Our book group choice for February 2010 is The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. By the time he dies, Ivan Ilych has come to understand the worthlessness of his life.

Our book group choice for January 2010 is Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver. With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the short story.

Our book choice for December 2009 is The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Short, straightforward in narrative, and relatively linear in plot, The Crying of Lot 49 is considered by many to be Pynchon’s most accessible novel, and is therefore the one most commonly read.

Our book group choice for November 2009 is Home by Marilynne Robinson. Home takes place concurrently in Gilead, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.

Our book group choice for October 2009 is Answering Back by Carol Ann Duffy. Carol Ann Duffy has asked some of the brightest writers in the poetry world to select a poem that is meaningful – or has meant something – to them, and write a response to it.

Our book group choice for September 2009 is The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy. It is a fictionalized account of the real life murder of Elizabeth Short. Short’s body was found in an abandoned field near the famous Hollywood sign on January 15, 1947.

Our book group choice for July 2009 is Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi. Jamal is middle-aged, though reluctant to admit it. He has an ex-wife, a son he adores, a thriving career as a psychoanalyst and vast reserves of unsatisfied desire.

Our book group choice for June 2009 is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Aleksandr Solzhenstenitsyn. First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature.

Our book group choice for May 2009 is A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark. Mrs. Hawkins, the majestic narrator of A Far Cry from Kensington, takes us well in hand, and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London.

Our book choice for April 2009 is The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh. The play is the viciously funny and seriously disturbing tale of a writer in an unnamed totalitarian state who is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories and their similarities to a number of child-murders occurring in his town.