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2005–2006 Booklist

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: A perceptive examination of recent Afghan history. A childhood friendship between two boys is viewed by the one who left the war-torn country to come to America. Join us for Everybody Reads, Multnomah County Library's annual community-wide book discussion.
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque: The timeless classic of World War I Germany that speaks to generation after generation.
All Together in One Place by Jane Kirkpatrick: Based on an actual 1852 Oregon Trail incident, Book One in the Kinship and Courage series speaks to the strength in every woman and celebrates the promise of hope that unfailingly blooms amidst tragedy and challenge.
American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, and Bullriders by Richard Grant: A British journalist travels the American West, meeting wanderers and pondering the lives of earlier explorers and frontiersmen.
Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared by Franz Kafka: Kafka's first and funniest novel tells the story of the young immigrant Karl Rossmann, who, after an embarrassing sexual misadventure, finds himself "packed off to America" by his parents. Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity, young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzying reversals, strange escapades and picaresque adventures.
Atomic Farmgirl: The Betrayal of Chief Qualchan, the Appaloosa, and Me by Teri Hein: The granddaughter of German Lutheran homesteaders, Teri Hein was raised in the 1950s and 1960s in rural eastern Washington. This starkly elegant landscape serves as the poignant backdrop to her story, for one hundred miles to the south of this idyllic, all-American setting lay the toxins — both mental and physical — of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan: A domestic crisis becomes a crime story that changes lives in an upper-middle-class English country home on a hot summer day in 1935. This haunting novel is McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically penetrating.
Billy Budd by Herman Melville: An absorbing and thought-provoking sea novella that has become a classic, Billy Budd describes a violent struggle between innocence and cruelty.
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood: This multi-layered story uses a novel within a novel to tell of the death of a woman's sister and husband. Brilliantly weaving together seemingly disparate elements, Atwood creates a world of astonishing vision and unforgettable impact.
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz: In an informative look at the life and travels of Capt. James Cook, Horwitz combines a sharp eye for reporting with subtle wit and a wonderful knack for drawing out the many characters he discovers. The book is both a travel narrative and a biography of the renowned 18th-century British explorer widely considered one of the greatest navigators in maritime history.
Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America by Linda Hunt: This long-forgotten story is an inspiring true tale of courage and determination set in a period when women were limited in what they could attempt or accomplish.
The Book of Salt by Monique Truong: Intricate, compelling, and witty, the novel weaves in historical characters, from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to Paul Robeson and Ho Chi Minh, with remarkable originality. Flavors, seas, sweat and tears — The Book of Salt is an inspired feast of storytelling riches.
The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad: For more than 20 years, Sultan Khan has defied the authorities, whether communist or Taliban, to supply books to the people of Kabul. This is the intimate portrait of a man of principle and of his family — two wives, five children and many relatives — sharing a small four-room apartment in this war-ravaged city.
Core: A Romance by Kassten Alonso: This intense and compact novel crackles with obsession, betrayal and madness. As the narrator becomes fixated on his best friend's girlfriend, his precarious hold on sanity rapidly deteriorates into delusion and violence.
Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber: Thirty-nine-year-old Sirine, never married, lives with a devoted Iraqi-immigrant uncle and an adoring dog named King Babar. She works as a chef in a Lebanese restaurant, her passions aroused only by the preparation of food — until an unbearably handsome Arabic literature professor starts dropping by for a little home cooking.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson: Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. The magical appeal and horrifying dark side of 19th-century Chicago are both revealed through Larson's skillful writing.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller: With candor and a unique and subtle sensitivity to racial issues, Fuller remembers her African childhood, describing her parents' racism and the wartime relationships between blacks and whites through a child's watchful eyes.
Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama: Obama, the son of a white American mother and a black African father, writes an elegant and compelling biography that powerfully articulates America's racial battleground and tells of his search for his place in black America.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss: In this impassioned manifesto on punctuation, journalist Truss gives full rein to her "inner stickler" in lambasting common grammatical mistakes. Moving from outright indignation to sarcasm to bone-dry humor, Truss turns the finer points of punctuation into spirited reading.
An Egg on Three Sticks by Jackie Moyer Fischer: In the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970s, 12-year-old Abby watches her mother fall apart and must take on the burden of holding her family together.
The Exploding Whale: and Other Remarkable Stories from the Evening News by Paul Linnman: Portland's KATU news reporter, Paul Linnman, reflects on the highlights and incredible events of his long career in television broadcasting.
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser: This devastating exposé reveals how the fast-food industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways.
Giovanni's Room: A Novel by James Baldwin: Baldwin delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving and passionate story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the heart.
A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana by Haven Kimmel: Kimmel grew up in a place that by some "mysterious and powerful mathematical principle" perpetually retains a population of 300. This is less a formal autobiography than a collection of vignettes comprising the things a small child would remember: sick birds, a new bike, reading comics at the drugstore, and the mean old lady down the street.
The Good House: A Novel by Tananarive Due: From an American Book Award winner comes a terrifying story of supernatural suspense, as a woman searches for the inherited power that can save her hometown from evil forces.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond: Why did some civilizations develop into industrialized civilizations while others remained agrarian societies? Jared explains how geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. A Pulitzer Prize winner.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: Dark allegory describes the narrator's journey up the Congo River and his meeting with Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants of the region. Masterly blend of adventure, character development, and psychological penetration.
The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto: Introduces the revolutionary work of internationally renowned Japanese scientist Masaru Emoto, who discovered that molecules of water are affected by our thoughts, words and feelings. Since humans and the earth are composed mostly of water, his message is one of personal health, global environmental renewal, and a practical plan for peace that starts with each one of us.
Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa by Mark Mathabane: This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mark Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered "Kaffir" from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do — he escaped to tell about it.
The Known World by Edward P. Jones: In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Jones tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. In a daring and ambitious novel, Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all of its moral complexities.
The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg: This account explores the lives and discoveries of the pioneers of 20th-century statistics, including Ronald Fisher. A genius who founded mathematical statistics and mathematical genetics, Fisher conducted an experiment on whether tea poured into milk tastes different from milk poured into tea.
Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill: This autobiographical play tells the story of the Tyrones — a fictional family based on the O'Neills — in which the youngest son is sent to a sanitarium to recover from tuberculosis. His mother is wrecked by narcotics and his older brother by drink, and he despises his father for sending him away.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: The wife of a stolid middle-aged doctor rebels at the provincial life forced upon her and engages in a series of illicit affairs, which ultimately lead to tragedy.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides: This mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek-American family is a "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time."
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder: The true story of Dr. Paul Farmer, who grew up in bus and on a boat and became an international health doctor, "a man who is in love with the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it."
My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor by Alec Guinness: This 18-month diary, from January 1995 to June 1996, from one of the most distinguished — and beloved — actors of stage and screen, reveals the octogenarian spryness of a civilized mind and a beguiling mixture of the meditative and the hedonistic.
Palace Walk by Najib Mahfuz: This first volume in the Cairo Trilogy describes the disintegrating family life of a tyrannical, prosperous merchant, his timid wife and their rebellious children in post-World War I Egypt. Mahfuz is the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize (1988).
The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland: Chronicles the extraordinary life of Artemisia Gentileschi, the first woman to make a significant contribution to art history.
Persuasion by Jane Austen: Jane Austen's last completed novel features a heroine much older and wiser than her predecessors in earlier books, and presents a more intimate and sober tale of a love found long after such happiness had been deemed hopeless.
The Piano Tuner by Daniel Philippe Mason: Sensuous, lyrical and rich with passion and adventure, this is the hypnotic tale of Edgar Drake, commissioned by the British War Office in 1886 to travel to hostile Burma to repair a rare Erard grand piano vital to the Crown's strategic interests.
Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult: When District Attorney Ellie Hathaway is asked to defend a young Amish girl accused of murdering her newborn son, Ellie moves in with her family. The courtroom suspense and Amish beliefs and culture create an absorbing story.
Portland Confidential: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Rose City by Phil Stanford: By the 1950s, an opportunistic con man named Big Jim Elkins had taken over the vice industry in Portland and had most of the police brass and local politicos on his payroll. An entertaining and fascinating story.
The Quiet American by Graham Greene: While the French Army in Indo-China is grappling with the Vietminh, back in Saigon a young and high-minded American named Pyle begins to channel economic aid to a Third Force.
The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne: In the tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, this mystery by the author of the Winnie-the-Pooh books is set in the English countryside in a stately British mansion with an abundance of characters and curious clues.
The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama: A Chinese man recuperates from tuberculosis on the eve of WWII in his family's summer home in Japan, where he meets four of the local residents.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: A stark and allegorical tale of adultery, guilt and social repression in Puritan New England. Nathaniel Hawthorne's exploration of the dichotomy between the public and private self, internal passion and external convention, gives us the unforgettable Hester Prynne, who discovers strength in the face of ostracism and emerges as a heroine ahead of her time.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt: In Tartt's controversial first novel, narrator Richard Papen is accepted into an elite Vermont college and a clique of Classics students who draw him into a murder conspiracy. A powerful and evocative story.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson: Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bryson can render it.
Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver: Whether Kingsolver is contemplating the Grand Canyon, motherhood, genetic engineering or the future of a nation, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as from our own backyards, and that answers may lie in both places.
Spiderweb by Penelope Lively: At age 65, retired anthropologist Stella Brentwood buys a cottage in Somerset, England, and slowly acquires neighbors, a dog, and a professional curiosity about the country village where she intends to settle and put down roots for the first time. In Somerset, Stella once again finds an opportunity to become part of the web of relationships that make for human society, as well as a chance at true friendship and love.
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith: Two men meet while traveling and play at concocting mutually beneficial murder plans. At the end of the journey, one man takes it seriously. A classic thriller.
The Student Conductor by Robert Ford: A young American conductor goes to study in West Germany in 1989 and develops a romantic interest in a young oboist from East Germany. The Berlin Wall is crumbling and East Germany is beginning to rebel. Life in the music school reflects the growing resentments and rivalries of East and West Germany.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person — no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.
The Time Traveler's Wife: A Novel by Audrey Niffenegger: A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: A timeless story of growing up in the South during the Depression. A Pulitzer Prize winner.
Trans-Sister Radio: A Novel by Chris Bohjalian: Chris Bohjalian's seventh novel, in which a male college professor in a small Vermont town transforms himself into a woman, is about the effect of a sex change on a romantic relationship, a family and a community. A compelling and often disturbing novel, Trans-Sister Radio challenges all of our assumptions about gender, relationships and sexuality.
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett: In her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Patchett shines a fresh, revealing light on the world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together.
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by John Krakauer: Using a crime committed by two brothers as a focal point, the author explores the nature of radical Mormon sects.
A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot: In January 1917 five French soldiers were tossed into no man's land and left for the Germans to shoot. Mathilde Donnay, fiancée of one of the dead soldiers, is determined to learn the truth about what really happened to these five young men.
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz: This clear-eyed, bracing, and exhaustively researched study of American families and the nostalgia trap proves — beyond the shadow of a doubt — that Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary.
What an Earl Wants by Shirley Karr: This delicious Regency romp marks the debut of an exciting new talent. The devilishly attractive Earl of Sinclair is initially disturbed but ultimately delighted to discover that his able new male secretary is, in fact, a delectable young lady in disguise.
When the Emperor Was Divine: A Novel by Julie Otsuka: The story of an unnamed Japanese American family's internment during World War II. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination — both physical and emotional — of a generation of Japanese Americans.
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks: In 1666, a young woman comes of age during an extraordinary year of love and death. Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a "plague village" in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history.

Pageturners is supported by a generous grant from the Friends of the Library.