Wednesday Evening Book Club Books 2023-2024

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Stacy Schiff brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world - Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. A canny strategist, a bold commander, and a captivating lover, Cleopatra was the wealthiest ruler of her time and one of the most powerful women in history. Though her life spanned fewer than 40 years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.

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Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the "Scriptorium," a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women's and common folks' experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary. To do so, she must leave her sheltered world and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.

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Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. But it's the 1960s and despite the fact that she is a scientist, her peers are very unscientific when it comes to equality. As events are never as predictable as chemical reactions, three years after meeting Calvin, a legend and Nobel nominee, Elizabeth is an unwed, single mother and the star of America's most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth's singular approach to cooking and independent example are proving revolutionary. Because Elizabeth isn't just teaching women how to cook, she's teaching them how to change the status quo.

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The morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As one fireman recounted, "Once that first stack got going, it was 'Goodbye, Charlie.' Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, reporter and bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

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Kabul, 1978: ten-year-old Sitara's world is shattered when her entire family is assassinated. Smuggled out of the palace, Sitara is brought to America and takes on a new name - Aryana. New York, 2008: forty years after that fatal night, Aryana's world is rocked again when an elderly patient appears in her examination room - the soldier who saved her, yet may have murdered her entire family. Realizing that she cannot go on without finding the truth, Aryana embarks on a quest that takes her back to Kabul and through shadowy memories of the world she loved and lost.

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When Tilly receives an invitation to help drive eight elders on their ultimate bucket-list road trip, she impulsively says yes. Before she knows it, Tilly has said good-bye to her family and is on an adventure that will transform her in ways she could not predict, just as it will for the elders who soon dub themselves the "Crazy Eights". They each choose a stop, somewhere or something they've always wanted to experience, on the way to their ultimate goal, the Gathering of Nations Pow Wow in Albuquerque. Their plan is to travel to Las Vegas, Sedona, and the Redwood Forests, with each destination the inspiration for secrets and stories to be revealed. The trip proves to be powerful medicine as they laugh, heal, argue, and dream along the way. By the time their bus rolls to a stop in New Mexico, Tilly and the Crazy Eights, with friendships forged and hearts mended, feel ready for anything. But are they?

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