Plainsong by Kent Haruf
Monday, December 4, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, December 4 through Friday, December 22, 2023. Read by Jim Fleming. In a small town, a high school teacher must raise his two boys alone after their mother retreats altogether. A teenage girl is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And two elderly brothers work the family homestead,...
American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal by Neil King
Monday, November 6, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, November 6 through Friday, December 1, 2023. Read by Jim Fleming. Neil King Jr.’s desire to walk from Washington, D.C., to New York City began as a whim and soon became an obsession. By the spring of 2021, events had intervened that gave his desire greater urgency. His neighborhood still...
Code Six by James Grippando
Monday, October 9, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, October 9 through Friday, November 3, 2023. Read by Norman Gilliland. Aspiring playwright, Kate Gamble, is struggling to launch a script she’s been secretly researching her entire life, mostly at the family dinner table. Her father is Christian Gamble, CEO of Buck Technologies, a private...
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Monday, September 11, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, September 11 through Friday, October 6, 2023. Read by Jim Fleming. Small towns "force you to deal with your neighbour in a way people in cities and larger towns don't have to" says Richard Russo. He demonstrates this in his epic new novel about a small town in Maine. Empire Falls has fallen...
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway
Monday, August 21, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, August 21 through Friday, September 8, 2023. Read by Jim Fleming. The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, this Hemingway masterpiece is a poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation. The novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable...
O Pioneers by Willa Cather
Monday, July 31, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, July 31 through Friday, August 18, 2023. Read by Susan Sweeney. Willa Cather established her reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent with the publication of “O Pioneers!”. The lives of two very different heroines unfold during a time when the wild lands of the frontier broke the...
The Last Bookshop in London: A Novel of World War II by Madeline Martin
Monday, June 26, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, June 26 through Friday, July 14, 2023. Read by Jim Fleming. August 1939: London prepares for war as Hitler’s forces sweep across Europe. Grace Bennett has always dreamed of moving to the city, but the bunkers and drawn curtains that she finds on her arrival are not what she expected. And...
The Call of the Wild and Other Stories by Jack London
Monday, June 12, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, June 12 through Friday, June 23, 2023. Read by Norman Gilliland. The Jack London classic follows a dog named Buck, a 140 pound Saint Bernard and Scotch Shepherd mix. Buck is abducted from a comfortable life as a pet and tossed into the chaos of the Klondike Gold Rush. There he must learn to...
Here On Lake Hallie: In Praise of Barflies, Fix-It Guys, and Other Folks in Our Hometown by Patti See
Monday, May 29, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, May 29 through Friday, June 9, 2023. Read by Susan Sweeney. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s as the youngest of eight children, Patti never imagined she’d stay in Chippewa Falls as an adult. Now, living on rural Lake Hallie just five miles from her childhood home, she has a new...
Happiness Is A Choice You Make: Lessons From A Year Among The Oldest Old by John Leland
Monday, May 15, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, May 15 through Friday, May 26, 2023. Read by Baron Kelly. In 2015, when the award-winning journalist John Leland set out on behalf of The New York Times to meet members of America’s fastest-growing age group, he anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of...
The Family Vault by Charlotte MacLeod
Monday, April 24, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, April 24 through Friday, May 12, 2023. Read by Jim Fleming. Great-uncle Frederick has passed away, and the Kelling clan of Boston has made plans to put the old gentleman's remains in the family vault on Beacon Hill. When the vault is opened, however, there's someone already there that no...
Small Game by Blair Braverman
Monday, April 3, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, April 3 through Friday, April 21, 2023. Read by Michele Good. When reality TV producers came knocking at Mara’s workplace—a survival school that teaches rich clients how not to die during a night outdoors—she’s surprised to learn that she’s been cast in their new show, Civilization. Now,...
Under A Veiled Moon by Karen Odden
Monday, March 13, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, March 13 through Friday, March 31, 2023. Read by Norman Gilliland. September 1878. One night, as the pleasure boat the Princess Alice makes her daily trip up the Thames, she collides with the Bywell Castle, a huge iron-hulled collier. The Princess Alice shears apart, throwing all 600...
The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
Monday, February 13, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, February 13 through Friday, March 10, 2023. Read by Karl Schmidt. Travel writer Macon Leary hates travel, adventure, surprises, and anything outside of his routine. Immobilized by grief, Macon is becoming increasingly prickly and alone, anchored by his solitude and an unwillingness to...
Notes Of A Native Son by James Baldwin
Wednesday, January 25, 2023, 12:30pm
Wednesday, January 25 through Friday, February 10, 2023. Read by Melvin Hinton. In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. Written during the 1940s and...
Let Me Be Frank: A Book About Women Who Dressed Like Men to Do Shit They Weren't Supposed to Do by Tracy Dawson
Tuesday, January 17, 2023, 12:30pm
Tuesday, January 17 through Tuesday, January 24, 2023. Read by Michele Good. From the dawn of time, countless women have ben told, "Nope, not for you," simply because of their gender. A sardonic and thoroughly impassioned homage to female ingenuity and tenacity, Comedian Tracy Dawson profiles women...
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Monday, January 16, 2023, 11:00pm
Monday, January 16, 2023. Read by Melvin Hinton. At the time of the award was given, Dr. King was the youngest person ever to get that particular honor, and said that he would dedicate all of the $54,000 that accompanied it toward the cause of equal rights. When he appeared in Oslo to collect the...
I Married The Klondike by Laura Beatrice Berton
Monday, January 2, 2023, 12:30pm
Monday, January 2 through Friday, January 13, 2023. Read by Susan Sweeney. In 1907, Laura Beatrice Berton, a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher, left her comfortable life in Toronto Ontario to teach in a Yukon mining town. When she first arrived in Dawson City, Berton expected to find a rough mining...
The Chimes - from Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens
Thursday, December 22, 2022, 12:30pm
Thursday, December 22 through Friday, December 30, 2022. Read by Jim Fleming. This 1844 Charles Dickens’ novella concerns the disillusionment of Toby "Trotty" Veck, a poor working-class man. When Trotty has lost his faith in Humanity and believes that his poverty is the result of his unworthiness...