Hi everyone, our June gathering will be via Zoom, on Friday, June 11, 2021 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

If you’ve previously signed up for a book club meeting, and thus I have your email address; you don’t need to sign up again. I will send you the Zoom link the first week in June.

If you’re new to the Southeast Steuben Count Library Adult Book Club – welcome! You can sign up on the library’s website by clicking the following link:

https://ssclibrary.org/activities/adult-book-club-before-coffee-cold/

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Our June read is Before The Coffee Gets Cold (208 pages) written by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

The book is available in print form through StarCat; and for instant checkout as an eBook or digital audiobook through the Hoopla Catalog found online at

https://www.hoopladigital.com/browse/ebook

You can also download the Hoopla app to your mobile device to read the eBook or listen to the digital audiobook version.

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Here is the publisher overview of the plot of Before The Coffee Gets Cold:

What would you change if you could travel back in time?

Down a small alleyway in the heart of Tokyo, there’s an underground café that’s been serving carefully brewed coffee for over a hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers its customers something else besides coffee-the chance to travel back in time.

The rules, however, are far from simple: you must sit in one particular seat, and you can’t venture outside the café, nor can you change the present. And, most important, you only have the time it takes to drink a hot cup of coffee-or risk getting stuck forever.

Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of traveling to another time: a heartbroken lover looking for closure, a nurse with a mysterious letter from her husband, a waitress hoping to say one last goodbye and a mother whose child she may never get the chance to know.

Heartwarming, wistful and delightfully quirky, Before the Coffee Gets Cold explores the intersecting lives of four women who come together in one extraordinary café, where the service may not be quick, but the opportunities are endless.

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May Book Club Notes:

The Adult Book Club meeting for May was held via Zoom from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. on Friday, May 14, 2021.

Our May Read was The Boy In The Field by Margot Livesey

The cliff notes overview of the book The Boy In The Field by Margot Livesey is:

Despite the title, the book really chronicles the experience of the three teenage Lang siblings: outgoing Zoe (age 16), studious Matthew (age 17) and artistic Duncan (age 13), who live in a tranquil, small village outside of the town where they attend school, with their father Hal, a blacksmith, and their mother Betsy a solicitor.

One day in September 1999, the sibling’s father promises to pick them up at school and forgets to do so.

So, the trio start walking home. As they walk by a field, bordered by a fence and bushes, Zoe sees something red in the field. Upon investigation, the siblings discover “The Boy” of the title, a youth they later learn is named Karel Lustig, lying beneath a tree in the field. Karel has been attacked by an unknown assailant and is unconscious.

The siblings realize that Karel needs help; so, the elder siblings, Zoe and Matthew, send the youngest Duncan to flag down a car for assistance. Once Duncan has finished his task he returns to his siblings and Karel, still lying unconscious in the field. The emergency crew arrive and take Karel to the hospital. The siblings go home, where later that evening they are visited by Police Inspector Price, who takes their statements regarding the incident and asks them not to discuss finding the boy in the field with anyone outside their household.

The story unfolds from there; the author paints a pleasing portrait of a family whose members genuinely care for each other and do their best to support each other through times easy and hard. The narrative starts out chronicling the experience of the siblings finding Karel in the field, together, and subsequent chapters follow each of the three siblings, in turn, in the aftermath of the event of finding the boy in the field. The story is indeed a Bildungsroman, as the impact of finding Karel in the field has the siblings in a contemplative mood in the months that follow, realizing there is evil in the world and sometimes people are treated abysmally for no good reason; while also, as teenagers do, trying to find where they fit in, in the world.

Readers also learn a bit more about “The Boy In The Field” himself, Karel Lustig by the end of the book; but as mentioned the book really isn’t his story; it is the story of three siblings who might live next door to any of us, and who they are impacted by a dark an unexpected event.

About The Writing: The author has something that is great for an author to have, the proverbial “way with words.” Her writing is descriptive and articulate without being packed with fluffy extraneous details; this is something the reader perceives from the first page of the book when she describes the sibling trio finding the Karel in the field  in this way: “Here is what happened one Monday in the month of September, in the last year of the last century;” “Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang were on their way home from school,” when they came upon the boy in the field.

The consensus of book club members is that the book The Boy In The Field is definitely worth reading, and several book club members were also interested in checking out additional titles by the author.

Margot Livesey’s current reading list:

Homework (1990)

Criminals (1996)

The Missing World (2000)

Eva Moves the Furniture (2001)

Banishing Verona (2004)

The House on Fortune Street (2008)

The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012)

Mercury (2016)

The Boy in the Field (2020)

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Other Items Discussed At The May Book Club Gathering Via Zoom:

In discussing how one event, like finding an unconscious youth in a field, can impact, or even transform, one’s life; we discussed the Ben Franklin attributed proverb For Want of a Nail.

For Want of a Nail
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
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Other Books Recommended By Book Club Members:

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah: Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman’s only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she barely knows.

By 1934, the world has changed; millions are out of work and drought has devastated the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as crops fail and water dries up and the earth cracks open. Dust storms roll relentlessly across the plains. Everything on the Martinelli farm is dying, including Elsa’s tenuous marriage; each day is a desperate battle against nature and a fight to keep her children alive.

In this uncertain and perilous time, Elsa- like so many of her neighbors – must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or leave it behind and go west, to California, in search of a better life for her family.

The Four Winds is a rich, sweeping novel that stunningly brings to life the Great Depression and the people who lived through it – the harsh realities that divided us as a nation and the enduring battle between the haves and the have-nots. A testament to hope, resilience, and the strength of the human spirit to survive adversity, The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation. – Description from the publisher
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Sold on a Monday: A Novel by Kristina McMorris:  2 CHILDREN FOR SALE The sign is a last resort. It sits on a farmhouse porch in 1931, but could be found anywhere in an era of breadlines, bank runs and broken dreams. It could have been written by any mother facing impossible choices.

For struggling reporter Ellis Reed, the gut-wrenching scene evokes memories of his family’s dark past. He snaps a photograph of the children, not meant for publication. But when it leads to his big break, the consequences are more devastating than he ever imagined.

Inspired by an actual newspaper photograph that stunned the nation, Sold on a Monday is a powerful novel of love, redemption, and the unexpected paths that bring us home. – Description from the publisher
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Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates Jr.: A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, by the bestselling author of The Black Church.

The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked “a new birth of freedom” in Lincoln’s America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the “nadir” of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance.

Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a “New Negro” to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age.

The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, goaded by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored “home rule” to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation.

An essential tour through one of America’s fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lion’s mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.

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Recommended Viewing:

One Lane Bridge, Season 1 (Available on DVD and through Acorn TV):

More a character study than a mystery; set in New Zealand – and the scenery is great!

And here is the IMDB overview of the series:
During a murder investigation at Queenstown’s infamous One Lane Bridge, ambitious young Maori Detective, Ariki Davis, inadvertently reawakens a spiritual gift that endangers the case, his career and his life.

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References

Margot Livesey. (n.d.). Fantastic Fiction. Retrieved May 21, 2021, from https://www.fantasticfiction.com/l/margot-livesey/

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Margot Livesey Professor Fiction. (n.d.). Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Retrieved April 21, 2021, from https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/people/margot-livesey

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Walsh, S. (2020, August 11). “Life is about change—whether we like it or not”: An Interview with Margot Livesey. Ploughshares. https://blog.pshares.org/life-is-about-change-whether-we-like-it-or-not-an-interview-with-margot-livesey/

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/l/margot-livesey/

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If you have questions about the book club, feel free to call the library at 607-936-3713 or send me an email to me at reimerl@stls.org

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, I apologize for the delay! I just realized today, the day of the April book club meeting, that I didn’t post the list of titles book club attendees recommended in March – so here is the list!

Book Club Attendees Other Recommend Reads

During our March meeting we discussed other books that members recommend and they include:

American Dervish: A Novel by Ayad Akhtar:

From Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar, a stirring and explosive debut novel about an American Muslim family in Michigan struggling with faith and belonging in the pre-9/11 world.

Hayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes.

American Dervish is a brilliantly written, nuanced, and emotionally forceful look inside the interplay of religion and modern life.

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The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson

The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a gripping account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies.

When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the building block of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.

Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance since his co-discovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turned their curiosity into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.

The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study the code of life.

Should we use our new evolution-hacking powers to make us less susceptible to viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! And what about preventing depression? Hmmm…Should we allow parents, if they can afford it, to enhance the height or muscles or IQ of their kids?

After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Her story is a thrilling detective tale that involves the

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The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

“Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost” (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.

“Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” (The Washington Post). Throughout, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome.

“A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are—and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. “The Gene is a book we all should read” (USA TODAY).

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Mama Day by Gloria Naylor

A “wonderful novel” steeped in the folklore of the South from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Women of Brewster Place (The Washington Post Book World).

On an island off the coast of Georgia, there’s a place where superstition is more potent than any trappings of the modern world. In Willow Springs, the formidable Mama Day uses her powers to heal. But her great niece, Cocoa, can’t wait to get away.

In New York City, Cocoa meets George. They fall in love and marry quickly. But when she finally brings him home to Willow Springs, the island’s darker forces come into play. As their connection is challenged, Cocoa and George must rely on Mama Day’s mysticism.

Told from multiple perspectives, Mama Day is equal parts star-crossed love story, generational saga, and exploration of the supernatural. Hailed as Gloria Naylor’s “richest and most complex” novel, it is the kind of book that stays with you long after the final page (Providence Journal).

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Also recommended the non-profit website Living Room Conversations which was formed to, as aptly described on the site, offer  “a simple way to connect across divides – politics, age, gender, race, nationality, and more.:

Here is the website link: https://livingroomconversations.org/

Hope to see everyone at 3 p.m.!

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Update! The April Adult Book Club meeting is being pushed forward a week and will be held on Friday, April 16, 2021 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

And the change in date is due to the fact that I’m getting my second COVID shot on Friday, April 9, which is the original date of the April book club meeting, and as I know a number of people have experienced distracting symptoms after getting the second shot – I thought I’d reschedule the meeting, so I don’t find I need to cancel at the last moment!

As a reminder, the April book club read is The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

If you have previously registered for an SSCL Adult Book Club meeting you’ll get an email with the link today (3/23) and a reminder email including the same link on Monday, April 5.

If you’ve just discovered this blog and would like to register for the April SSCL Adult Book Club, here is the link, which will direct you to the registration page on the Southeast Steuben County Library website:

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I know moving the April meeting forward a week, will leave us less time before the May 14 Adult Book Club meeting; however, the May read, The Boy In The Field by Margot Livesey is relatively short – just 272 pages – so I’m sure we can all read that title in the three weeks in between meetings.

And as usual, if you find you can’t get a copy of the book club selection of the month, let me know and I’ll make sure you get a copy.

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And here are the Cliff Notes Takes on the February & March reads!

Cliff Notes Take on the February Read:

The February SSL Adult Book Club Selection was Ruth Ware’s One By One. The book is an intriguing thriller set at an isolated French chalet. As the story opens readers meet the two chalet staff members, Erin and Danny, who are getting ready to host the staff of an app company called Snoops The app allows music fans to listen, in real time, to whatever music other Snoop members, both famous and non-famous, are listening to in real time. The Snoops staff includes stockholders Eva, Topher, Rik & Liz and several support staff. Just after the Snoop crew arrives for their business vacation, Eva holds a meeting and announces that they have a buy-out offer that she is eager to accept; not all stockholders wish to sell the company and some, including Topher, are outraged that Eva has been in negotiation for a buy-out without telling the other stockholders. As the story progresses Eva suffers a suspicious “accident,” an avalanche partially buries the chalet leaving group stranded together and cut off from the rest of the world; and as murder ensues, readers discover that not all characters are quite who they seem to be.

The consensus of book club members was that One By One was an interesting thriller, with compelling characters and a story reminiscent of the works of Agatha Christie.

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Cliff Notes Take of the March Read:

The March SSCL Adult Book Club read was Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar.

Ayad Akhtar book is fiction, on the real-life experiences of Ayad, a first generation American and his family. In the book, the main character is also called Ayad Akhtar, and he is the only child of Pakistani immigrants Sikander and Fatima Akhtar. The book explores the world-view of Ayad who is American born and his Pakistani born parents, Sikander and Fatima; interspersing  experiences the trio has had during their lives and as they traverse the discriminatory climate in the U.S. Readers learn that Akhtar’s mother Fatima, despite always longing to return to Pakistan to live, experienced the horrors of war at a young age, and that Akhta’s father, who during the story works as  both as an academic and a practicing cardiologist, meets a fictional Donald Trump when that character is suffering from cardiac issues, and that despite experiencing discrimination as an immigrant, Sikander supports Donald Trump through all the years insisting that he is a good man and even voting or him; this despite evidence that indicates that the fictional Donald Trump is a racist.

The experiences of the main character, Ayad, are also relayed including how his college studies, particularly under his favorite Professor Mary Maroni have influenced his life and how his worldview has changed over time. There are also stories of how Ayed, an American citizen, must deal with discrimination, including an incident, in the aftermath of 9/11, when Ayed’s car breaks down and encounters a bigoted white police officer and his car-repair shop owning uncle who cheats Ayed by charging him an exorbitant amount to fix his car simply because both the nephew and uncle do not like that Ayed’s family comes from Pakistan.

Home Elegies is an enlightening read that follows several immigrant characters and one first-generation American, Ayed, who when asked while giving a Q&A following an academic lecture, near the end of the book, that if he thinks it is so difficult to live in America – then why does he stay? And he sums up a main theme of the book with his reply “I’m here because I was born and raised here. This is where I’ve lived my whole life. For better, for worse– and it’s always been a bit of both– I don’t want to be anywhere else. I’ve never even thought about it, America is my home.”

The book club members agreed Homeland Elegies is an excellent read. Highly recommend.

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Have a great day everyone,

Linda

Hi everyone, here is the info for our February read followed by a brief summary of our January read, The Cold Millions.

Our February read is the mystery One By One written by Ruth Ware; and our February meeting will take place from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. next Friday, February 12, 2021

If you’ve previously signed up for a book club meeting, and thus I have your email, you should receive an email with the Zoom link for our February gathering today (2/3/2021).

If you’re new to the Adult Book Club and would like to sign up for the February meeting, click on the following link to do so and after you sign up you’ll receive the email with the Zoom link.

Adult Book Club Online: “One by One” by Ruth Ware

January Book Club Notes:

The Adult Book Club meeting for January was held via Zoom from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. on Friday, January 8, 2021.

Book of the Month: The Cold Millions by Jess Walter

The Cold Millions opens in 1909 and relays the story of 16-year-old Rye Dolan who has been orphaned and, as the story opens, has been traveling & working across the northwestern United States with his older brother Gig; the pair are currently living in a boarding house in Spokane, Washington.

Gig Dolan, an idealist and ardent proponent of labor unions and the rights of workers is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Gig likes to migrant life of going from town to town working, while Rye would prefer to settle in one town and build a life in one location.

Gig is set to speak at a protest and has forbidden Rye to accompany him. Rye follows Gig to the protest anyway, where it is apparent to the reader, right off the bat, that the police and the owners of the local mining company are determined to squash the civil protest and the protesters by violence; completely ignoring the first amendment rights of the workers. Several speakers briefly stand up on soapboxes to give speeches and are forcibly pulled down and arrested by the police including both Gig and Rye. Both the Dolans are incarcerated and the conditions in the local jail are abysmal. Rye is released after a few days, once it is discovered he is underage, while Gig is held as a union ring-leader for months. When Rye is released from jail he is met by a lawyer working with the IWW Union and taken to meet one the IWW’s fiercest supporters, the charismatic Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Flynn wants him to come on her upcoming speaking tour and relay his experiences of being mistreated by the police with an emphasis on the fact that he is underage.

Rye has quite the adventure traveling with Flynn and if you throw in an unscrupulous detective or two, a kind boarding house proprietor who can’t remember names, a car crash and the connection Rye makes with the family of a fellow worker and union supporter named Jules you have the basic outline of a well told story.

The majority opinion of the book club attendees was that Jess Walter is a terrific writer; and The Cold Millions is a great read if a tad dark around the edges.

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, the January Adult Book Club Zoom gathering is tomorrow, Friday, January 8, 2021 at 3:00 p.m.

If you’ve previously registered for a book club gathering you should already have received an email with the Zoom link.

If you’re new to the book club – welcome!

You can register for the meeting, and be emailed the Zoom link, by clicking/tapping on the following link, which will take you to the registration page found on the calendar section of the library’s website, and filling out the short online registration form:

Adult Book Club Online: “The Cold Millions” by Jess Walter

Have a great day!

Linda Reimer, SSCL

If you have questions, send me an to reimerl@stls.org

Hi everyone, I’m finding it interesting in this strange, pandemic year that we area living in; that being home bound so much, one can still be super busy. I’m just not getting to typing up in-depth notes to the last two book club meetings and have thought that perhaps in-depth notes are not needed – I do tend to throw in everything but the kitchen sink when I write – brevity is hard for me! But just perhaps, readers of this blog only really want a brief description of the past reading selections; so briefly, in October and November our reading selections were, respectively, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson and The Splendid And The Vile by Erik Larson.

Just Mercy was written by lawyer and civil rights activist Bryan Stevenson, and chronicles his career as a lawyer beginning when he was a young graduate, making his first visit to a prisoner in prison in Alabama and having an epiphany; that many prisoners were unfairly and illegally treated and had no legal representation. Stephenson realized that he could both connect with them in person, which they needed, and work to get them fair sentences or get them released if they were unjustly convicted of a crime.

Stephenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative to work on alleviating injustices in the legal system in the south; and he discusses many people in the book who are discriminated against by the legal system, particularly those living in poverty, including African Americans, women and the mentally ill.

Stephenson uses one prisoner as a prime illustration of the injustices of the legal system; his name is Walter McMillian. McMillian is a black man who was convicted of murdering a white woman by the local police. The police, who were having a hard time solving the murder, were desperate to turn press and government heat off themselves and used McMillan as a scapegoat. McMillan was tried and convicted of the murder, despite the fact that he couldn’t have committed the crime as he was as a barbeque surrounded by many eyewitnesses at the time the murder occurred. And despite what would seem to be an open and shut case of injustice – it took Stephenson years to get McMillian’s conviction overturned.

The book club attendees all concurred Just Mercy was an enlightening read focusing on injustices in the U.S. legal system – and that we as a nation have to do better.

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The November reading selection The Splendid And The Vile written by Erik Larson, chronicles the life of Winston Churchill, his family and select individuals involved the British government and war effort in that pivotal year of 1940. Ninety forty was Churchill’s first year as Prime Minster, the year Germany invaded France, France surrendered to the Germans, thousands of British and French soldiers made a hasty departure from Dunkirk, France to England, the German Luftwaffe repeatedly bombed England and Churchill did his best to encourage the isolationist U.S., represented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to join in the war effort.

The book is a terrific read because, although many, many books have been written about Churchill, this one gives us a fly on the wall perspective via firsthand accounts from Churchill himself, his wife Clementine, his youngest daughter Mary, other members of the British government and others individuals showing us what life was like for people living in Britain in 1940. Mary Churchill, the future Lady Mary Soames, describes what it was like as a young person, of the upper social classes, to dine out and go dancing and then walk home in the wee hours of the morning through blackout darkened streets. And Churchill’s private secretary John Coville, described a Luftwaffe bombing of London in great detail, with the follow long and eloquent quote for his private journal “The Night was cloudless and starry, with the moon rising over Westminster. Nothing could have been more beautiful and the searchlights interlaced at certain points on the horizon the star-like flashes in the sky where shells were bursting the light of distant fires, all added to the scene. It was magnificent and terrible: the spasmodic drone of enemy aircraft overhead; the thunder of gunfire, sometimes close sometimes in the distance; the illumination, like that of electric trains in peace-time as the guns fire; and the myriad stars, real and artificial, in the firmament. Never was there such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness. “

The book club members all agreed the Larson book was a very accessible one with readers getting to know the individuals whose firsthand accounts fill the pages of the book. The Splendid and the Vile, it was agreed, was a very interesting read, and highly recommended for history fans, albeit a bit long for a book club at 546 pages over 101 chapters.

The book club members agreed that in the future, we’ll keep our book club reading selections under 500 pages if at all possible!

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Our next book club gathering will be via Zoom on Friday, December 11, 2020.

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The SSCL Adult Book Club Reading List: December 2020 – May 2021

Book club meetings are on the second Friday of each month at 3:00 p.m. and patrons can register via the calendar page on the library’s website found here https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/

December 2020: A Time For Mercy by John Grisham (465 pages)

January 2021: The Cold Millions by Jess Walter (352 pages)

February 2021: One by One by Ruth Ware (383 pages)

March 2021: Homeland Elegies: A Novel by Ayad Akhtar (369 pages)

April 2021: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (352 pages)

May 2021: The Boy in the Field by Margot Livesey (268 pages)

Have a great day,

Linda

Hi everyone, it has been an especially busy couple of weeks as the library has re-opened at its home in Civic Center Plaza!

Thus the lateness of this book club meeting reminder; apologies for the lateness of the reminder!

Regarding the library having re-opened; you can now drop by the library without an appointment to browse or use the computers during current library hours of operation which are:

Monday & Friday: 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Tuesday & Thursday: 11:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Saturday: 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Curbside pickup is still available too – to make an appointment for curbside pick up call the library at 607-936-3713

Having said all of that, back to the subject of our book club meeting for November!

Our November read is The Splendid And The Vile by Erik Larson.

Our meeting is tomorrow, Friday, November 13, via Zoom, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

To register for the meeting, and be emailed the Zoom link, click on the following link which will take you to the registration page found on the library’s website:

Adult Book Club Online: “The Splendid and the Vile” by Erik Larson

Have a great day!

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, our October Book Club meeting is this Friday at 3:00 p.m. via Zoom.

We’ll be discussing the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson.

If you’ve previously registered for an Adult Book Club meeting, than you will receive an email with the Zoom link today.

If you’re new to our for-the-present-time-online Adult Book Club – welcome!

You can sign up for the Friday meeting via the calendar found on the library’s website, accessible via the following link:

https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/bookclub-just-mercy/

Hope everyone is doing well; and I look forward to seeing you via Zoom on Friday!

Linda Reimer

SSCL

Hi everyone, our September read was The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung. The book received praise from all book club attendees and a summary of the plot is found at the end of this post.

Our October read is the book Just Mercy written by Bryan Stevenson. A print copy of the book and the audiobook on CD may be requested from StarCat, the eBook and downloadable audiobook may be requested from the Digital Catalog; and there are three different study guides for the book available, on-demand, via Hoopla – and below the September book summary, you’ll find information on how to access Hoopla.

As usual, if anyone can’t get a copy of the book – let me know and I’ll request one for you and also send it to you if that is helpful.  And if you’d like to call the library to request a copy, please feel free to do that too – our number is 607-936-3713.

Our October book club meeting will be held via Zoom on Friday, October 9, 2020 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

If you’ve previously registered for a book club meeting, you’ll receive an email reminder with the Zoom information, the first week of October. If you’re new to the group – welcome!

You can sign up for the October book club meeting by clicking on the follow link

https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/bookclub-just-mercy/

And here is the summary of our September read:

The Tenth Muse Summary

The title The Tenth Muse refers to the story of the Muses of Ancient Greek mythology; the daughters of Zeus, who were immortal and could inspire mortals, but were not allowed to create art of their own. They could only inspire mortals to create art. When the tenth and youngest muse came of age, she refused to pick an art to use as an inspirational tool, so mortals could create great works of art. Instead, she was fiercely determined to sing her own songs and not be limited to the songs humankind created. To be able to sing songs of her own creation, the youngest muse had to give up all her immortal gifts including her mortality. And so, she gave up her immortality to gain the ability to sing her own songs, blaze her own path and simply be herself. It is said that she is reborn in each generation; and that analogy allows the reader to compare the Tenth Muse to Katherine, the protagonist of the novel, whom the reader first meets as a young girl. Katherine was so brilliant at mathematics as a child, that she was taken to task by her second-grade teacher, Mrs. Linn, for quickly doing the math problems in hear head and answering the questions verbally. Mrs. Linn demanded that Katherine stick to the format of doing the math problems on paper, as instructed, and not offer verbal answers even though they were the correct answers. Katherine’s parents instructed her to treat Mrs. Linn with respect and do as she was instructed; so she quietly refused to be limited to the role of an obedient child student; doing the math work quietly in school as instructed; and in her spare time, reading every book she could find, in the school and public library, on mathematics to further sharper her math skills.

The author, Catherine Chung, is very adept at weaving the threads of the three main stories of the novel together.

The first story is the story of young Catherine, a girl who loved math and science, in an era when women were not supposed to study math and science; nor for that matter to work outside the home. The social norms of the day were the guidelines, that had most women staying in their traditional roles as wives and mothers and not working outside the home. So the first story weaves the threads of what it was like if you were female and bucked those norms in the 1940s and 1950s. Katherine has to work twice as hard as her male counterparts at college, and even gives up the love of her life, Peter Hall, after he submits her work for publication without her permission and receives a co-credit for the work he did not deserve;  but she is eventually very successful as a mathematician, in her own right, despite the challenges she had to overcome and the discrimination she encountered along the way.

The second story is of Katherine’s quest for mathematical truth found in proofs. Admittedly, I am not a math fan; and I say that as the author makes the mathematical part of the text; illustrated by Katherine’s exceptional determination to prove mathematical problems, most especially the famous Riemann Hypothesis, perfectly accessible. Katherine loves math. She loves the way solving mathematical problems, give you an undisputable truth in the proof that proves a hypothesis is true. And although, I’m not a math person myself; the book is so well written and Katherine so well described as being a brilliant and enthusiastic mathematical detective, who is determined to solve mathematical mysteries, that I can just as enthusiastically root for her to succeed.

And the third story woven through the plot, features threads of another kind of mystery and subsequent revelations. At the beginning of the book, Katherine is introduced as the daughter of a Chinese mother and a white American father. The couple met while the father was serving in Europe during World War II. When Katherine is in high school, her mother abandons the family without a word. And after her mother leaves, the first of several jaw dropping revelations occur. Her father tells her that he and her mother were never married. And later her father’s new wife Linda tells her that the women she thought was her mother, wasn’t in fact, her mother at all. Fast forward to Katherine’s college years and after her father has a heart attack, he reveals that not only was her mother not her biological mother, but he is not her biological father. He tells Katherine the truth of her origins as far as he knows it. He tells her she was taken to an orphanage in France at the end of World War II; and that while he was recovering from injuries suffered in combat, he walked to orphanage every day to visit the children. One of the nuns at the orphanage persuaded him to take Katherine home with him; because she thought the baby might be harmed, if anyone found out she was the daughter of a Jewish woman and a Chinese father. Her father told Katherine that the story goes that her biological parents were taken away by the Germans. And that her parents left her sleeping in a box, wrapped in a blanket, with a small black notebook that featured all sorts of mathematical hypothesis and problems. A good Samaritan found Katherine after her parents were taken away and took her to the orphanage. Thus, the third thread of the story has Katherine on a quest to discover who she really is; by discovering who her parents were. When Katherine is working on a graduate project in Germany in the late fifties, she does some investigating and finds some information about her parents from people that knew them; she also finds an unscrupulous second-cousin, who she later determines became notable in his field by publishing the mathematical works her mother, his cousin, did as an unofficial college student in Germany in the 1940s.

Suffice it to say, quite a bit goes on in the book The Tenth Muse; it is one of those titles that warrants a second reading so the reader can catch more of the fine details surrounding the three main plot threads.

The book is highly recommended by the members of the SSCL Adult Book Club!

Have a great day everyone!

Linda

The August read was The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes

Our September read is The Tenth Muse by Catherine Chung.

Our September Adult Book Club meeting, via Zoom is today, Friday, September 11, 2020 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

If I already have your email address you should have received the Zoom invite for the meeting – if you haven’t received it let me know by sending an email to me at reimerl@stls.org

If you’re new to our book club – welcome! You can easily register for todays’ meeting by clicking on the following link which will take you to the library’s calendar page for the Sept book club:

https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/bookclub-10th-muse/

Book club meetings are on the second Friday of each month from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Our October meeting will be held on Friday, October 9, 2020 and will feature a discussion of the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson.

And again, if you’re new to the club and wish to register for the October online gathering – here is the link:

https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/bookclub-just-mercy/

And if you’ve previously registered for a book club meeting, and thus I have your email address, you’ll get an email reminder about the October meeting, along with the Zoom link, the first week in October.

–

I was a bit swamped during August and didn’t get to a summary of the August read – The Giver of Stars, so here, in as brief of a nutshell as I can create, is a description of the plot and main characters.

The book is set in Baileyville, Kentucky in the 1930s and chronicles the experiences of a group of women who participated in the Pack Horse initiative, a federal public works program that paid women to take books, and thus promote reading, to people living in rural Kentucky. The women were collectively referred to as the Pack Horse Librarians and they encountered a number of trials during their pack horse tenure, including fighting to rise above the commonly held belief of the day that women should keep their opinions to themselves, have children and be chained to the hearth and home. The opening chapters of the book introduce the cast of characters including the two lead librarians Margery O’Hare and Alice (Wright) Van Cleve.

Margery is an independent and fiercely self-reliant woman. She is a native of the Baileyville area, grew up with an abusive father named Frank, and has a beau named Sven that she loves but doesn’t wish to marry because, as a result of her upbringing, she has a hard time relying on anyone other than herself. Margery’s family had a long-standing feud with the local McCullough family and the book opens with Margery, on her librarian delivery rounds, being stopped in her tracks by a drunken Clem McCullough who is blocking the path ahead and refusing to let Margery pass. Margery is able to get by Clem and continue on her rounds. However, later in the book Clem is found dead and Margery is accused of murdering him by hitting him in the head with a book. Margery is arrested and taken to trial, despite the evidence against her being circumstantial, only to be acquitted when Clem’s daughter, Verna, who knew first hand how horrible a person he was, lies under oath saying that Clem was a big reader and intended to return the book he had checked out and the potential murder weapon – ironically, the book is the early feminist classic Little Women.

Alice Van Cleve is the second lead librarian. Alice is introduced as a young English woman who is too independent and spontaneous for her family’s linking. Alice Wright meets the charming and rich Bennet Van Cleve and his father Geoffrey, while they are vacationing in England. The father son duo departs England to travel to continental Europe; and when they pass through England on their way back to America, Bennett proposes to Alice and she accepts. Alice expects that life in America will be full of glamourous parties and theater outings and is vastly disappointed when she arrived in Baileyville to discover how rural the area is; and how dull her life is as the new wife of the heir to the richest man in town. Alice has servants to cook and clean and is expected to do nothing beyond being a quiet homebound wife and have children – which leaves her bored to proverbial tears. Alice attends a town meeting to discuss the Pack Horse Librarian project and much to her new family’s surprise she volunteers to be a pack horse librarian. Alice’s challenges include a husband who sometimes treats her coldly and at other times treats her as a friend – but never as a wife; and a bullying father-in-law – Geoffrey Van Cleve, owner of the local mining company and the richest man in town with all the power and influence that position entails. Geoffrey Van Cleve tries to stop Alice from working as a packhorse librarian and even works hard to close down the project by unscrupulously using his influence to smear the librarians and later, to get the sheriff to arrest and Margery for the murder of Clem McCullough.

Early in the story the reader is introduced to Fred Guisler who offers the librarians his barn to set up their library and who is able to see women as more than wives and mothers – he is able to see them as individual people with thoughts, desires and abilities. Alice and Fred fall in love during the book but are convinced they can never be together since Alice is married. And then a great plot point appears – that reading can change a persons entire life. This plot point unfolds when Alice is talking to Fred about the notorious little blue book in the library; a book that offers information on how to be a good mountain wife, including how to engage in sex. Alice is tearfully telling Fred that she and Bennett have never done anything like that – when Fred realizes that Alice’s marriage to Bennet has never been consummated, and thus, can be annulled.  Fred shares that information with Alice; and with that information Alice is able to quietly annual her marriage to Bennett and to get his father Geoffrey to stop harassing the librarians. Geoffrey stops his interference to keep Alice from revealing to the world that her marriage to Bennett was unconsummated thus making Bennett seen as less of a man in the eyes of the society of the time; a reflection that would cast a shadow on Geoffrey as well.

The other librarians include:

Mrs. Brady, an organizer of the initial meeting to recruit pack horse librarians. Mrs. Brady initially supports the librarians, volunteers her daughter Izzy to be a librarian, later believes Geoffrey Van Cleve’s falsehoods about the librarians and ceases to support them; only to later determine Van Cleve’s accusations against the librarians are false and to again patronize the librarians.

Izzy Brady is Mrs. Brady’s daughter. Izzy has had polio and wears a leg brace something she is initially embarrassed about; she comes out of her shell during the book, is able to ride a horse to deliver books and is found to have an incredible singing voice. Izzy goes on to become a professional singer.

Sophia Kenworth is a librarian who has worked in a big city library and who is exceptionally organized. Margery knows Sophia and her brother William and is grateful to their family as they helped her learn to read as a girl, after her father refused to send her to school. Sophia is recruited to work at the library by Margery, despite the fact that doing so is dangerous for a black woman in the 1930s. After Verna McCullough testifies that her father had checked out the book Little Women; Sophia “borrows” the library check out ledger and notes that Clem McCullough had indeed checked out the book but never returned it.

Beth Pinker is an independent young woman and salty talker, who grew up with a house full of brothers and who, it is revealed at the end of the book, secretly brewed and sold moonshine to save money so she could fulfill her dream of traveling to India.

Also of note, although not a librarians is the character Kathleen Bligh. Kathleen is a strong woman who lives in the mountain country with her family including a sick husband, Garrett, who dies leaving her both heartbroken and on her own to raise their family. After Margery is arrested for Clem’s murder, Kathleen goes out to his cabin to talk to his daughters and, it is implied, helps to convince Verna McCullough to testify against her father, lying under oath, in order to get Margery acquitted.

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The general consensus of the book club members was that The Giver of Stars was a light but enjoyable read. The group also discussed the accusations another author, Kim Michele Richardson, made against Moyes for the similarity in the plots of their latest books, both of which focus on the pack horse librarians.

One attendee had read Richardson’s book, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek: A Novel and mentioned that she thought that was an even better book on the pack horse librarians.

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL