Story Circle Network: For Women with Stories to Tell

Austin-Area Reading Circle

2009 Book List / Schedule

Circle members are encouraged to contribute book reviews of these books. The Reviewer's Guidelines and online Book Review form are here.

Date	Title	Author	Reader's Guide
01/12/2009	Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight	Alexandra Fuller	Reader's Guide
02/09/2009	The Blue Jay's Dance	Louise Erdrich	Reader's Guide
03/09/2009	Standing Alone in Mecca	Asra Q. Nomani	Reader's Guide
04/13/2009	The Sum of Our Days	Isabel Allende	Reader's Guide
05/11/2009	Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age—and Other Unexpected Adventures	Reeve Lindbergh	Reader's Guide
06/08/2009	The Shiniest Jewel	Marian Henley	Reader's Guide
07/13/2009	An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir	Elizabeth McCracken	Reader's Guide
08/10/2009	Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found	Marie Brenner	Perplexing was the family euphemism for Brenner's older brother Carl; the less tactful thought him unknowable, charm-free or plain weird. At 13, in San Antonio, Tex., where his father owned a discount store, Carl joined the John Birch Society. At 40, he left his career as a trial lawyer to become an apple farmer in Washington's Cascade Mountains. Brenner (House of Dreams) and he were on barely civil terms, but when he was 55, he was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, glandular cancer, and asked Marie for help. She responded, leaving her family in New York to be with Carl, who rejected conventional treatment, and to follow him as far away as China for scorpion patches, herbs and red meat for yang deficit...
09/14/2009	Take Big Bites	Linda Ellerbee	Claiming to be neither food writer nor chef, longtime TV newswoman Ellerbee calls herself "a recovering journalist who's traveled and eaten her way around the planet and lived to tell some tales." She fantasizes about doing something she thinks is unattainable, namely, writing for food and travel magazines ("Imagine being paid to eat, travel and write about that, instead of the bombing down the block"). But she does better than that, writing a witty, easy-to-read book about food that's also a blend of autobiography, travelogue and self-help...
10/12/2009	Letter to My Daughter	Maya Angelou	Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning... Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son...
11/09/2009	The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir (in paperback October, 2009)	Patricia Harman	A nurse midwife struggling to keep solvent the women's health clinic in Torrington, WV, that she ran with her surgeon husband shares poignant stories about her patients over the course of a year. A self-described former hippie who lived on a commune with her three sons, Harman later went to nursing school and became a midwife while her husband, Tom, attended medical school...
12/14/2009	The Rabbi's Daughter	Reva Mann	In her misspent youth, Mann, a journalist and daughter of a prominent London rabbi and granddaughter of a chief rabbi of Israel, was hooked on drugs and promiscuous sex, which led to hepatitis B infection and an arrest for drug possession. In her 20s, she went to Jerusalem, where again she disappointed her progressive Orthodox parents by marrying a born-again American Jew who had become an obsessive and separatist Hasid...