who, according to the The New York Times, has "made it more faithful to Kafka's dreamlike style." 
213 25-May-95 The Witches of Eastwick  John Updike  
214 18-Jul-02 Swift as Desire Laura Esquivel LAURA  ESQUIVEL is the award-winning and bestselling author of Like Water for Chocolate.
215 22-Nov-93 One Richard Bach  
216 25-Apr-96 Bluefeather Fellini in the Sacred Realm Max Evans My eternal source of shame, but not as bad as my brothers claim
217 27-Mar-97 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia-Marquez  
218 25-Jul-99 Jonathan Livingstone Seagull Richard Bach  
219 30-Sep-10 Jemez Spring Rudolpho Anaya With "Jemez Spring," Rudolfo Anaya again centers on the literate and spiritual private investigator, Sonny Baca. We have a corpse. But not just any dead body. Sonny is beckoned to crack the mystery behind the death of New Mexico's governor whose bloated, half-cooked body is found in the Bath House at Jemez Springs. 
220 30-Jun-94 Alburquerque Rudolpho Anaya   

26-Feb-09 Just Coffee Don Tobesing Don Tubesing has already received the highest award from the LTBC - no further voting is necessary, no greater accolade is possible.  May he rest in Wisconsin.





















LTBC's Table of All Books Read by the Club - as Ordered by votes of the participating members
LTBC Ordered Book List  last updated:
  20 February 2012

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