Winona Public Library Reads discussion

Are you ready for summer?! The Winona Public Library is! We’ve got forty (that’s right – 40) Beach Reads that will be perfect for vacations, weekend getaways, or lounging around the house.

Come find out more about these beach reads on Monday, June 9th at 5PM in the Winona Public Library’s Bell Art Room. The library will feature all forty of these reads over one hour. That’s right! Forty books in one hour!

Registration is not required for this event. For more information, call the Winona Public Library’s Reference Desk at (507) 452-4860.

(A complete listing of the Beach Reads will be posted here after the presentation.)

Did you miss 40 Beach Reads in 60 Minutes? Here's what we talked about:


Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders. The flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading—source of the most intractable problems—will have no advantage whatsoever.


A powerful family saga steeped in the legends of the sea. Set in a lobster fishing village, The Lobster Kings introduces a fiery and unforgettable heroine, Cordelia Kings. The Kings family has lived on Loosewood Island for three hundred years, blessed with the bounty of the sea. But for the Kings, this blessing comes with a curse: the loss of every firstborn son.


An extraordinary novel of fear, friendship, courage, and hope. Panic began as so many things do in Carp, a dead-end town of twelve thousand people in the middle of nowhere: because it was summer, and there was nothing else to do. Heather never thought she would compete in Panic, a legendary game played by graduating seniors, where the stakes are high and the payoff is even higher.


In a mega-stakes, high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely and winning heroes Stephen King has ever created try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands. Mr. Mercedes is a war between good and evil, from the master of suspense whose insight into the mind of this obsessed, insane killer is chilling and unforgettable.


A tale about the fascinating, true history of the Hungarian Gold Train in the Second World War. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure—a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust. 


Every August, four women would spend a week at the beach, renting a new house each year. The ritual began when they were in their twenties and their husbands were in medical school, and became a mainstay of every summer thereafter. Their only criteria were oceanfront and isolation, their only desire to strengthen their far-flung friendships. There, far from civilization, the women make startling discoveries that will change them in ways they never expected.


Jennifer Weiner's talent shines like never before in this collection of short stories, following the tender, often hilarious, progress of love and relationships over the course of a lifetime.  The Guy Not Taken demonstrates Weiner's amazing ability to create characters who feel like they could be your best friend and to find hope and humor, longing and love in the hidden corners of our common experiences.


Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid.


Lizzie Nichols has a problem: she can't keep anything to herself. And when she opens her big mouth on a trip to London, her good intentions get her long-distance beau, Andrew, in major hot water. Now she's stuck in England with no boyfriend and no place to stay until the departure date on her nonrefundable airline ticket.


In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel with breathtaking feats of imagination.


Breeze is the story of BeBe Loudermilk, a Southern belle who’d dearly like to get back at the handsome, two-faced con man who swindled out of everything she owns except for a broken-down 1950s-era motel on Tybee Island. Joining BeBe on a revenge-inspired road trip south to Fort Lauderdale is her junking friend Weezie and a car-full of lovable misfits.


Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead.  The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny's murderer to justice--if he doesn't track her down first.


Holly is married with two children but not sure if she loves her husband. Olivia’s long-term boyfriend left her suddenly, and she hasn’t gotten her life together since then. Saffron is a successful actress in Hollywood, but she’s in love with a famous married actor. This once-close group of friends has drifted apart over the years, but they are suddenly jolted back into touch with each other after the tragic loss of a friend. Their friendships are renewed as a result, and they come to help shape each others’ futures in unexpected ways.


Anna wakes up one morning in her mammy's house in Dublin with stitches in her face, a dislocated knee, hands smashed up, and no memory at all of what happened. As soon as she's able, Anna's flying back to Manhattan mystified but determined to find out how her life turned upside down. As her past slowly begins coming back to her, she sets out on an outrageous quest—involving lilies, psychics, mediums, and anyone who can point her in the right direction. Marries life's darker bits with wild humor and tender wit.


In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago world, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can’t have both.


Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. �


A Love Story for this generation, Me Before You brings to life two people who couldn’t have less in common—a heartbreakingly romantic novel that asks, What do you do when making the person you love happy also means breaking your own heart?


The Husband's Secret" is the gripping tale of Cecilia Fitzpatrick, a successful businesswoman who seemed to have it all until her husband wrote her a letter, only to be opened after his death. The letter derails her entire life, because it contains his deepest, darkest secret. But the letter has an even bigger impact, as it soon starts to change the lives of other people as well — and none of them know each other.


Would you rather know a truth that makes you feel hopeless, or keep believing the lies?�A spellbinding story of two young people with devastating pasts who embark on a passionate, intriguing journey to discover the lessons of life, love, trust—and above all, the healing power that only truth can bring. �


Who hasn’t, at some brief point in her life, entertained the dream of being a rock star? Though for some, it’s more serious than others, the musing is one we can all identify with. But for Anna Brundage, the 44-year-old protagonist this novel, becoming an indie rock goddess is more than a naïve fantasy.


Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.


When a group of neurotic, self-absorbed, and competitive urban parents leave their gentrified neighborhoods of middle-class Brooklyn and head to a cozy Long Island beach house for a weekend-long parent-child bonding retreat, things are bound to get anything but cozy.


An unforgettable story of one powerful secret, its effect on two families, and the life-altering journey that follows…Marian Caldwell is a thirty-six-year-old television producer living her dream in New York City. With a fulfilling career and picture-perfect relationship, she has convinced everyone, including herself that her life is just as she wants it to be. But one night, Marian answers a knock on the door . . only to find Kirby Rose, an eighteen-year-old girl with a key to a past that Marian thought she had locked away forever.


Set in present-day New York City The Snow Queen is story about loss and the ways in which we attempt to recover from and regain the things we lose hold of, a story that illuminates the innermost conditions of the human soul.


Thoughtful, funny, and brilliantly observed, The One & Only is a luminous novel about finding your passion, following your heart, and, most of all, believing in something bigger than yourself . . . the one and only thing that truly makes life worth living.


Untamed State tells the haunting tale of a young Haitian-American woman who is swept away from her privileged life in Haiti when she is kidnapped for ransom and tormented by her captors while her wealthy father refuses to comply with their demands.


Gabby and Elliot have been happily married for eighteen years. They have two teen-aged daughters; they have built a life together. So why does forty-three year old Gabby feel like she has only three more minutes left of youth. Why do her friends so desperately try to hang on to their attractiveness? And why does she even ever look at the handsome guy—ten years younger—at the other end of the bar one night?


Khakpour combines the beauty of ancient Iranian myth with the tragedy of contemporary American life to create an inventive world where an arrogant illusionist running out of tricks and a young girl in search of religion meet a feral boy, formerly raised as a bird, who wants nothing more than to fly. It’s a darkly glittering story that draws you in from its very first pages and mesmerizes you until the last.


When fate conspires to have three very different women move into the same SoHo apartment building, they soon discover that having their carefully planned lives fall to pieces might be the best thing that could have ever happened to them.

Told through the eyes of three students whose lives were irrevocably altered by the tragedy that shocked the University of Austin’s campus that sweltering August afternoon, the novel spans forty years, traversing the course of those three lives as they unravel and intertwine in unexpected ways. Crook’s elegant handling of a national tragedy will move readers in ways they won’t easily forget.


Grace Reinhart Sachs authors a book, You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a violent death, a missing husband, and an ongoing chain of terrible revelations force Grace to dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.


On this family vacation Franny and Jim Post head to the luxurious Balearic island of Mallorca with their daughter Sylvia to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary and Sylvia’s recent high school graduation alongside extended family and friends. But amid the celebratory air, tensions begin to simmer beneath the sun — secrets are unveiled, old wounds reopen, and rivalries unfurl.


Julie Metz's life changes forever on one ordinary January afternoon when her husband, Henry, collapses on the kitchen floor and dies in her arms. Suddenly, this mother of a six-year-old is the young widow in a bucolic small town. And this is only the beginning. It is the story of coming to terms with painful truths, of rebuilding both a life and an identity after betrayal and widowhood. It is a story of rebirth and happiness--if not perfection.


The circumstances of Molly Marx’s death may be suspicious, but she hasn’t lost her sense of humor.  Exploring the bonds of motherhood, marriage, and friendship, and narrated by a memorable and endearing character, The Late, Lamented Molly Marx is a hilarious, deeply moving, and thought-provoking novel that is part mystery, part love story, and all heart.


Written with radiant style and a wicked sense of humor, Commencement follows four unlikely friends through college and the years beyond, brilliantly capturing the complicated landscape facing young women today.


Vacationland is a moving portrait of a place—at once timeless and of the moment, composed of conflicting dreams and shared experience—and of the woman bound to it by legacy and sometimes longing, but not necessarily by choice.�


Allison Weiss got her happy ending—a handsome husband, an adorable little girl, a job she loves, and a big house in the suburbs. But when she’s in the pediatrician’s office with her daughter and a magazine flips open to a quiz about addiction, she starts to wonder whether her use of prescription pills is becoming a problem.


At once a coming-of-age tale, a family saga, and a love story of erotic longing, The Story Sisters sifts through the miraculous and the mundane as the sisters become women and their choices haunt them, change them and, finally, redeem them.


With indifferent parents, Iona Sheehan grew up craving devotion and acceptance.. But nothing is as it seems. An ancient evil has wound its way around Iona’s family tree and must be defeated. Family and friends will fight with each other and for each other to keep the promise of hope—and love—alive…


Welcome to Little Wing. It’s a place like hundreds of others, nothing special, really. But for four friends—all born and raised in this small Wisconsin town—it is home. in farmland, the lure of which, in Nickolas Butler’s hands, emerges as a vibrant character in the story. Shotgun Lovesongs is that rare work of fiction that evokes a specific time and place yet movingly describes the universal human condition.