January Reading:The Spice Island Voyage by Tim Severin

This remarkable account of Tim Severin's voyage to the Indonesian Archipelago in search of the island paradise that naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had explored 140 years before him offers both the thrills of exotic adventure and the marvels of scientific discovery. In a replica of the boat that Wallace himself sailed to the Spice Islands and with Wallace's The Malay Archipelago as his guide, Severin travels to remote shores that still harbor such rare but fast-disappearing creatures as red birds of paradise, flying foxes, and bird-winged butterflies. Not only does he discover the now-endangered flora and fauna that Wallace recorded in his expeditions, he also pays due homage to his intrepid predecessor, the man who provided Darwin with the ideas and principles that changed forever the way we view nature and with him co-authored the theory of evolution.

December Reading:Wildride, The rise and fall of Cobb & Co.

In 1853, a young American arrived in the new colony of Victoria hoping to make his fortune from the world's greatest gold rush. He soon realised that the real money was to be made from the miners' need to travel from the fields where they found their gold to the towns where they spent it, and established a coach company that would literally carry his name into every household in the land: Cobb & Co. But Freeman Cobb himself was long gone by the time the company bearing his name became an Australian legend. Wild Ride is the story of the two extraordinary men, James Rutherford and Frank Whitney, who along with their business partners took Cobb's humble company and made it into the Qantas of its day. These were pioneers, carving a path through otherwise impassable terrain, settling unsettled land, enduring bushrangers and terrible accidents, and making their fortunes. The Rutherford and Whitney families became two of the most significant of their era, unrivalled in their influence and, finally, vicious in their falling out.

November Reading:The Shipping News by Anne Proulx

A darkly comic portrait of human life and possibility. Quoyle is a hopeless hack journalist working in New York. When his two-timing wife dies in a road accident, he retreats to his ancestral home on the coast of Newfoundland where he must confront the unpredictable forces of nature and society.National Book Award for Fiction and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

October Reading

Crime Scene Jerusalem by Alton Gansky

When cynical American investigator Maxwell Odom travels to Jerusalem, he leaves his hotel to discover that he's been transported back into ancient history. Allowed to return to his own time only if he can solve a crime that begins in the upper room, will he be able to unearth--and believe--the real truth?