Summit Book Club Open Read

For our January 13 meeting, read a classic, however you define that. Here are a few suggestions from our librarians.

Updated July 11, 2025
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The turn of the screw & the Aspern papers
James, Henry
Ebook
American author and expatriate, Henry James is regarded as one the principal figures of 19th century literary realism. His work, which often features Americans traveling to Europe, is noted for its intimate examination of the consciousness of his characters. In this volume we find two of his most...
Demon Copperhead : a novel
Kingsolver, Barbara
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE * WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION New York Times Readers' Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st Century * An Oprah's Book Club Selection * An Instant New York Times Bestseller * An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller * A #1 Washington Post...
Dracula
Stoker, Bram
Paper Book
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England- an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman...
Frankenstein
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Paper Book
Few creatures of horror have seized readers' imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The story of Victor Frankenstein's terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless...
Gilead
Robinson, Marilynne.
Paper Book
2005 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction 2004 National Book Critics Circle Winner In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the...
Giovanni's room
Baldwin, James
Paper Book
From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century comes a groundbreaking novel set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, about love and the fear of love--"a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction" (The Atlantic). ...
The great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paper Book
The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald's family and from his lifelong publisher. This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author's own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book...
The handmaid's tale
Atwood, Margaret
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from "the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction" (The New York Times) * The sixth and final season of the award-winning Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss is now streaming ...
The house on Mango Street
Cisneros, Sandra.
Paper Book
A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago * Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world--from the winner of the...
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
Capote, Truman
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The most famous true crime novel of all time "chills the blood and exercises the intelligence" (The New York Review of Books)--and haunted its author long after he finished writing it. On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb,...
James : a novel
Everett, Percival
Paper Book
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view NATIONAL BOOK...
A lesson before dying
Gaines, Ernest J.
Paper Book
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * A deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a Black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. "An instant classic." --...
Lonesome Dove : a novel
McMurtry, Larry.
Paper Book
The Pulitzer Prize­-winning classic of the American West that follows two aging Texas Rangers embarking on one last adventure. An epic of the frontier and rich with complex characters, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness. ...
March
Brooks, Geraldine.
Paper Book
As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the war, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched...
Night
Wiesel, Elie
Paper Book
A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent...
The Odyssey
Homer.
Paper Book
Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem, recounting the great wandering of Odysseus during his ten-year voyage back home to Ithaca, after the Trojan War. A superb new verse translation, now published in trade paperback, before the standard Penguin Classic B format.
The old man and the sea
Hemingway, Ernest
Paper Book
*Winner of the Pulitzer Prize* "A beautiful tale, awash in the seasalt and sweat, bait and beer of the Havana coast. It tells a fundamental human truth: in a volatile world, from our first breath to our last wish, through triumphs and pitfalls both trivial and profound, what sustains...
One hundred years of solitude
Garca̕ Mr̀quez, Gabriel
Paper Book
Now a Netflix original series! "One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. . . . García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound,...
Rebecca
Du Maurier, Daphne
Paper Book
A true classic of suspense in a beautiful new package for a whole new generation of readers.
A spool of blue thread
Tyler, Anne.
Paper Book
Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize  "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon. . ." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate...
Their eyes were watching God
Hurston, Zora Neale
Paper Book
"A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." --Zadie Smith The beloved Zora Neale Hurston Classic--a PBS Great American Read Top 100...
Things fall apart
Achebe, Chinua.
Paper Book
"A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world." --Barack Obama "African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe." --Toni Morrison "A...
The underground railroad : a novel
Whitehead, Colson
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. One of The New York Times's 10 Best Books of...
We have always lived in the castle
Jackson, Shirley
Paper Book
Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly...

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