Plano Reads: May Book Clubs

What Are You Reading Now?

Monday, May 1 at 3pm 

Hybrid, meets in-person at Haggard Library and on Zoom 

Read and discuss great books you’ve read. Check out past recap book lists here on the blog. 

Second Tuesday Book Club

Tuesday, May 9 at 7pm 

Meets in-person at Schimelpfenig Library 

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn 

Print | Large Print | eBook | eAudiobook 

1940. As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call to Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. Osla puts her fluent German to use as a translator of decoded enemy secrets. Mab works the legendary codebreaking machines and looks for a socially advantageous husband. Beth’s shyness conceals a brilliant facility with puzzles, and she becomes one of the Park’s few female cryptanalysts. 1947. As the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip whips post-war Britain into a fever, the three women are reunited by a mysterious encrypted letter– the key to which lies buried in the long-ago betrayal that destroyed their friendship and left one of them confined to an asylum. 

Mystery Book Club

Thursday, May 18 at 7pm 

Hybrid, meets in-person at Davis Library and on Zoom 

The Verifiers by Jane Pek 

Book | eBook 

Claudia Lin is looking at a cliched post-college future as a chronically underemployed English major–much to the consternation of her mother, who wants her to settle down and start dating a nice Chinese boy already; her brother, who pushes her to follow in his model-minority footsteps; and her sister, who can’t get over Claudia’s privileged place in their mother’s affections. But Claudia is used to keeping secrets from her family. Such as the fact that she prefers girls–and that she’s embarking on an unsuitable but supremely fun career. Veracity, a two-and-a-half-person detective agency that operates out of a Manhattan townhouse and verifies people’s online dating personas, has recruited Claudia via an online murder mystery game. A lifelong reader of mystery novels, Claudia takes to her new job sniffing out cheaters and catfishers like a latter-day lovechild of Elizabeth Bennet and Sherlock Holmes. But when one of her very first clients turns up dead, Claudia breaks with Veracity’s protocols to investigate what happened, unconvinced by the story everyone else believes. The deeper she digs, the more she discovers that nothing–her client, the death, the dating platforms that claim to know us better than we know ourselves, Veracity, even her own family–may be as it seems. 

Brown Bag Book Club

Thursday, May 25 

Meets in-person at Parr Library 

Elderhood: Redefining Agin, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life by Louise Aronson 

Print | Large Print | eBook | eAudiobook 

For more than 5,000 years, “old” has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied. Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that’s neither nightmare nor Utopian fantasy — a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself.