Hi everyone, here is our monthly book club is this week email reminder!

We’ll be meeting in the Conference Room at 3:00 p.m. this Friday, August 14, 2026, to discuss the novel The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

And if anyone should wish to join us via Zoom, here is the Zoom info:

SSC Library Book Club for Adults Zoom Info

Meeting Date & Time: Aug 14, 2026, 03:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Zoom Link

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84991054902?pwd=HsOXig3xmqZb1TywdGvvdw3Z7ctJoF.1

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Looking forward to September; we will be reading:

Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit Of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dubar. The title really gives you the basics of this non-fiction book – it tells the tale of Ona Judge (1774-1848) who was born enslaved at Mount Vernon in 1774. As a youth, she traveled with George & Martha Washington to Philadelphia, the first capital of the United States, and worked in the president’s household during the eight years of his two terms in office. Living in Philadelphia for those eight years, Judge would have seen the growing population of free persons of color who lived there and would have known about Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery; the law, which was passed in 1780, decreed that any slaves born in the state before 1780 would remain slaves for life; but any slaves born in the state after 1780 would be freed once they reached the age of 28.

Then in 1796, it became known that President Washington was retiring, that his household would be returning to Viriginia and that Martha Washington planned to give Ona Judge to her hot-tempered granddaughter who was about to be married and who lived in Virginia where there was nothing like Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery; Judge made the decision to escape and escape she did! To say the Washington’s were not pleased by her departure would be an understatement as they spent years trying to re-enslave her and to learn more, check out the book! Copies are available at the Circulation Desk.

About July’s Book Club:

In July we read and discussed the novel The Antidote by Karen Russell. The novel, which is a mixture of historical fiction and magical realism, is set in Uz, Nebraska during the Great Depression and tells that tale of an ensemble cast of characters including: Toni Rossi a prairie witch who, has been for many years a living vault for memories people don’t wish to lose but don’t want to live with but who is now having issues retrieving those stored memories; Dell an orphaned teenager who is a talented basketball player and wants to make some money by working with Toni and learning to become a prairie witch; Harp Oletsky, Dell’s uncle and a local farmer whose fields, unlike the fields of his neighbors are lush and growing and seemingly unaffected by the dust bowl and the Scarecrow, who is literally a scarecrow standing in Harp Oletsky’s field; and more, because as the novel unfolds readers become aware the Scarecrow holds the spirit of Toni’s son who she was forced to give up when she was young; and who recently died in a automobile accident.

The Graflex Speed Camera mentioned in the novel looks like this:

And as a coda to the July book club read; here is a link to a short documentary about the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, which was indeed headed by Roy Stryker, who made appearances in the novel as the fictional photographer, Cleo Allfrey’s boss. The short documentary is produced by the official FDR Presidential Library:

Books Read in the Past Month by Book Club Members

Titles are books unless otherwise noted —

California Sorcery: A Group Celebration edited by William F. Nolan

Here’s a book of magic, all right — all right, dark magic — and its contributors are, as the title implies, sorcerers of their craft. California Sorcery provides a virtual roll call of some of the most important names in the history of 20th-century horror, sci fi, and dark fantasy: Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont — just to name a few. And this is no reprint sham like we’ve seen too many times before; nine of the 12 stories were never-before-published! (The Bloch piece hasn’t seen print in 50 years, and Harlan Ellison’s piece is newly revised.)

We’re talking the greats of the field, folks, guys who were writing high-octane tales of terror when Stephen King was still playing with toy soldiers. (King, in fact, has acknowledged a number of these authors as major influences.) In their day (though many are still actively writing) the contributors here were known in Hollywood as “The California School” or simply, “The Group”; they became a notorious creative coterie due to their sheer, indefatigable talent and, combined, helped brand the entertainment industry with some of the finest scripts, novels, and stories ever produced. Coeditor William Nolan says it best in his foreword: “The Group lives again in this book, brought together at last and for always…”

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The Foursome: A Novel: by Christina Baker Kline

When Eng and Chang Bunker arrive in Wilkes County in 1839, they’re not just a curiosity—they’re a sensation. Everyone is eager to learn whether the salacious rumors about them are true. Within months, the twins have opened a general store, bought land, and begun building a plantation. Now, word has it, they’re looking for wives—and in a place that thrives on gossip and legacy, their ambitions set the community on edge.

Sarah and Adelaide Yates, daughters of a once-prominent local family brought low by scandal, are drawn into their orbit. Bold, beautiful Adelaide sees in the twins’ fame a chance to reclaim her future. Sarah, quiet and observant, isn’t so sure. When the twins’ lives become entangled with theirs, they must navigate loyalty, longing, and identity in a world where everything—including race, class, and gender—is rigidly defined.

Spanning five decades and unfolding against the backdrop of a fractured nation hurtling toward war, The Foursome is both intimate and epic: a story of love and constraint, identity and reinvention. With piercing insight and emotional precision, Kline brings to life a forgotten chapter of American history and the complex, boundary-defying marriages at its center.

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Inside the O’Briens: A Novel by Lisa Genova

Joe O’Brien is a forty-three-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and respected officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements. He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family’s lives forever: Huntington’s disease.

Huntington’s is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with no treatment and no cure, and each of Joe’s four children has a fifty percent chance of inheriting their father’s disease. While watching her potential future in her father’s escalating symptoms, twenty-one-year-old daughter Katie struggles with the questions this test imposes on her young adult life. As Joe’s symptoms worsen and he’s eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life “at risk” or learn their fate.

Praised for writing that “explores the resilience of the human spirit” (San Francisco Chronicle), Lisa Genova has once again delivered a novel as powerful and unforgettable as the human insights at its core.

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John Adams by David McCullough

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling biography of America’s founding father and second president that was the basis for the acclaimed HBO series, brilliantly told by master historian David McCullough.

In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution; who rose to become the second president of the United States and saved the country from blundering into an unnecessary war; who was learned beyond all but a few and regarded by some as “out of his senses”; and whose marriage to the wise and valiant Abigail Adams is one of the moving love stories in American history.

This is history on a grand scale—a book about politics and war and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, John Adams is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.

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The Most Fun We Ever Had: A Novel by Claire Lombardo

In this “rich, complex family saga” (USA Today) full of long-buried family secrets, Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, blithely ignorant of all that awaits them. By 2016, they have four radically different daughters, each in a state of unrest.
 
Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator turned stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she’s not sure she wants by a man she’s not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects.
 
With the unexpected arrival of young Jonah Bendt—a child placed for adoption by one of the daughters fifteen years before—the Sorensons will be forced to reckon with the rich and varied tapestry of their past. As they grapple with years marred by adolescent angst, infidelity, and resentment, they also find the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.

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On Witness and Respair: Essays by Jesmyn Ward

The collected creative nonfiction of a singular American writer, Jesmyn Ward, including widely shared classics, three never-before-published speeches, and an introductory essay.

Respair (noun, obsolete), fresh hope after despair.

From the two-time National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author Jesmyn Ward, this collection of essays documents more than a decade of work in the life of a singular writer often lauded as “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub). Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy’s footsteps when she promises always to “Tell it straight. Tell it all.”

True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood—the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright’s novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison. Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies—including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward’s powers as “one of America’s finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty, and personal and collective resilience.

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Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make–and Keep—Friends by Marisa G. Franco PhD

How do we make and keep friends in an era of distraction, burnout, and chaos, especially in a society that often prizes romantic love at the expense of other relationships? In Platonic, Dr. Marisa G. Franco unpacks the latest, often counterintuitive findings about the bonds between us—for example, why your friends aren’t texting you back (it’s not because they hate you!), and the myth of “friendships happening organically” (making friends, like cultivating any relationship, requires effort!). As Dr. Franco explains, to make and keep friends you must understand your attachment style—secure, anxious, or avoidant: it is the key to unlocking what’s working (and what’s failing) in your friendships.

Making new friends, and deepening longstanding relationships, is possible at any age—in fact, it’s essential. The good news: there are specific, research-based ways to improve the number and quality of your connections using the insights of attachment theory and the latest scientific research on friendship. Platonic provides a clear and actionable blueprint for forging strong, lasting connections with others—and for becoming our happiest, most fulfilled selves in the process.

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The Tale Teller by Anne Hillerman

Joe Leaphorn may have retired from the Tribal Police, but he finds himself knee-deep in a perplexing case involving a priceless artifact—a reminder of a dark time in Navajo history. Joe’s been hired to find a missing biil, a traditional dress that had been donated to the Navajo Nation. His investigation takes a sinister turn when the leading suspect dies under mysterious circumstances and Leaphorn himself receives anonymous warnings to beware—witchcraft is afoot.

While the veteran detective is busy working to untangle his strange case, his former colleague Jim Chee and Officer Bernie Manuelito are collecting evidence they hope will lead to a cunning criminal behind a rash of burglaries. Their case takes a complicated turn when Bernie finds a body near a popular running trail. The situation grows more complicated when the death is ruled a homicide, and the Tribal cops are thrust into a turf battle because the murder involves the FBI.

As Leaphorn, Chee, and Bernie draw closer to solving these crimes, their parallel investigations begin to merge . . . and offer an unexpected opportunity that opens a new chapter in Bernie’s life.

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Theo of Golden: A Novel by Allen Levi

One spring morning, a stranger named Theo arrives in the small Southern city of Golden. He doesn’t explain much about where he came from or why he’s there—but when he visits the local coffeehouse, where pencil portraits of the people of Golden hang on the walls, he begins purchasing them, one at a time, and giving each portrait to the person depicted. In exchange, he asks only for the person’s story. And so portrait by portrait, person by person, secrets are revealed, regrets are shared, and ordinary lives are profoundly altered.

A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is an unforgettable novel about the power of generosity, the importance of connection, and the quiet miracles that happen when we choose kindness and wonder.

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The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.

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Young George Washington (2026) (Movie)

Before he became the first President of the United States, young George Washington tests his honor, loyalty and courage by fighting in the French and Indian War. As alliances crumble and the frontier erupts into battle, he must confront not only his enemies, but the man he’s becoming.

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Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett

When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.

Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. It’s a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.

To see a list of upcoming library events, visit the library’s calendar of events page via the following link: https://ssclibrary.org/calendar/

And to request print books, visit StarCat, the online catalog of physical library materials: https://starcat.stls.org/client/en_US/default

Alternatively, you can search for eBooks and eAudios via the Libby or Hoopla apps – all you need is a library card; if you have questions please call the library at: 607-936-3713

Have a great day everyone!

Linda Reimer, SSCL