Thanksgiving Reads

Happy Thanksgiving week from Irma! Once you've had your fill of turkey and football this Thursday, why not curl up with a good book?

In honor of the upcoming holiday, here are some Thanksgiving-related books you can find at Jackson Library.

1. The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote

A boy recalls his life with an elderly relative in rural Alabama in the 1930s and the lesson she taught him one Thanksgiving Day about dealing with a bully from school.   2. The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne "Strikingly different since childhood and leading dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have managed to remain "devoted"--as long as they stay on opposite coasts. When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her idyllic New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include the sisters' long-estranged father. Cynthia, however, doesn't understand how Frances can ignore the past their father's presence revives, a past that includes suspicions about their mother's death twenty-five years earlier. As Thanksgiving Day arrives, with a houseful of guests looking forward to dinner, the sisters continue to struggle with different versions of a shared past, their conflict escalating to a dramatic, suspenseful climax."--Publisher's website.   3. The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford With "The Sportswriter," in 1985, Richard Ford began a cycle of novels that ten years later--after "Independence Day"--won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Now, Frank Bascombe's story resumes, in the fall of 2000, with the presidential election still hanging in the balance and Thanksgiving looming before him with all the perils of a post-nuclear family get-together.           4. A Catered Thanksgiving: A Mystery with Recipes by Isis Crawford The proprietors of A Little Taste of Heaven, their Longely, N.Y., catering company, prepare a Thanksgiving feast for Scrooge-like fireworks manufacturer Monty Field and his family at the Field mansion. When Monty comes into the kitchen to test the roasting turkey, Bernie and Libby watch in horror as Monty taps the pop-up button in the bird's breast and the turkey explodes, blowing off the top of his head. Libby fears their stuffing made the turkey explode, but they soon learn that there was plenty of rivalry among the assembled family members, any one of whom had reason to want Monty dead. A heavy snowstorm ensures the suspects stay put as the sisters start to investigate. That their father, Sean, was on bad terms with the victim complicates their task. The action builds to more fireworks and a dramatic rescue--Publisher's Weekly.     5. Thanksgiving: A Novel in Celebration of America by Terry Coleman Chronicles the life of Wolsey Lowell, a young, liberally educated Englishwoman, who marries a Massachusetts Puritan minister and finds herself struggling against the rigidity of Puritan life--Google Books.