Books In A Bar - Winter 2024
Our Books In A Bar book group continues with our Winter 2024 book discussions at Parnell's Pub on Cedar Road. Shown below are books the group will be discussing starting in January 2024. The discussions will be from 7-9 PM in the back room of Parnell's. Grab a beer, glass of wine, or other beverage and join Holly for a lively discussion.
January 8, 2024: The 6:41 to Paris by Jean Philippe Blondel (New Vessel Press)
February 12, 2024: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marques (Vintage)
March 11, 2024: Jacqueline in Paris by Ann Mah (Mariner)
Books are available for purchase in the store.
Books In A Bar - Fall 2023
Our Books In A Bar book group continues with our Fall 2023 book discussions at Parnell's Pub on Cedar Road. Shown below are books the group will be discussing starting in October. The discussions will be from 7-9 PM in the back room of Parnell's. Grab a beer, glass of wine, or other beverage and join Holly for a lively discussion.
October 9, 2023: Writers and Lovers by Lilly King (Grove Press)
November 13, 2023: The Mad Women's Ball by Victoria Mas (Abrams)
December 11, 2023: Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf (Vintage)
Books are available for purchase in the store.
Books In A Bar - Spring and Summer 2023
Our Books In A Bar book group continues in with our Spring and Summer 2023 with book discussions at Parnell's Pub on Cedar Road. Shown below are books the group will be discussing starting in June. The discussions will be from 7-9 PM in the back room of Parnell's. Grab a beer, glass of wine, or other beverage and join Holly and Jane for a lively discussion.
June 12, 2023: Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (Mariner Books)
July 10, 2023: Gift From The Sea by Anne Lindbergh (Pantheon Books)
August 14, 2023: The Violins of Saint-Jacques by Patrick Leigh Fermor (New York Review of Books)
September 11, 2023: To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (Harvest Books)
Books are available for purchase in the store.
Books In A Bar - Winter and Spring 2023
Our Books In A Bar book group continues in 2023 with book discussions at Parnell's Pub on Cedar Road. Shown below are books the group will be discussing starting in February. The discussions will be from 7-9 PM in the back room of Parnell's. Grab a beer, glass of wine, or other beverage and join Holly and Jane for a lively discussion.
February 13, 2023: Wide Sargasso by Jean Rhys (W.W. Norton & Company)
March 13, 2023: The Peregrin by J.A. Baker (NY Review of Books)
April 10, 2023: The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America (Penguin)
May 8, 2023: Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor (Catapult)
Books are available for purchase in the store.
Books In A Bar Fall 2022
During the fall of 2022, our Books In A Bar book group read and discussed the following books:
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (Grove Press)
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (W.W. Norton & Company)
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Vintage International)
My Antonia by Willa Cather (Mariner Books)
Books in A Bar Spring and Summer 2022
During June, July, and August 2022, we read the following books:
Crossing to Saftey by Wallace Stegner (Modern Library)
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (Vintage)
City of Thieves by David Benioff (Penguin)
Martinis on Mars Cocktail Chats on Science Fiction
Science Fiction is one of the most popular genres in publishing. The stories combine fantastic elements such as time travel, invasion by alien pieces, and much more; they provide an escape and challenge us to think deeply about our world.
Michael Wells and Eric Henry are enthusiastic readers of science fiction. They will host 3 cocktail hour "chats" this spring to introduce you to science fiction and discuss 2 famous science fiction works, "War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells and "All Systems Red" by Martha Wells. Unfortunately, neither of these authors is related to Michael!
Thursday, April 14th: Overview of the Science Fiction Genre, 5-6 PM
Thursday, May 12th: Discussion of "War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells, 5-6 PM
Thursday, June 16th: Discussion of "All Systems Red" by Martha Wells, 5-6 PM
Each chat will be conducted over Zoom, and details on joining the chats will be emailed to participants in advance of the meeting.
Register by clicking on the calendar event on our Event page, email at info@appletree-books.com, or call 216.791.2665
So grab a cocktail, sit in a comfy chair and join us as we explore other worlds.
Books In A Bar - Eclectic Reading List
Books In A Bar
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, our book group “Books in a Bar” discussed a varied list of books. Shown below are some of the more popular books from our discussions.

The Library Book (Simon & Schuster) by Susan Orlean
On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library–and if so, who?
Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” ( New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

Jar City (Picador USA) by Arnaldur Indridason
When a lonely old man is found dead in his Reykjavík flat, the only clues are a cryptic note left by the killer and a photograph of a young girl’s grave. Inspector Erlendur discovers that many years ago, the victim was accused, but not convicted, of an unsolved crime, a rape. Did the old man’s past come back to haunt him? As Erlendur reopens this very cold case, he follows a trail of unusual forensic evidence, uncovering secrets that are much larger than the murder of one old man.
Jar is another book in the Inspector Erlendur series. Indridason is a two-time winner of the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel. The Books In A Bar group read Voices, another book in the Erlendur series, in 2019.

Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road (Dey Street Books) by Kate Harris
As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved–to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler, and metaphysician–had gone extinct. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth; there was nothing left to be discovered. Looking beyond this planet, she decided to become a scientist and go to Mars.
In between studying at Oxford and MIT, Harris set off by bicycle down the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel. Pedaling mile upon mile in some of the remotest places on earth, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks: what she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. The farther she traveled, the closer she came to a world as wild as she felt within.
Lands of Lost Borders, winner of the 2018 Banff Adventure Travel Award and a 2018 Nautilus Award, is the chronicle of Harris’s odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set ourselves; an examination of the stories borders tell, and the restrictions they place on nature and humanity, and a meditation on the existential need to explore–the essential longing to discover what in the universe we are doing here.

The Paragon Hotel (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) by Lyndsay Faye
The year is 1921, and “Nobody” Alice James has just arrived in Oregon with a bullet wound, a lifetime’s experience battling the New York Mafia, and fifty thousand dollars in illicit cash. She befriends Max, a black Pullman porter who reminds her achingly of home and who saves Alice by leading her to the Paragon Hotel. But her unlikely sanctuary turns out to be an all-black hotel in a Jim Crow city, and its lodgers seem unduly terrified of a white woman on the premises.
As she meets the churlish Dr. Pendleton, the stately Mavereen, and the club chanteuse Blossom Fontaine, she understands their dread. The Ku Klux Klan has arrived in Portland in fearful numbers–burning crosses, electing officials, infiltrating newspapers, and brutalizing blacks. And only Alice and her new Paragon “family” are searching for a missing mulatto child who has mysteriously vanished into the woods. To untangle the web of lies and misdeeds around her, Alice will have to answer for her own past, too.
A richly imagined novel starring two indomitable heroines, The Paragon Hotel at once plumbs the darkest parts of America’s past and the most redemptive facets of humanity. From international-bestselling, multi-award-nominated writer Lyndsay Faye, it’s a masterwork of historical suspense.

Bowlaway (Ecco Press) by Elizabeth McCracken
From the day she is discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century–nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin, and fifteen pounds of gold on her person–Bertha Truitt is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts. She has no past to speak of, or at least none she is willing to reveal, and her mysterious origin scandalizes and intrigues the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. But Bertha is plucky, tenacious, and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford’s most defining landmark–with Bertha, its most notable resident.
When Bertha dies in a freak accident, her past resurfaces in the form of a heretofore-unheard-of son, who arrives in Salford, claiming he is heir apparent to Truitt Alleys. Soon it becomes clear that, even in her death, Bertha’s defining spirit and the implications of her obfuscations live on, infecting and affecting future generations through inheritance battles, murky paternities, and hidden wills.
In a voice laced with insight and her signature sharp humor, Elizabeth McCracken has written an epic family saga set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America. Bowlaway is both a stunning feat of language and a brilliant unraveling of a family’s myths and secrets, its passions and betrayals, and the ties that bind and the rifts that divide.

The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between (Random House) by Hisham Matar
When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Hisham would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. The Return is the story of what he found there.
The Pulitzer Prize citation hailed The Return as “a first-person elegy for home and father.” Transforming his quest for answers into a brilliantly told universal tale of hope and resilience, Matar has given us an unforgettable work with a powerful human question at its core: How does one go on living in the face of unthinkable loss?