SGPL Book Club Picks

On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It's a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has...

"In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Hugo Award-winner Becky Chambers's delightful new Monk & Robot series gives us hope for the future. It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor...

The popular cookbook author and blogger behind Half Baked Harvest shares a new collection of recipes for novice home cooks or those pressed for time including Cardamom Apple Fritters, Spinach and Artichoke Mac and Cheese and Lobster Tacos. Gerard shares a collection of recipes for novice home cooks or those pressed for time. Some can be prepped the night before; others use a pressure cooker, slow cooker; some are one-skillet meals. Whichever your...

"'Few true friends have I known and two were giraffes . . . ' Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling an unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave. It's 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the...

Based on the extraordinary life of Louis Erdrich's grandfather Patrick Gourneau, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, with lightness and gravity, and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a literary master. Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel-bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation...

"A lone astronaut. An impossible mission. An ally he never imagined. Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission--and if he fails, humanity and Earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions...

"You don't need to be a vegetarian to eat like one! With over 100 recipes, the New York Times bestselling author of Dinner: A Love Story and her family adopt a "weekday vegetarian" mentality. In her newest cookbook, creator of the beloved website Dinner: A Love Story and Cup of Jo columnist Jenny Rosenstrach writes about being a "weekday vegetarian," i.e. eating a vegetable-based diet during the week and saving meaty splurges for the weekend. One...

S.T., a domesticated crow, is a bird of simple pleasures: hanging out with his owner Big Jim, trading insults with Seattle's wild crows (those idiots), and enjoying the finest food humankind has to offer: Cheetos ®. Then Big Jim's eyeball falls out of his head, and S.T. starts to feel like something isn't quite right. His most tried-and-true remedies--from beak-delivered beer to the slobbering affection of Big Jim's loyal but dim-witted dog, Dennis--fail...

"Reimagining Blue is a passionate and personal analysis of a misunderstood profession from the vantage point of female police chief Kristen Ziman. Ziman credits her colorful childhood for the temperament that led her to gravitate toward policing, a profession where chaos is all in a day's work. Many times, she learned life and leadership lessons through the revelation of what not to do. But nothing could have prepared Kristen for the turmoil that...