Friends of the Pacific Beach Library -- Book Discussion Group

The Pacific Beach Library Book Discussion Group is designed for all adult readers who want to talk about books, and provides an informal forum for the discussion of one selected book each month.

The Book Discussion Group normally meets in the Meeting Room/Gallery at the Pacific Beach/Taylor Library on the 2nd Thursday of every month, at 4:00 p.m. The group may also meet virtually online via Zoom; please contact the Book Discussion Group Coordinator for details. At the January meeting, participants select the books that will be read by the Book Discussion Group throughout the rest of the year.

Copies of each month's selection may be picked up at the Pacific Beach/Taylor Library.

For additional information about the PB Library Book Discussion Group, please send email to our Book Discussion Group Coordinator via our Contact Us web page (==> Click Here <==).

		January 8 Meet to select titles for 2026.

		February 12 James by Percival Everett
	When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river's banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin . . .), Jim's agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

		March 12 The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See
	On the small Korean island of Jeju, best friends Mi-ja and Young-sook are old enough to begin working in the sea with their village's all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook's mother. Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook's differences are impossible to ignore. Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator, and she will forever be marked by this association. Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother's position leading the divers in their village. Beginning during a period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, through the Korean War and its aftermath, up to the present, the residents of Jeju find themselves caught between warring empires.

		April 9 The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson
	On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

		May 14 Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls
	In her acclaimed graphic memoir debut, Tessa Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family. Tessa's grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival—then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Feeding Ghosts is Tessa's homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.

		June 11 The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon
	A gripping historical mystery based on the real-life diary entries of Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history. Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town's most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own. Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

		July 9 The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson
	To celebrate America's 250th anniversary, Walter Isaacson takes readers on a . . . deep dive into the creation of one of history's most powerful sentences: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Drafted by Thomas Jefferson and edited by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, this line lays the foundation for the American Dream and defines the common ground we share as a nation. Isaacson unpacks its genius, word by word, illuminating the then-radical concepts behind it.

		August 13 Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
	Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world's largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore. Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again. But Rowan isn't telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust one another enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it's too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

		September 10 Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach
	From the New York Times best-selling author of Stiff and Fuzz, a rollicking exploration of the quest to re-create the impossible complexities of human anatomy. The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what's available—sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we're attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet? In Replaceable You, Mary Roach explores the remarkable advances and difficult questions prompted by the human body's failings.

		October 8 What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
	At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife's birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, 'A Corona for Vivien'. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery. 2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, 'A Corona for Vivian'. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem's discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well. What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.

		November 12 One Book, One San Diego selection to be announced
	Each year, in partnership with KPBS, the San Diego Public Library brings together our community and encourages residents to join others in the shared experience of reading the same book. This year's One Book, One San Diego selection will be announced in the fall.

		December 10 Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
	It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

		January 14 (2027) Meet to select titles for 2027.

		February 11 (2027) An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin
	In this book Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America's famed historians, weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life. Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy's New Frontier and Doris was a White House Fellow. Over the years, Dick and Doris discussed the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved. Their last collaboration involved opening more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction they could make a difference. Their expedition gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s and it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time: John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and Lyndon Johnson. The voyage of remembrance allowed them to revive the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.

Although not selected for a Book Discussion Group meeting, voracious readers might be interested in the following book suggestions from members of the Pacific Beach Library Book Discussion Group.

Call Number	Author(s)	Title
Fic/Aoyama	Aoyama, Michiko	*What You Are Looking For Is in the Library*
Fic/Barry	Barry, Dave	*Lunatics*
Fic/Barry	Barry, Sebastian	*Old God's Time*
Fic/Bohjalian	Bohjalian, Chris	*The Jackal's Mistress*
Fic/Burke	Burke, James Lee	*Flags on the Bayou*
571.2019/Calvo	Calvo, Paco	*Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence*
Fic/Carroll	Carroll, Lewis	*The Annotated Alice*
576.8/Dawkins	Dawkins, Richard	*The Ancestor's Tale*
091.09/De Hamel	de Hamel, Christopher	*The Manuscripts Club*
025.3/Duncan	Duncan, Dennis	*A History of the Index*
612.793/Everts	Everts, Sarah	*The Joy of Sweat*
Fic/Frazier	Frazier, Charles	*Varina*
B/Alexander	Freeman, Phillip	*Alexander the Great*
976.60049/Grann	Grann, David	*Killers of the Flower Moon*
Fic/Haig	Haig, Matt	*The Midnight Library*
780.92/Haupt	Haupt, Lyanda Lynn	*Mozart's Starling*
B/Kahlo	Herrera, Hayden	*Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo*
B/Bell	Howell, Georgina	*Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations*
B/Leonardo	Isaacson, Walter	*Leonardo da Vinci*
Not in system	Jeremiah, David	*The God You May Not Know*
153.42/Kahnemann	Kahnemann, Daniel	*Thinking, Fast and Slow*
Fic/Kawaguchi	Kawaguchi, Toshikazu	*Before the Coffee Gets Cold*
929.20973/Keefe	Keefe, Patrick Radden	*Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty*
Fic/Kenney	Kenney, John	*I See You've Called In Dead*
305.597/Kimmerer	Kimmerer, Robin Wall	*Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants*
420.207/Lederer	Lederer, Richard	*Anguished English*
Not in system	Leonard, Sarah & Bhaskar Sunkara	*The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century*
958.1047/Mann	Mann, Scott	*Operation Pineapple Express*
Fic/Mason	Mason, Daniel	*North Woods*
Fic/Matsuda	Matsuda, Aoko	*The Woman Dies*
612.86/McGee	McGee, Harold	*Nose Dive*
006.3/Mueller	Mueller, John	*Artificial Intelligence for Dummies*
Fic/O'Farrell	O'Farrell, Maggie	*Hamnet*
612.3/Roach	Roach, Mary	*Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal*
Fic/Russell	Russell, Karen	*The Antidote*
579.5/Sheldrake	Sheldrake, Merlin	*Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape Our Futures*
YA Fic/Turner	Turner, Megan Whalen	*The Thief*
Fic/Whitaker	Whitaker, Chris	*All the Colors of the Dark*
Fic/Winslow	Winslow, Don	*City On Fire*
591.5/Yong	Yong, Ed	*An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us*
579.17/Yong	Yong, Ed	*I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life*
591.5/Zuk	Zuk, Marlene	*Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test*