Book Club

Pick up the book and join the Book Club on Monday,
October 26th at 12:30pm when we’ll discuss our October read,
The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America by Kostya Kennedy. Timed for the 250th anniversary of America’s revolution and founding: Paul Revere’s heroic ride, newly told with fresh research into little-known aspects of the story Americans have heard since childhood but hardly understood… (more…)

Drop-ins & Prospective Members are Welcome!

The Book Club meets every 4th Monday from 12:30 – 2:00pm
September through June on the Campbell UMC Campus –
in the Fireside Room.  (excepting December due to the holidays.)
Feel free to bring your lunch! (most of us do!) You can also attend via zoom if you’d like and are unable
to attend in person! – just write to info[at]campbellunited[dot]org.

  —————————  Upcoming Months’ Meetings/Selections  —————————

(Upcoming Titles fall under this section, then move to previous selections after the meetings.)

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October 2026 – The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America by Kostya Kennedy

Meeting:  October 26th, 2026 – in the Fireside Room

Timed for the 250th anniversary of America’s revolution and founding: Paul Revere’s heroic ride, newly told with fresh research into little-known aspects of the story Americans have heard since childhood but hardly understood.
On April 18, 1775, a Boston-based silversmith, engraver, and anti-British political operative named Paul Revere set out on a borrowed horse to fulfill a dangerous but crucial mission: to alert American colonists of advancing British troops, which would seek to crush their nascent revolt.
Revere was not the only rider that night, and indeed, he had completed at least 18 previous rides across New England and other colonies, disseminating intelligence about British movements. But this ride was like no other, and its consequences in the months and years to come—as the American Revolution morphed from isolated skirmishes to a full-fledged war—became one of our founding legends.

In The Ride, Kostya Kennedy presents a dramatic new narrative of the events of April 18 and 19, 1775, informed by fresh primary and secondary source research into archives, family letters and diaries, contemporary accounts, and more. Kennedy reveals Revere’s ride to be more complex than it is usually portrayed—a loosely coordinated series of rides by numerous men, near-disaster, capture by British forces, and finally success. While Revere was central to the ride and its plotting, Kennedy reveals the other men (and, perhaps, a woman with information about the movement of British forces) who helped to set in motion the events that would lead to America’s independence.
Thrillingly written in a dramatic, unstoppable narrative, The Ride re-tells an essential American story for a new generation of readers.  Audible available    289 pages

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November 2026 – Kin: A Novel by Tayari Jones

Meeting:  November 23rd, 2026 – in the Fireside Room

 • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST •  A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.   Audible available    351 pages

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December 2026 – NO MEETING – Enjoy the holidays and your families – start the next book!   😉

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January 2027 – The Sparrow: A Novel by Mary Doria Russell

Meeting:  January 25th, 2027 – in the Fireside Room

A visionary work that combines speculative fiction with deep philosophical inquiry, The Sparrow tells the story of a charismatic Jesuit priest and linguist, Emilio Sandoz, who leads a scientific mission entrusted with a profound task: to make first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life.

The mission begins in faith, hope, and beauty, but a series of small misunderstandings brings it to a catastrophic end.  
Audible available    517 pages

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February 2027 – Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

Meeting:  February 22nd, 2027 – in the Fireside Room

Normally each February, we read one of the Silicon Valley Reads books. This year we decided to read one of our member’s suggestions, altho we’ll also add an SVR book if members wish to. The 2026 Silicon Valley Reads theme is TBA soon. 

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING PHENOMENON
A Katie Couric Book Club Pick • A Jen Hatmaker Book Club Pick
“[A] word-of-mouth smash hit.” —The New York Times.
One spring morning, a stranger named Theo arrives in the small Southern city of Golden. He doesn’t explain much about where he came from or why he’s there—but when he visits the local coffeehouse, where pencil portraits of the people of Golden hang on the walls, he begins purchasing them, one at a time, and giving each portrait to the person depicted. In exchange, he asks only for the person’s story. And so portrait by portrait, person by person, secrets are revealed, regrets are shared, and ordinary lives are profoundly altered.

A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is an unforgettable novel about the power of generosity, the importance of connection, and the quiet miracles that happen when we choose kindness and wonder.   Audible available    399 pages

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March 2027 – English Creek  by Ivan Doig

Meeting:  March 22nd, 2027 – in the Fireside Room

In this prize-winning portrait of a time and place—Montana in the 1930s—that at once inspires and fulfills a longing for an explicable past, Ivan Doig has created one of the most captivating families in American fiction, the McCaskills.

The witty and haunting narration, a masterpiece of vernacular in the tradition of Twain, follows the events of the Two Medicine country’s summer: the tide of sheep moving into the high country, the capering Fourth of July rodeo and community dance, and an end-of-August forest fire high in the Rockies that brings the book, as well as the McCaskill family’s struggle within itself, to a stunning climax. It is a season of escapade as well as drama, during which fourteen-year-old Jick comes of age. Through his eyes we see those nearest and dearest to him at a turning point—“where all four of our lives made their bend”—and discover along with him his own connection to the land, to history, and to the deep-fathomed mysteries of one’s kin and one’s self.  Audible available    354 pages

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April 2027 – Twice by Mitch Albom

Meeting:  April 26th, 2027 – in the Fireside Room

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
What if you got to do everything in your life—twice? The heart of Mitch Albom’s newest novel is a stunning love story that dares to explore how our unchecked desires might mean losing what we’ve had all along.

When he is eight years old, Alfie Logan discovers the magical ability to get a second chance at everything. He can undo any moment and live it again. The one catch: he must accept the consequences of his second try—for better or worse.
He grows up correcting his mistakes and saving himself from adolescent embarrassments. He even takes foolishly dangerous risks, just to see what it’s like to come close to death, before tapping back to safety.
Eventually, Alfie turns his gift to his love life, studying his crushes and going back to make himself more appealing. In time, he falls deeply in love with Gianna, the woman he believes is the one. He seems to find contentment.
But as the years pass, Alfie’s eye begins to wander. Which is when he learns a lone caveat to his power: once he undoes a love, that person can never fall in love with him again. Knowing if he gives into to temptation, he will risk losing what he has with Gianna, Alfie makes a choice that changes his life forever.

The book begins many years later, after an ailing Alfie is arrested for allegedly cheating and winning millions at a casino roulette wheel. As a curious detective interrogates him, he slowly uncovers Alfie’s incredible story, and its most unlikely conclusion. In Twice, America’s favorite storyteller, Mitch Albom, is at the top of his powers.
A love story that is enchanting, probing, and clairvoyant in matters of the heart, Twice will make you think, weep, and overflow with love from beginning to end.  Audible available    320 pages

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May 2027 – The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Meeting:  Monday, May 24th, 2027 – in the Fireside Room

The #1 New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon
Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A GMA Book Club Pick | Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year
“A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits.”—The Washington Post

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place. 
Audible available    299 pages

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June 2027 – The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

Meeting:  June 28th, 2027 – in the Fireside Room

The first installment of Bernard Cornwell’s bestselling series chronicling the epic saga of the making of England—the basis for The Last Kingdom, the hit television series on Netflix.
This is the exciting—yet little known—story of the making of England in the 9th and 10th centuries, the years in which King Alfred the Great, his son and grandson defeated the Danish Vikings who had invaded and occupied three of England’s four kingdoms.
The story is seen through the eyes of Uhtred, a dispossessed nobleman, who is captured as a child by the Danes and then raised by them so that, by the time the Northmen begin their assault on Wessex (Alfred’s kingdom and the last territory in English hands) Uhtred almost thinks of himself as a Dane. He certainly has no love for Alfred, whom he considers a pious weakling and no match for Viking savagery, yet when Alfred unexpectedly defeats the Danes and the Danes themselves turn on Uhtred, he is finally forced to choose sides. By now he is a young man, in love, trained to fight and ready to take his place in the dreaded shield wall. Above all, though, he wishes to recover his father’s land, the enchanting fort of Bebbanburg by the wild northern sea.

This thrilling adventure—based on existing records of Bernard Cornwell’s ancestors—depicts a time when law and order were ripped violently apart by a pagan assault on Christian England, an assault that came very close to destroying England.  Audible available    384 pages

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——————————— Previous Months’ Selections & Meetings ——————————— 

(Titles fall under this section as we meet & complete the books.)

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Sept 2026 – We’ll select books for the upcoming 2026-2027 Session

Meeting:  Sept 28th, 2026 – in the Fireside Room

At each session’s first meeting in September, everyone brings books that we recommend to the group for the upcoming session.  We then have the difficult task of selecting only 7 or 8 (as we often read a Silicon Valley Reads selection during February)! 
ALL readers, book-worms, drop-ins, & prospective members are welcome!

The Book Club meets every 4th Monday 12:30 – 2:00pm
from September through June on the Campbell UMC Campus – in the Fireside Room.
Feel free to bring your lunch!

*Book selections from the 2025-2026 session have moved here.

See more of previous years’ book selections.