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2010 Schedule
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January 15
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 The Ride of Our Lives: Roadside Lessons of an American Family
by Mike Leonard
Mike Leonard is a lucky man. It's not everyone who gets parents like Jack and Marge. At eighty-seven, Jack is a pathological optimist with an inexhaustible gift of gab. Marge, Jack's bride of sixty years, though cut from the same rough bolt of Irish immigrant cloth, is his polar opposite—pessimistic and proud of it. What was their son, Mike, thinking when he took a sabbatical from his job with NBC News so he could pile these two world-class originals along with three of his grown kids and a daughter-in-law into a pair of rented RVs and hit the road for a month?
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February 19
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 Stray Affections
by Charlene Baumbich
Mesmerized by a snow globe containing figures of three dogs and a little girl with hair the color of her own, Cassandra Higgins recalls long-dormant memories of her beloved Grandpa Wonky, the stray she rescued as a child, and her tumultuous relationship with her mother.
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March 19
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 I Love You, Miss Huddleston: And Other Inappropriate Longings of My Indiana Childhood
by Philip Gulley
A raucous coming-of-age tale about the author's experiences of life in small-town Indiana recounts his awkward adolescence and unwavering crush on his sixth-grade teacher, a fixation for which he fruitlessly struggled to avoid getting promoted to junior high.
From beginning to end, Gulley recalls the hilarity (and heightened dangers) of those wonder years and the easy charm of mid-western life.
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April 16
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 The Note
by Angela Hunt
En route from New York's La Guardia Airport to Tampa International, Flight 848 bursts into flames and crashes into Tampa Bay. All 261 passengers and crew are killed. For one week, newspaper columnist Peyton MacGruder and her fellow reporters cover one of the nation's worst air disasters in years with overwhelming and numbed emotions.
Then a woman Peyton's never met gives her a plastic bag that has washed up behind her house. The bag contains a note, almost certainly from the doomed flight, with a simple yet wrenching message: T - I love you. All is forgiven. - Dad.
Combing through the passenger list to find the victims whose children's names begin with T, Peyton is determined to deliver the note to its proper owner. A quest which will prove as important to Peyton's own life as to the mysterious T.
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May 21
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 Walking Across Egypt
by Clyde Edgerton
She has as much business keeping a stray dog as she would walking across Egypt—which not so incidentally is the title of her favorite hymn. She's Mattie Rigsbee, an independent, strong-minded senior citizen who, at seventy-eight, might be slowing down just a bit. When teenage delinquent Wesley Benfield drops in on her life, he is even less likely a companion than the stray dog. But, of course, the dog never tasted her mouth-watering pound cake. Wise and witty, down-home and real, Walking Across Egypt is a book for everyone.
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June 18
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 Amazing Gracie: A Dog's Tale
by Dan Dye and Mark Beckloff
The co-founders of Three Dog Bakery describe how the rescue of Gracie, the loneliest puppy in the litter—a deaf and partially blind albino Great Dane, and her relationship with her owner, Dan Dye, led to the founding of their successful enterprise. She had huge, sky blue eyes. And when Dan Dye reached for her, she struggled to her feet like a clumsy foal, raised her forehead to his, and announced, as clearly as if she had actually spoken the words, You know I'm the one. Now get me outta here!
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July 16
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 Pay It Forward
by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Pay It Forward is a wondrous and moving novel about Trevor McKenney, a twelve-year-old boy in a small California town who accepts the challenge that his teacher gives his class, a chance to earn extra credit by coming up with a plan to change the world for the better—and to put that plan into action. A story of seemingly ordinary people made extraordinary by the simple faith of a child.
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August 20
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 Little Women
by Louisa May Alcott
Timeless in its evocation of idealized family life and robustly enduring, Little Women is recognized as one of the best-loved classic children's stories of all time. Originally written as a "girls'" story, its appeal transcends the boundaries of time and age, making it as popular with adults as it is with young readers. For this is a beguiling story of happiness and hope, of the joys of companionship, domestic harmony and infinite mother love, all seen through the life of the March family. But which of the four March sisters to love best? For every reader must have their favorite. Independent, tomboyish Jo; delicate, loving Beth; pretty, kind Meg, or precocious and beautiful Amy, the baby of the family? Little Women was an instant success when first published in 1868, and was followed only a year later by the sequel, Little Wivese
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September 17
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 The Year of Pleasures
by Elizabeth Berg
Following the death of her husband, Betta Nolan fulfills her promise to him to move to a small town and build a new life for herself, following her as she strives to cope with her grief and find pleasure and solace in the ordinary things of everyday life—a warm bath, good food, the beauty of nature, art, and her garden.
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October 15
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 Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter
by Adeline Yen Mah
When her mother dies giving birth to her, Adeline is considered bad luck by her family, thus when her father's new wife begins to treat her poorly while spoiling the others, Adeline can turn to no one for comfort and must endure the difficult times on her own, in a dramatic true story of bravery and triumph over adversity.
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November 19
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 A Redbird Christmas
by Fannie Flagg
Oswald T. Campbell, aged fifty-two, down-and-out in a Chicago winter, is given only months to live unless he moves South. He finds himself in the small town of Lost River, Alabama, where the residents are friendly if feud-prone and eccentric to a fault. One of them, Roy, keeps a red cardinal, a once wounded bird called Jack, in the village store. Patsy, a sad, sweet little kid with a crippled leg, from the trailer park up in the woods, takes to dropping by the store—and falls in love with Jack. Flagg takes us on an emotional roller-coaster ride through the lives and hearts of an engaging crew of misfits, fixers and ordinary good-hearted folk, set against the vivid natural backdrop of a mellow Alabama winter, along the riverside where birds and fish abound. Her enchanting story culminates at Christmas time with surprises and a magical "redbird" moment.
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