In 1954, 15-year-old Tamara Anderson’s family is searching for a place to call home.  When they chose rural New York, the family starts to unravel…

From Barnes and Noble: “Deeply moving, with a profound understanding of family dynamics and adolescent anguish, Some Things That Stay introduces an unforgettable narrative voice and marks the arrival of a distinctive, new American talent.”

Book Discussion: Tuesday, September 16th @ 6:30 pm 

With a radical feminist criticism of Islam, this novel offers a disturbing view of the modern world - and inspired every critic who read it.

From Barnes and Noble: “In this profoundly affecting memoir from the internationally renowned author of The Caged Virgin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her astonishing life story, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya, to her intellectual awakening and activism in the Netherlands, and her current life under armed guard in the West.”

Book Discussion:
Tuesday, August 19th @ 6:30 pm.

Join us in a discussion of one of my favorite novels, I Capture the Castle. There are different motivations in pulling a book from the shelves and deciding to follow the author into a different world. Sometimes we are looking for a little relaxation, mental stimulation, or belly grabbing laughter. This novel offers all of this through the eyes of Cassandra Mortmain, a young woman who realizes much about herself and her odd family in six short months… Written over 50 years ago, Dodie Smith takes you into a dilapidated castle and uncovers a heartwarming, dysfunctional family.

Join us and enter to win one of our Adult Summer Reading Raffles:
$30 to Cliff’s Country Inn
$75 to DiSiena Furniture

Tuesday, July 15th @ 6:30 pm

At age three, she witnessed her mother’s death and still ended with her own suicide. In this rich piece of historical fiction by Margaret George (author of Mary, called Magdalene and The Autobiography of Henry VIII), we explore the possible life story of one the world’s most intriguing women.

Tuesday, June 17th @ 6:30 pm.

We are always looking for new members.  We understand discussing books with any group of people is frightening prospect (what if I sound silly or stupid?)  But we assure you, this is an open, fun bunch of readers with lots of anecdotes to share.  This is a fun way to get together once in a while and discuss what we thought of a piece we read - and YES, sometimes we have hated the book…

Daisy Goodwill Flett is “a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck.” In other words, a woman so commonplace that her story would seem barely worth remarking, were it not, perhaps, for her own determination to tell it. And in telling it, give it shape and meaning - even if she must supply these herself.

This is the problem that Carol Shields addresses in The Stone Diaries: how do small lives, the kind most women were once assumed to lead, assume significance and coherence? How closely do our versions of those lives correspond to objective facts? Can facts be said to exist at all in the context of something as changeable and arbitrary as a life? To what extent do “our” stories really belong to us, considering the tendency that other people - parents, spouses, children - have to intrude in them, interpret them, claim them?

Join us for a discussion of The Stone Diaries on Tuesday, May 20th @ 6:30pm. New members are eagerly awaited - we’d love for you to stop and in and visit!

After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker (”His head was the size and color of the lifebuoy, with teeth”).

Join us for a discussion of Life of Pi on Tuesday, April 15th @ 6:30pm.

Seriously - we’d really like to get this group a little bigger so visit the library!  NO - we do not discuss these books in terms of literary merit or quality of language.  We talk about what it made us think - if we liked it or not, did we believe the author???

Until the phone calls came at three o’clock on a November morning, the Golds and their neighbors, The Hartes, had been inseparable…

Join us for a discussion of bestselling author Jodi Picoult’s The Pact on Tuesday, March 18th @ 6:30pm. New faces are always welcome!  It’s a great bunch of ladies with wonderful thoughts on the life situations presented in the novels…

Tuesday, February 19th @ 6:30pm
 in the library…

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Vida Winter is a famous author, whose life story is coming to an end. Margaret Lea is a young, unworldly, bookish girl who is a bookseller in her father’s shop…

New Readers are welcome to join us!  We are always looking for new opinions and laughter!

 Tuesday, January 15th @ 6:30m

The last 33 years of Afghanistan’s tumultuous history of war and oppression told on an intimate scale, through the lives of two women, Miriam and Laila.  This novel is haunting and just as beautifully scripted as Hosseini’s last effort - The Kite Runner.

A bit hard to come by as it is still on the New York Times Bestseller List, don’t forget library card holders can download the audiobook for free through the link on the left. 

Martha Washington by Patricia Brady

Although the cover of this book sparks a lot of conversation - no doubt the words inside will give us even more!

Join us for a book discussion on this biography of our nation’s premier First Lady!

Tuesday, December 18th at 6:30 pm.  Book Discussions are held on the first floor in order to accommodate all of our readers.

This is the final meeting on our 2007 selection list.  2008 Reading Menus will be distributed…

“Clark launched her career in 1968 with this historical romance, published as Aspire to the Heavens. The plot follows George Washington as he exits the White House after his presidency. Clark is more interested in Washington the husband than the nation’s leader, and this focuses on his sometimes bumpy marriage to Martha. Higgins has the Midas touch, so even though this isn’t a thriller, fans will want to read it.” ~ From Library Journal

Tuesday, November 20th 6:30pm

 From the publisher:

 The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history — the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin led Union cavalry and detectives on a wild twelve-day chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia, while the nation, still reeling from the just-ended Civil War, watched in horror and sadness.

Based on rare archival materials, obscure trial transcripts, and Lincoln’s own blood relics, Manhunt is a fully documented work, but it is also a fascinating tale of murder, intrigue, and betrayal. A gripping hour-by-hour account told through the eyes of the hunted and the hunters, this is history as you’ve never read it before.

 Tuesday, October 16th @ 6:30 pm

From the publisher:

New discoveries in archaeology and recent bestsellers and movies such as The Da Vinci Code and The Passion of the Christ have sparked a renaissance of the many controversies that have remained unanswered in Christianity and other religions. At the heart of these controversies is Jesus. With a unique perspective only Sylvia Browne could bring, The Mystical Life of Jesus is filled with the details of Jesus’ inspiring life.

Tuesday, September 18th @ 6:30 pm

“The Nanny Diaries is an absolutely addictive peek into the utterly weird world of child rearing in the upper reaches of Manhattan’s social strata. Cowritten by two former nannies, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, the novel follows the adventures of the aptly named Nan as she negotiates the Byzantine byways of working for Mrs. X, a Park Avenue mommy. Nan’s 4-year-old charge, the hilariously named Grayer (his pals include Josephina, Christabelle, Brandford, and Darwin) is a genuinely good sort. He can’t help it if his mom has scheduled him for every activity known to the Upper East Side, including ice skating, French lessons, and a Mommy and Me group largely attended by nannies. What makes the book so impossible to put down is the suspense of finding out what the unbelievably inconsiderate Mrs. X will demand of Nan next. One pictures the two authors having the last hearty laugh on their former employers.”  ~from amazon.com

Tuesday, August 21st @ 6:30pm

Trisha McFarland is a plucky 9-year-old hiking with her brother and mom, who is grimly determined to give the kids a good time on their weekends together. Trisha’s mom is recently divorced, and her brother is feuding with her for moving from Boston to small-town Maine, where classmates razz him. Trisha steps off the trail for a pee and a respite from the bickering. And gets lost.

Trisha’s odyssey succeeds on several levels. King renders her consciousness of increasing peril beautifully, from the “first minnowy flutter of disquiet” in her guts to her into-the-wild tumbles to her descent into hallucinations, the nicest being her beloved Red Sox baseball pitcher Tom Gordon, whose exploits she listens to on her Walkman. The nature writing is accurate, tense, and sometimes lyrical, from the maddening whine of the no-see-um mosquito to the profound obbligato of the “Subaudible” (Trisha’s dad’s term for nature’s intimations of God). Our identification with Trisha deepens as we learn about her loved ones: Dad, a dreamboat whose beer habit could sink him; loving but stubborn Mom; Trisha’s best pal, Pepsi Robichaud, vividly evoked by her colorful sayings (”Don’t go all GIRLY on me, McFarland!”). The personal associations triggered by a full moon, the running monologue with which she stays sane–we who have been lost in woods will recognize these things. ~review from Amazon.com

Tuesday, July 17th @ 6:30pm

A chicken walks into the library.  It goes up to the circulation desk and says: “book, bok, bok, boook”.  The librarian hands the chick a book. She tucks it under her wing and runs out.

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