The San Diego Sunday Breakfast and Books Group

Please bring cash. Not all of our venues will give separate checks.

Our book for April will be "The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store" by James McBride. Please join us for breakfast and informal discussion. A brief description is below. I usually arrive early and ask to be seated, but I always alert the host that we are a book club, so please feel free to ask for the book club table.

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

Please bring cash. Not all of our venues will give separate checks. We are meeting a week early this month in order to miss Memorial Day weekend.

Our book for May will be "Trust" by Hernan Diaz. A brief description follows. Please join us for breakfast and an informal discussion. I usually arrive early and ask to be seated, but I always alert the host that we are a book club, so please feel free to ask for the book club table.

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

Please bring cash. Not all of our venues will give separate checks.

Our book for June is "All the Ugly and Wonderful Things" by Bryn Greenwood. Please join us for breakfast and an informal discussion. I usually arrive early and ask to be seated, but I always alert the host that we are a book club, so please feel free to ask for the book club table(s).

A beautiful and provocative love story between two unlikely people and the hard-won relationship that elevates them above the Midwestern meth lab backdrop of their lives.

As the daughter of a drug dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. It's safer to keep her mouth shut and stay out of sight. Struggling to raise her little brother, Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck, she forms an unusual friendship with one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold.

Please bring cash. Not all of our venues will give separate checks.

Our book for July will be "Pigs in Heaven" by Barbara Kingsolver. A brief description follows. Please join us for breakfast and an informal discussion. I usually arrive early and ask to be seated, but I always alert the host that we are a book club, so please feel free to ask for the book club table.

Taking place three years after The Bean Trees, Taylor is now dating a musician named Jax and has officially adopted Turtle. But when a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation begins to investigate the adoption—their new life together begins to crumble.
Depicting the clash between fierce family love and tribal law, poverty and means, abandonment and belonging, Pigs in Heaven is a morally wrenching, gently humorous work of fiction that speaks equally to the head and the heart.