Hi everyone, before I get started with the notes for the May meeting, our June meeting info is:

Book Club Title: We Live in Water: Stories by Jess Walter

Book Club Review: From Booklist *Starred Review* This is the first collection of short stories, all of which have appeared previously in Harper’s and McSweeney’s, among other literary publications, from the much-acclaimed, best-selling Walter (Beautiful Ruins, 2012). With their visceral depictions of the homeless, the bereft, and the marginalized, often presented with a signature blend of wicked humor and heartbreaking tenderness, Walter’s intense stories speak directly to the contemporary American experience. In “Anything Helps,” a homeless father has lost his wife to a heroin overdose and his son to social services. Determined to buy the latest Harry Potter novel for his son, he brings a practiced eye to his begging, opting to go “to cardboard.” In the title story, Walter expertly uses the tropes of crime fiction to tell the grim story of an unrepentant gambler who steals from the wrong person, and his young son, who is forever haunted by his father’s disappearance. In “Don’t Eat Cat,” Walter turns to zombie fiction to unleash a hilarious satire of political correctness (“I’m not one of those reactionaries, but hiring zombies for food service? I just think that’s wrong”). Wildly entertaining and thought-provoking fiction from a prodigiously talented writer. –Joanne Wilkinson for Booklist

Date & Time of Meeting: Friday, June 10, 2020 at 2:00 p.m.

How to Sign Up for the June Book Club: You can sign up for the June book club gathering by emailing me at REIMERL@STLS.ORG or, by filling out the short online registration form via the following link https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/bookclub_we_live_in_water/

–

May Book Club Notes:

Our May 2020 Book Club read was Teá Obreht’s second novel Inland.

To sum it up, the book follows two characters, Nora Lark a thirty-seven-year-old housewife living in Amargo in the Arizona territory in 1893, and Lurie Mattie a wanted man and cameleer.

Nora’s story is told in the third person and Lurie’s in the first person. And the reader eventually realizes that Lurie is telling his story to his camel Burke, seemingly from the afterlife. Nora’s story unfolds during one day in 1893, whereas Lurie’s journey is followed from the 1850s to 1893.

The book has two big threads, one being time and the other being want. In this case “want” meaning a need or desire for something.

The cliff notes version of Nora’s story is that she is at the family home, outside the town of Amargo, Arizona Territory. There is a drought, the Lark family is almost out of water and Nora mentions numerous times during her story her desire (want) for water. Nora’s husband, newspaper editor Emmett Lark, has gone to find the water merchant and was due back with water days ago. And Nora’s two eldest sons, Rob & Dolan, who are supposed to be getting the weekly newspaper printed have disappeared from the newspaper shop. Thus Nora, is waiting for Emmett’s return, looking after their youngest son Toby, Emmett’s mother and Emmett’s clairvoyant cousin Josie, while wondering where her missing sons and husband might be.

Meanwhile, Toby & Josie insist that they have seen a monster on the property and Nora does not believe them. Also of note, Nora talks to her long-dead first-born child, a daughter named Evelyn who it seems for most of the book is a figment of her imagination.

The cliff notes version of Lurie’s story is that he is introduced to the reader as a young immigrant child in the 1850s. He loses his father to illness shortly after they arrive in America, realizes he is clairvoyant and can see ghosts, stays with the landlady of the boarding house he and his father were living in after his father dies, is later sold to a man who turns out to be a grave robber, escapes from detention on a farm with brothers Hobb & Donovan Mattie and goes on a robbing spree with the Mattie Brothers.

While working with the Mattie Brothers Lurie inadvertently kills a young man in a fight and is followed down subsequent years by a sheriff determined to right that wrong. Toward the end of his tenure with the Mattie Brothers, the younger Mattie brother Hobb dies. And Lurie ingests Hobb’s want/desire to rob and is forever after stealing small objects to appease Hobb. A short time after Hobb dies, Lurie winds up in ill health and Donovan leaves him – leaving him only his (Donovan’s) canteen full of water.

Lurie recovers his health, discovers camels and his love for them and joins the U.S. Camel Corps, led by a man named Jolly. Then one day, the Camel Corps arrives in a town where they have just hung a notorious criminal. Lurie goes to the town square where the hanging occurred and discovers Donovan’s ghost whose want is thirst; so Lurie takes on Donovan’s desire for water and keeps adding water from rivers he passes to the canteen Donovan gave him before they parted. Lurie is eventually forced to leave his companions in the camel corps when the sheriff who is hunting him gets too close. When he leaves, he takes his best friend and confident, a camel names Burke, with him.

At this point, I should mention that Lurie’s need (want) evolves during the story and it is that someone should remember the things he has seen in his life – that they should not be forgotten.

Years go by, and Lurie is surprised to encounter his old camel corps leader and friend Jolly again. At first it seems Lurie might stay in the same town Jolly lives in with his wife, but eventually Lurie & Jolly hear of wild camels nearby and the call of the trail and adventure reaches them. Lurie & Jolly find the wild camels and then begin a camel shipping business, carting water and other items to where they can be sold. Subsequently they join a geological survey team that offers them money to go with them, and cart water a long way on camel back, to their survey site. Once at the site, Jolly and Lurie begin to suspect that they will never get paid. So Jolly steals one of the large black rocks (probably a piece of Obsidian) found at the site thinking they can sell it. They try to sell the black rock and the word gets out they stole the rock, and they are tracked down by a group of people who can’t believe the rock they have is what was stolen, as it doesn’t appear to be worth much. Lurie & Jolly get away from the men and separate, Jolly goes home, and Lurie and Burke go on. Shortly after they part, Lurie is accosted by another group of men looking for that same not-so-precious stone and they don’t believe him when he says he doesn’t have it. He is shot in the leg while trying to get away from them and is then tied tightly to Burke’s saddle.

Then after the many years we’ve followed Lurie & Burke and we’ve gotten to the evening of Nora’s story, their stories collide. The “monster” that Nora’s son Toby and cousin Josie insist they have seen is actually an aged and partially blind Burke the camel who has obviously been fending for himself for many years, Burke still carries the remains of the long-dead Lurie tied to his back. It is implied that the ghost of Evelyn drew Burke and the ghost of Lurie to the Lark homestead. And Nora, for safety reasons, and taking pity on the aged camel, shoots Burke – and the desire that Burke and Lurie have felt, wanting to be buried together takes place; but not before Nora has discovered Donovan’s old canteen, drunk of the water within and received mental images of the places Lurie had been in his life. She also sees the future, a future where she has sold the family newspaper to the rich, demanding Merrion Crace to get her two elder sons out of trouble, a future with a grown and prospering Toby and one in which her son Rob married her cousin Josie.

All in all, Inland was quite a read!

–

Other Book Recommendations by Club Attendees:

This month the following books were recommended by book club members

The Book of Dust by Philip Pullman: Philip Pullman returns to the parallel world of His Dark Materials–Malcolm Polstead and his daemon, Asta, are used to overhearing news and the occasional scandal at the inn run by his family. But during a winter of unceasing rain, Malcolm finds a mysterious object—and finds himself in grave danger.

Inside the object is a cryptic message about something called Dust; and it’s not long before Malcolm is approached by the spy for whom this message was actually intended. When she asks Malcolm to keep his eyes open, he begins to notice suspicious characters everywhere: the explorer Lord Asriel, clearly on the run; enforcement agents from the Magisterium; a gyptian named Coram with warnings just for Malcolm; and a beautiful woman with an evil monkey for a daemon. All are asking about the same thing: a girl—just a baby—named Lyra.

Lyra is at the center of a storm, and Malcolm will brave any peril, and make shocking sacrifices, to bring her safely through it.

–

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout: Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susan—the Burgess sibling who stayed behind—urgently calls them home. Her lonely teenage son, Zach, has gotten himself into a world of trouble, and Susan desperately needs their help. And so the Burgess brothers return to the landscape of their childhood, where the long-buried tensions that have shaped and shadowed their relationship begin to surface in unexpected ways that will change them forever.

–

Cloud Atlas: A Novel by David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . . Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.

But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

–

Holes by Louis Sachar: Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys’ detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes.

It doesn’t take long for Stanley to realize there’s more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake. The boys are digging holes because the warden is looking for something. But what could be buried under a dried-up lake? Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment—and redemption.

–

House of Sprits by Isabel Allende: The House of the Spirits, the unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world’s most gifted storytellers, brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.

One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, The House of the Spirits is an enthralling epic that spans decades and lives, weaving the personal and the political into a universal story of love, magic, and fate.

–

Mosaic: A Novel by Joseph Catalano: In the early 1980s, two mosaics purchased by Art Termini from the Vatican Mosaic Studio in Rome were stolen from his home on Titan Court in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. The FBI, along with local and state police, tried in vain to find the thief. Mosaic is a novel based on a true story. Art Termini grew up in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward, a Sicilian enclave in the heart of the city.

–

The Tiger’s Wife by Teá Obreht: Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.

–

Note: Plot descriptions are from the publishers

–
SSCL Book Blogs:

The Adult Book Club hosted by our very own book club host, Linda Reimer, features info on upcoming book club meetings, monthly reading titles and the monthly meeting notes – it is found at https://ssclbook.club/

–

SSCL Book & Tech Talk is hosted by SSL librarian Linda Reimer and features a few tech tips but mostly focuses on Readers and Viewers advisory for those looking for something new to read or watch. The Book & Tech Talk blog can be found at https://sscltech.com/

–

STORY MUSING is a blog hosted by our Adult Services Director, Michelle Wells. Michelle for short reviews on anything from books to movies to music. Check it out weekly for new ideas for what to read, watch or listen to. Story Musings is found at http://storymusing.blogspot.com/

–

Be well & have a good day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi, thanks for signing up for the May Adult Book Club program!

On Friday, May 8 at 2:00 p.m. we will be meeting, via Zoom, to discuss the novel Inland by Téa Obreht.

Looking forward to June, our next book club selection is We Live in Water Stories by Jess Walter. The June Adult Book Club meeting, also being held via Zoom, is scheduled for Friday, June 12, start time: 2:00 p.m.

If you register for the May book club, I will send you the Zoom link for the June book club program the first week of June.

And patrons will, shortly, be able to register for the June book club meeting too through the library’s website. You can register for the May 8 book club via the following link (and the June book club when the calendar is updated)  https://www.ssclibrary.org/activities/

Additionally, information on upcoming book club meetings, and a summary of items discussed during each monthly book club meeting can be found on the SSCL Adult Book Club blog https://ssclbook.club/

And if you have questions please free to contact me! My email address is REIMERL@STLS.ORG

Have a good day,

Linda

Hi everyone, here are the notes from our April Book Club meeting.

The SSC Library Adult Book Club met, via Zoom, on Friday, April 10, 2020.

We discussed our April read, Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson. The author packs quite a bit into the 192-page book. The book has several major themes, it is a coming of age story, a learning how to deal, or not deal, with loss story, the story of young black girls growing up in a changing Brooklyn in the 1970s, a story of childhood friendship; and how those formative friendships sometimes don’t survive the transition from childhood into adulthood; and it a story that emphasizes how important memories our in our lives.

The story chronicles the experiences of August, who as the book opens, is introduced as an anthropologist in her thirties who has come back to Brooklyn to bury her father and assist in clearing out his apartment. She has a meal with her brother at a dinner after their father’s funeral, and then heads to the subway to go back to her father’s apartment and runs into a former childhood friend, Sylvia. And it is this brief encounter with a former friend that she does not want to see, that triggers her remembrances of her childhood. August’s remembrances of two major things weave the threads of the book together, the first is her inability as a child to remember her mother’s death, and the second, consists of the memories she has of her close childhood friendship with three girls – Sylvia, Gigi and  Angela.

Woodson’s story isn’t completely linear. At the beginning of the book we meet the adult August and then the story flashes back to her youth with the ghost of her mother’s death hanging over the story.

August remembers moving to Brooklyn with her father and brother when she was eleven years old. And she remembers that she was born in SweetGrove, Tennessee and as a young child lived with her parents and younger brother in a run-down house on land her mother’s family owned. August’s maternal uncle, Clyde, was a frequent visitor and it was clear that Clyde and his sister, August’s mother, were close. Clyde was drafted, went to Vietnam, and was killed in combat. And the loss of her brother was something August’s mother could not accept. For most of the book the reader gets the impression that August’s mother is dead, but it is only in the last chapter of the book that we get conformation of that fact; when August remembers a trip she took at age 16 with her father and brother to the old family home in SweetGrove, during which she seemed to finally remember that her mother committed suicide by walking into the water of the small lake on the property.

And of her friendship with her close childhood friends, August remembers that soon after arriving in Brooklyn, she met and formed a friendship with three other girls, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi. The girls took comfort from their friendship, hanging out with each other during the day at school and after school too, and supported each other to the hilt. They took shelter from life’s difficulties together, and then began to drift apart when two of the girls were sent private schools, Gigi to a performing arts school, and Sylvia to a Catholic school. The final spike that broke apart their friendship occurred when August was 15 and Sylvia took up with the boyfriend August had recently broken up with, a betrayal August could not, and cannot forgive, even as an adult when she encounters Sylvia in a subway station.

So, it is loss, and the remembrances of events that are the foundation pillars of the book. It seems that the remembrances of the childhood losses of her mother and her friends and the inability of August to overcome them, have greatly impacted the course of her life.

And indeed, those losses began to impact the course of her life when she was a youth.

The loss of her mother and the loss of her close friends, soaked August to the bone, from an emotional point of view, and she has not been able to move on from those losses and establish new, close relationships with others.

We see this in the glimpses we have of August as an adult, an anthropologist who takes refuge in her work, who studies cultural death rituals, who lives an academic based nomadic lifestyle and has had many lovers but never yet married or had children of her own. In the way she couldn’t remember her mother’s death until she was 16 and visited the old family property in SweetGrove, and in the way she couldn’t manage to stop and talk to her old friend Sylvia in the subway station after her father’s funeral. These points indicate that August is trying to avoid the deeper connections that close friends and family offer in this life to avoid the pain of loss. One might hope that August will grow and mature, and by her forties, perhaps she will branch out and find the deep joy that close relationships with family and friends brings. Perhaps one day Woodson will write a sequel and we will find out!

–

The next Adult Book Club will be held, via Zoom, on Friday, May 8, start time: 2:00 p.m. Send me an email and I’ll send you the Zoom link on Monday, May 4, 2020.

My email address is: REIMERL@STLS.ORG

Hope to “see” everyone on May 8 and stay well everyone!

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, the April book discussion will be held, via Zoom, this Friday, April 10.

Start time is 2:00 p.m.

We’ll be discussing the book Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson.

If you’d like to attend the meeting, please send me an email and I’ll send  you the Zoom meeting information.

Be well!

Linda Reimer, SSCL

email: REIMERL@STLS.ORG

Hi everyone, the library has purchased a subscription to the video service Zoom.

And that means that we can actually have an interactive conversation about the next book club read, Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson!

In order to do so though, I have to send a Zoom link to the email address of all book club members.

And as no one wants to share their personal email with all of the Internet, unless it is a work email like mine! I need everyone to send me their email address And then next Thursday afternoon, I’ll send a link out to everyone who has sent me their email address and on Friday you’ll just click on the link in the email to be connected to the book club meeting.

We’ll connect at 2 p.m. on Friday, April 10, instead of our usual 3 p.m.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me!

I do check my email numerous times during the day.

And my email address is:

REIMERL@STLS.ORG

Be well everyone,
Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, our next book club title is

Another Brooklyn, written by Jacqueline Woodson.

Here’s a description of the book:

Longlisted for the National Book Award

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling and National Book Award—winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming delivers her first adult novel in twenty years.

Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them.

But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.

Like Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time when childhood gives way to adulthood—the promise and peril of growing up—and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that united four young lives.

I’m hoping we can connect through the blog and share our impressions of the book!

And on a logistics note, the library will be closed until at least April 13.

So, what I’m going to do is finish reading Another Brooklyn and then have a book talk ready for Friday, April 10. I’m not sure at the present time if I’ll be doing the talk through Skype and sending the live video feed to the blog or if I’ll need to use YouTube and prerecord the talk – but I will figure that our shortly and let you all know!

If anyone wishes to discuss the last book club book, Talking With Strangers, or any other or book, audiobook or video they are currently enjoying – please feel free to share by commenting on this blog!

And if anyone would like to listen to the Another Brooklyn audiobook, I see it is currently (2/24/2020 at 12:02 p.m.) available in the Digital Catalog (Libby/OverDrive apps). Check it out!

Happy reading everyone!

Linda

P.S. If you haven’t used the Digital Catalog and need assistance in downloading the app and/or checking out materials, please let me know – just send an email to me at REIMERL@STLS.ORG

Hi, everyone, for a relatively short book of 346 pages, author Malcolm Gladwell sure covers a lot of ground in Talking With Strangers.

And before I kick off our initial, online discussion of the early part of the book, I have to say – if you haven’t had a chance to hear the audiobook version of this book – check it out! I “read” the book by combining reading the Kindle version and listening to the Audible audiobook version. And the audiobook version is very compelling as it  features  interviews with people mentioned in the book, like the intelligence officer the Mountain Climber and real life recordings of incidents described in the book, most notably the real life recording Sandra Blair made when she was pulled over for having a broken tail light.

I think it is fair to say the basic umbrella gist of the book, the one that covers all other aspects of it , is that people have a default truth belief setting, which Gladwell calls “Truth Default Theory.” So people in general, don’t know what the strangers they encounter, are thinking because humans are wired to believe people are telling the truth. Further, that people are frequently wrong when they think they know what other people, people that they don’t know (strangers) are thinking even if they are experts in a field.

And I’m running out of day here, it is almost 5:30, so I’ll have to cut this first discussion of the book a bit short.

I will say, that for me the most compelling story in the book, and the most horrifying, especially if you listen to the audiobook version, is the story of Sandra Bland as discussed in the introduction and final chapter of the book. No one should be pulled over by the police for a made up reason and then harassed and arrested because they protest of their unethical treatment; and then feel so despondent that they take their own life in jail days later.

I think Gladwell wanted to relay several major things in Talking With Strangers including

1. That people don’t know what strangers are thinking

2. That people default to truth belief mode

3. That some people think outside the truth-mode box and either see the truth more clearly than the majority of our society or completely misread the strangers.

And 4. That we need to do a better job at communicating with people and understanding strangers if we in the western world are to evolve our society into one that is truly more equal and ethical.

Those are in a nut shell, my initial thoughts about the book.

What did you think of the book?

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, the library has cancelled all programs through at least April 1 due to the Coronavirus situation.

And that means that most unfortunately, the Book Club meeting scheduled for today, to discuss Malcolm Gladwell’s insightful book, Talking To Strangers, has been cancelled.

The Friday Free Film scheduled for today is also cancelled.

As of right now the library will remain open our regular hours to serve patrons.

Updates regarding library programs and services may be found on the library’s Facebook page and website – https://www.ssclibrary.org/

And of course, you can always call the library at 607-936-3713.

Also, feel free to contact me with any questions about upcoming book club meetings. My phone number is the same as the main library number with the extension 212, and you can also reach me by email at: REIMERL@STLS.ORG

I’m hoping we can discuss Talking To Strangers remotely by posting comments to this blog. I will publish a post, with my initial impressions of the book, later today.

Stay safe everyone,

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, here is the book club reading list for April – November of this year. The titles for April & May were previously selected, and the titles for the months June – November were just selected via vote.

Also, I wasn’t sure if we want to meet in December as the holiday season is so  busy for so many people? So we’ll have to discuss that are our meeting tomorrow afternoon and then decide on a title for December if applicable.

And just as an FYI for anyone who is new to the book club, our February read is Talking To Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell.

Here is the reading list without plot descriptions:

April 10 | Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

May 8 | Inland: A Novel by Tea Obreht

June 12 | We Live in Water Stories by Jess Walter

July 10 | Cracking India: A Novel by Bapsi Sidhwa

August 14 | Lost Children Archive: A Novel by Valeria Luiselli

September 11 | Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

October 9 | The Orphan Master’s Son: A Novel by Adam Johnson

November 13 | Strangers And Cousins: A Novel: Leah Hager Cohen

–

And here is the same list again, this time with plot descriptions for each book:

April 10 | Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them.

But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.

Like Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time when childhood gives way to adulthood—the promise and peril of growing up—and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that united four young lives.

–

May 8 | Inland: A Novel by Tea Obreht

In the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, two extraordinary lives unfold. Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life—her husband, who has gone in search of water for the parched household, and her elder sons, who have vanished after an explosive argument. Nora is biding her time with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home.

Meanwhile, Lurie is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts. He sees lost souls who want something from him, and he finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected relationship that inspires a momentous expedition across the West. The way in which Lurie’s death-defying trek at last intersects with Nora’s plight is the surprise and suspense of this brilliant novel.
Mythical, lyrical, and sweeping in scope, Inland is grounded in true but little-known history. It showcases all of Téa Obreht’s talents as a writer, as she subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West, making them entirely—and unforgettably—her own.

–

June 12 | We Live in Water Stories by Jess Walter

From the New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins, the first collection of short fiction from Jess Walter—a suite of diverse and searching stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit, keen eye, and generosity of spirit that has made him a bookseller and reader favorite

These twelve stories—published over the last five years in Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Playboy, and other publications—veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.

We Live in Water is a darkly comic, heartfelt collection of stories from a “ridiculously talented writer” (New York Times), “one of the freshest voices in American literature” (Dallas Morning News).

–

July 10 | Cracking India: A Novel by Bapsi Sidhwa

The 1947 Partition of India is the backdrop for this powerful novel, narrated by a precocious child who describes the brutal transition with chilling veracity. Young Lenny Sethi is kept out of school because she suffers from polio. She spends her days with Ayah, her beautiful nanny, visiting with the large group of admirers that Ayah draws. It is in the company of these working class characters that Lenny learns about religious differences, religious intolerance, and the blossoming genocidal strife on the eve of Partition. As she matures, Lenny begins to identify the differences between the Hindus, Moslems, and Sikhs engaging in political arguments all around her. Lenny enjoys a happy, privileged life in Lahore, but the kidnapping of her beloved Ayah signals a dramatic change. Soon Lenny’s world erupts in religious, ethnic, and racial violence. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, the domestic drama serves as a microcosm for a profound political upheaval.

–

August 14 | Lost Children Archive: A Novel by Valeria Luiselli

From the two-time NBCC Finalist, an emotionally resonant, fiercely imaginative new novel about a family whose road trip across America collides with an immigration crisis at the southwestern border—an indelible journey told with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity.
A mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home.
Why Apaches? asks the ten-year-old son. Because they were the last of something, answers his father.
In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an “immigration crisis”: thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way.

As the family drives—through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas—we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure—both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.

Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, Lost Children Archive is an astonishing feat of literary virtuosity. It is a richly engaging story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. With urgency and empathy, it takes us deep into the lives of one remarkable family as it probes the nature of justice and equality today.

–

September 11 | Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

In the stunning first novel in Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: “He has a nose,” people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

As Tracker follows the boy’s scent—from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers—he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?

Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that’s come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that’s also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.

–

October 9 | The Orphan Master’s Son: A Novel by Adam Johnson

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times betselling novel of North Korea: an epic journey into the heart of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship.

“Imagine Charles Dickens paying a visit to Pyongyang, and you see the canvas on which [Adam] Johnson is painting here.”—The Washington Post

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs a work camp for orphans. Superiors in the North Korean state soon recognize the boy’s loyalty and keen instincts. Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do rises in the ranks. He becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love.

–

November 13 | Strangers And Cousins: A Novel: Leah Hager Cohen
A novel about what happens when an already sprawling family hosts an even larger and more chaotic wedding: an entertaining story about family, culture, memory, and community.

In the seemingly idyllic town of Rundle Junction, Bennie and Walter are preparing to host the wedding of their eldest daughter Clem. A marriage ceremony at their beloved, rambling home should be the happiest of occasions, but Walter and Bennie have a secret. A new community has moved to Rundle Junction, threatening the social order and forcing Bennie and Walter to confront uncomfortable truths about the lengths they would go to maintain harmony.

Meanwhile, Aunt Glad, the oldest member of the family, arrives for the wedding plagued by long-buried memories of a scarring event that occurred when she was a girl in Rundle Junction. As she uncovers details about her role in this event, the family begins to realize that Clem’s wedding may not be exactly what it seemed. Clever, passionate, artistic Clem has her own agenda. What she doesn’t know is that by the end, everyone will have roles to play in this richly imagined ceremony of familial connection-a brood of quirky relatives, effervescent college friends, ghosts emerging from the past, a determined little mouse, and even the very group of new neighbors whose presence has shaken Rundle Junction to its core.

With Strangers and Cousins, Leah Hager Cohen delivers a story of pageantry and performance, hopefulness and growth, and introduces a winsome, unforgettable cast of characters whose lives are forever changed by events that unfold and reverberate across generations.

–

Have a great day and I look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow!

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, just a reminder, next Southeast Steuben County Library Adult Book Club meeting will be here at the library next Friday, March 13, 2020 from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m.

This month we’ll be discussing the book Talking To Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell.

Hope to see everyone next Friday!

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Email: reimerl@stls.org

–

Book Club Notes from the February Adult Book Club meeting

Recommended Books:

These titles were recommended by book club members during our February meeting:

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

–

Harriet (2019) movie: It was mentioned that the 2019 film Harriet which chronicles Harriet Tubman’s journey from slavery, to freedom to Underground Railway conductor to national hero would be shown at the library as part of the Free Friday Film series. Library book club host, Linda Reimer, couldn’t remember what month the movies is being shown – it will be the July Free Friday Film and will be shown in the library’s community room on Friday, July 10, 2020, start time 7:00 p.m.

–

Harriet Tubman Museum in Auburn, New York: It was mentioned, during our discussion, that there is an excellent Harriet Tubman Museum in Auburn, New York. The museum itself is actually a homestead that Harriet Tubman lived on and the tour shows visitors around the property.

The website for the museum lists hours of operation and contact information is found at the following web address:

https://www.harriettubmanhome.com/

Also found on the website is a link to a 26 minute video about the museum put together by the Syracuse PBS station WCNY:

https://video.wcny.org/video/insight-insight-61915/

–

Women’s Rights In The U.S. Advancing Over Time: Also discussed during the meeting was the topic of how women’s rights have advanced in the U.S. from the time the February read, The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, was set in approximately the 1850s through today. A Facebook page was mentioned titled 40 Basic Rights Women Didn’t Have Until The 1970s. The Facebook page, which requires a logged in Facebook account to access, is found at the following web address:

https://www.facebook.com/historycollectionco/posts/1120079411667397

The Facebook page is hosted by the History Collection group and they also host a website found at the following address:

https://historycollection.co/40-basic-rights-women-did-not-have-until-the-1970s/24/

–