Hi everyone, first up, the info on our February meeting. The SSCL Book Club for Adults will be meeting on Friday, February 9, 2024, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. 

We’ll be discussing the novel Crook Manifesto, the second book in a historical fiction trilogy by Colson Whitehead. The book is set in New York City in the 1970s and follows Ray Carney, the owner of a successful furniture store who once sold stolen goods, but  now focuses on his legitimate business and his family. 

The consensus is that you do not need to read the first novel, Harlem Shuffle, to follow Carney’s story in the second book, although it does feature more of the character’s back story so if you have time to read the first book too – you’ll find out more about Ray, his family and the New York City world of the 1970s. 

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And here are the notes from our January 2024 gathering! 

The Southeast Steuben County Library Book Club for Adults met on Friday, January 12, 2024, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. at the library. 

We discussed our January Read, Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. 

In brief, the novel is an ecological thriller, featuring an activist environmental group, named Birnam Wood, whose members cultivate plants on public and private property, without permission of the property owners, to draw attention to environmental issues.  

The plot features three main sets of characters,  the Birnam Wood group, which includes head honcho Mira Bunting, her best friend, back up and eventually, briefly, her successor in leading Birnam Wood, Shelley Noakes and Tony Gallo, a founding member of Birnam Wood, and former lover of Mira, who leaves the group when he can’t convince them to follow his plan of action, and who then transitions into an investigative reporter. 

The second, set of characters, consists of one character, the psychopathic American millionaire Robert Lemonie, who although quite rich, is determined to become richer still, and whose current get-richer-project is to quietly mine rare metals from Darvish’s land and the adjacent National Park, under the guise of building a doomsday bunker. Lemonie is used to getting what he wants and going all out to manipulate people and situations to do so.  

And the third set of characters consists of the couple that own the land Lemoine is buying and Birnam Wood is cultivating, Sir Owen and Lady Darvish. Sir Owen has just been knighted for his conservation work; which is ironic because he owns a pest control company and got his start shooting rabbits. 

The novel takes place mainly on the land owned by Sir Owen, which is located near a fictional national park in New Zealand. Robert Lemoine is purchasing the property and, despite not owning it, gives permission to Mira Bunting to have Birnam Wood plant cultivate the land.  

In this novel, each of the main characters is self-centered, has an agenda and is ambitious which is a combination that can always be toxic or explosive; and in the case of the novel, does indeed, turn deadly; although granted the powder keg explosion is kicked off by an accident when, the spaced-out-and-tripping Shelley accidentally gets into Mira’s van and runs over and kills Sir Owen.  

Lemoine, who is nearby with Mira, puts the still tripping Shelley back in the van and tells her nothing she has seen is real, and concocts a plan to make Sir Owen’s death appear to be an accident. Lemoine wants to continue his illegal mining and knows that an in-depth police investigation would be unavoidable if it were known Sir Own was the victim of manslaughter. As the cover-up plan unfolds, and Lemoine has more interaction with Shelley, her realizes she, unlike Mira, has no limits and could conceivable be as ruthless as he is; thus, he determines to both bankroll Birnam Wood, and that Shelley is the one who should lead Birnam Wood. Mira, who knows she’s in too deep, as the colloquial expression goes, agrees with Lemoine’s plan. Meanwhile Tony has been out in the woods investigating the supposed building of the doomsday bunker, and has discovered Lemoine’s illegal mining operation, although he is convinced the government is behind it. Tony has been chased by some of Lemoine’s armed guards and is tired and injured when he encounters Mira who agrees to help him. Lemoine discovers Tony and escorts Tony and Mira back to the house.  

The novel ends with a bang, as readers follow Lady Darvish, who has buried her beloved husband, is convinced Lemoine is responsible for Sir Owens death and is determined to confront Lemoine. She drives to the property, goes into the empty house and hears a shot, so she picks up a gun and some ammunition and carefully walks towards where the shot was fired from. 

As this is unfolding, Lemoine, who had previously directed Shelley to call a morning meeting of Birnam Wood at the Darvish house; and graciously said he’d provide breakfast, had indeed done that, providing a poisoned breakfast, intending that all the troublesome Birnam Wood group, who have turned out to be more trouble than he wants to deal with, are delt with.  

And as Lemoine is standing in the midst of the group of dying activists, with Tony tied to a dead Mira, and casually using his phone, Lady Darvish comes on the scene and doesn’t hesitate to pass sentence on him, she shoots Lemoine right between the eyes killing him outright. She then frees Tony, the only one still alive, and is then shot in the back by one of Lemoine’s hired guards.  

The novel ends as Tony, having run through the woods to the site of Lemoine’s mining operation, sets it on fire so that people will know illegal, environmentally damaging activity had gone on there. And the novel abruptly ends with Tony wondering who will put out the fire.  

In as much of a nutshell, as I can manage, and granted I’m not good at writing short pieces, that is an overview of the plot of Birnam Wood. The novel has an additional literary layer, the title itself is taken from Shakespear’s Macbeth. The author has woven a tapestry of similar dramatic-tragic design with threads spotlighting that ambition is evil and corrupts, as does having unlimited funds which translates into villains, in this case Lemoine, having almost unlimited power and thus being almost unstoppable, until someone, in the case of Birnam Wood, Lady Darvish, takes drastic and unexpected, at least to the villain, action and eliminates the problem, in this case Lady Darvish eliminated the problem by eliminating Lemoine himself.  

The consensus of book club attendees is that Birnam Wood was a good thriller read. Although several persons commented on the ending being both tragic and slightly ambiguous; tragic in the sense that readers can assume that all the main characters died at the end of the story, and slightly ambiguous because although Tony alone escaped, and readers can assume that he too died in the fire he set, we do have to assume that as the writer closed the story abruptly with Tony thinking about the fire, and waiting to die, but still very much alive.  

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Book Club Members Recommended Reading/Viewing/Listening: January 2024 

Reading: 

Absolution by Alice McDermott  

Returning to fiction after What About the Baby?, McDermott focuses on characterization. Young newlywed Patricia and little Rainey meet in Saigon in 1963 at a garden party hosted by Rainey’s mother, Charlene. It is Patricia’s introduction to the world of American high-society wives. With the assistance of some U.S. military personnel, Charlene draws Patricia into her black-market activities involving a Vietnamese children’s hospital and a leprosarium. Charlene’s imperious treatment of the Vietnamese women in her employ further strains the women’s relationship. Sixty years later, Rainey tracks down Patricia to ask her for the full story of Charlene’s secretive influence over whomever she met. Charlene was the catalyst both for Patricia’s metamorphosis from a naive dewy-eyed “helpmeet” to tougher pragmatic independent woman and for Rainey’s transition from a troubled adolescent to a happily married wife and mother. VERDICT National Book Award winner McDermott frames this exquisite novel (a recent Barnes & Noble book club pick) against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Social class, awakening feminist consciousness, the bladed side of “good works,” and the power of one seemingly small event that changes lives forever are perfectly revealed in this correspondence between two women, connected over six decades by their shared experience. – Library Journal Review  

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Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse by Timothy P Carney 

A fresh diagnosis of what ails so many places in the United States today.In opening his run for president, Donald Trump famously declared that “the American Dream is dead.” Many of his core supporters agreed and looked to him to restore it; many other voters rejected this premise, and Trump, entirely. Locating the precincts where Trump did exceptionally well and exceptionally poorly in the early 2016 primaries, Washington Examiner commentary editor Carney (Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses, 2009, etc.) set out to discover what they had in common and thus what they might tell us about the actual health of the American dream. Synthesizing a number of sociological studies of these places, the author brushes aside the easy tropes about loss of manufacturing jobs and fear of immigrants, concluding that confidence in the dream depends on the health of a community’s institutions of civil society, in particular religious groups and marriage. While elite communities have thriving social networks to support individuals and families, poorer ones depend on fraternal groups, labor unions, sports leagues, and similar volunteer organizations, many of which have withered in recent decades, particularly in areas of economic dislocation. This in turn leaves residents isolated, alienated, and distrustful. According to Carney, churches provide a low-barrier gateway to restored civic connection in a wide variety of ways, and he has the numbers to prove it. Though occasionally repetitive and dry, the author presents a sophisticated analysis that defies easy summary, using an informal style and illustrative stories about individuals and towns to draw readers along. Unfortunately, he concludes that civic alienation cannot be reversed by central government, which is often guilty of crowding out the very local institutions that are needed; it can only be cured from the grassroots up. An approachable and incisive yet discouraging analysis with wide applicability to contemporary political and social challenges. – Kirkus Review 

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Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story by Lee Berger 

This first-person narrative about an archaeological discovery is rewriting the story of human evolution. A story of defiance and determination by a controversial scientist, this is Lee Berger’s own take on finding Homo naledi, an all-new species on the human family tree and one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century. 

In 2013, Berger, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, caught wind of a cache of bones in a hard-to-reach underground cave in South Africa. He put out a call around the world for petite collaborators—men and women small and adventurous enough to be able to squeeze through 8-inch tunnels to reach a sunless cave 40 feet underground. With this team of “underground astronauts,” Berger made the discovery of a lifetime: hundreds of prehistoric bones, including entire skeletons of at least 15 individuals, all perhaps two million years old. Their features combined those of known prehominids like Lucy, the famous Australopithecus, with those more human than anything ever before seen in prehistoric remains. Berger’s team had discovered an all new species, and they called it Homo naledi. 

The cave quickly proved to be the richest prehominid site ever discovered, full of implications that shake the very foundation of how we define what makes us human. Did this species come before, during, or after the emergence of Homo sapiens on our evolutionary tree? How did the cave come to contain nothing but the remains of these individuals? Did they bury their dead? If so, they must have had a level of self-knowledge, including an awareness of death. And yet those are the very characteristics used to define what makes us human. Did an equally advanced species inhabit Earth with us, or before us? Berger does not hesitate to address all these questions. 

Berger is a charming and controversial figure, and some colleagues question his interpretation of this and other finds. But in these pages, this charismatic and visionary paleontologist counters their arguments and tells his personal story: a rich and readable narrative about science, exploration, and what it means to be human. 

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A Cursed Place: A page-turning thriller of the dark world of cyber surveillance by Peter Hanington 

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. AND THEY KNOW EVERYTHING. 

The tech company Public Square believes in ‘doing well by doing good’. It’s built a multi-billion dollar business on this philosophy and by getting to know what people want. They know a lot. But who else can access all that information and what are they planning to do with it? 

Radio reporter William Carver is an analogue man in a digital world. He isn’t the most tech-savvy reporter, he’s definitely old school, but he needs to learn fast – the people he cares most about are in harm’s way. 

From the Chilean mines where they dig for raw materials that enable the tech revolution, to the streets of Hong Kong where anti-government protesters are fighting against the Chinese State, to the shiny research laboratories of Silicon Valley where personal data is being mined everyday – A Cursed Place is a gripping thriller set against the global forces that shape our times. 

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The Diary Keepers: World War II in the Netherlands, as Written by the People Who Lived Through It by Nina Siegal 

Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to record this unparalleled time, and maintained by devoted archivists, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before, from the stories of a Nazi sympathizing police officer to a Jewish journalist who documented daily activities at a transport camp. 

Journalist Nina Siegal, who grew up in a family that had survived the Holocaust in Europe, had always wondered about the experience of regular people during World War II. She had heard stories of the war as a child and Anne Frank’s diary, but the tales were either crafted as moral lessons — to never waste food, to be grateful for all you receive, to hide your silver — or told with a punch line. The details of the past went untold in an effort to make it easier assimilate into American life. 

When Siegal moved to Amsterdam as an adult, those questions came up again, as did another horrifying one: Why did seventy five percent of the Dutch Jewish community perish in the war, while in other Western European countries the proportions were significantly lower? How did this square with the narratives of Dutch resistance she had heard so much about and in what way did it relate to the famed tolerance people in the Netherlands were always talking about? Perhaps more importantly, how could she raise a Jewish child in this country without knowing these answers? 

Searching and singular, The Diary Keepers mines the diaries of ordinary citizens to understand the nature of resistance, the workings of memory, and the ways we reflect on, commemorate, and re-envision the past. 

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The Future by Naomi Alderman  

When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now, she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left? 

Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what’s going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future? 

Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization. 

By turns thrilling, hilarious, tender, and always piercingly brilliant, The Future unfolds at a breakneck speed, highlighting how power corrupts the few who have it and what it means to stand up to them. The future is coming. The Future is here. 

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The Girl Behind the Gates: The gripping, heart-breaking historical bestseller based on a true story by Brenda Davies 

‘Compelling. Poignant. Haunting. Heart wrenching. Just beautiful. Everyone needs to read this wonderful book.’ – Renita D’Silva, bestselling author of The Forgotten Daughter 

1939. Seventeen-year-old Nora Jennings has spent her life secure in the certainty of a bright, happy future – until one night of passion has more catastrophic consequences than she ever could have anticipated. Labelled a moral defective and sectioned under the Mental Deficiency Act, she is forced to endure years of unspeakable cruelty at the hands of those who are supposed to care for her. 

1981. When psychiatrist Janet Humphreys comes across Nora, heavily institutionalized and still living in the hospital more than forty years after her incarceration, she knows that she must be the one to help Nora rediscover what it is to live. But as she works to help Nora overcome her past, Janet realizes she must finally face her own. 

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Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker 

Delving into the mysterious roots of a misunderstood condition, Kolker (Lost Girls) tells the story of the Galvin family, who lived on Hidden Valley Road, and their role in a scientific discovery. Kolker describes how, after discovering that six of the 12 Galvin children were diagnosed with schizophrenia, medical researchers began collecting their genetic material in hopes of determining the biology of the disease. The Galvin clan comes alive in Kolker’s eloquent telling: distant parents Don and Mimi, who wanted to be seen as a model military family; the six affected sons, many of whom spent time in and out of mental hospitals; and two daughters, who were all but abandoned by their parents. Alternating chapters movingly detail the family’s tragedy and despair, including the ways the illness manifests, along with the study of illness as a science in order to determine its genetic makeup. Throughout, Kolker effectively shows how illness impacts each relative, especially those who live alongside it. VERDICT Kolker masterfully combines scientific intrigue with biographical sketches, allowing readers to feel as if they are right there with the Galvins as researchers examine their genes in the quest for answers. – Starred Library Journal Review 

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How to Be a Christian: Reflections and Essays by C. S. Lewis 

From the revered teacher and bestselling author of such classic Christian works as Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters comes a collection that gathers the best of C. S. Lewis’s practical advice on how to embody a Christian life. 

The most famous adherent and defender of Christianity in the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis has long influenced our perceptions and understanding of the faith. More than fifty years after his death, Lewis’s arguments remain extraordinarily persuasive because they originate from his deep insights into the Christian life itself. Only an intellectual of such profound faith could form such cogent and compelling reasons for its truth. 

How to Be a Christian brings together the best of Lewis’s insights on Christian practice and its expression in our daily lives. Cultivated from his many essays, articles, and letters, as well as his classic works, this illuminating and thought-provoking collection provides practical wisdom and direction Christians can use to nurture their faith and become more devout disciples of Christ. 

By provoking readers to more carefully ponder their faith, How to Be a Christian can help readers forge a deeper understanding of their personal beliefs and what is means to be a Christian, and strengthen their profound relationship with God 

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The Keeper of Stories by Sally Page 

Janice is an exceptional cleaner. Her clients all say so. She is also a collector of stories. All across Cambridge, Janice collects tales of those for whom she works and others who surround her. Geordie is an opera singer, Fiona and her son Adam have been rocked by a recent loss, Mrs. YeahYeahYeah (as Janice calls her) is singularly preoccupied with fundraising, the gal who sells Janice a new pair of boots once played squash for England. Janice is only too happy to collect others’ stories, but she doesn’t feel she has one of her own to tell. That is, until Mrs. YeahYeahYeah recruits her to clean her mother-in-law’s home. Mrs. B is in her nineties and, as a former intelligence officer, is incredibly tricky. Can she trick Janice’s story out of her? Can Janice find a way to tell her own story and create a new one for the second half of her life? Moving and funny, this debut novel is a perfect read for romantics and sentimentalists of all stripes. – Booklist Review 

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The Love Story of Missy Carmichael by Beth Morrey 

For readers of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and A Man Called Ove, a life-affirming, deeply moving “coming-of-old” story, a celebration of how ordinary days are made extraordinary through friendship, family, and the power of forgiving yourself–at any age. 

“At a time when people are having to isolate, [this novel is] a balm, offering an expansive sense of love and possibility at a time when the main characters feel like those chances are gone.” –Christian Science Monitor 

The world has changed around seventy-nine-year-old librarian Millicent Carmichael, aka Missy. Though quick to admit that she often found her roles as a housewife and mother less than satisfying, Missy once led a bustling life driven by two children, an accomplished and celebrated husband, and a Classics degree from Cambridge. Now her husband is gone, her daughter is estranged after a shattering argument, and her son has moved to his wife’s native Australia, taking Missy’s beloved only grandchild half-a-world away. She spends her days sipping sherry, avoiding people, and rattling around in her oversized, under-decorated house waiting for…what exactly? 

The last thing Missy expects is for two perfect strangers and one spirited dog named Bob to break through her prickly exterior and show Missy just how much love she still has to give. In short order, Missy finds herself in the jarring embrace of an eclectic community that simply won’t take no for an answer–including a rambunctious mutt-on-loan whose unconditional love gives Missy a reason to re-enter the world one muddy paw print at a time. 

Filled with wry laughter and deep insights, The Love Story of Missy Carmichael is a coming-of-old story that shows us it’s never too late to forgive yourself and, just as important, it’s never too late to love. 

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The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery  by Barbara K. Lipska with Elaine McArdle 

In the tradition of My Stroke of Insight and Brain on Fire, this powerful memoir recounts Barbara Lipska’s deadly brain cancer and explains its unforgettable lessons about the brain and mind. 

Neuroscientist Lipska was diagnosed early in 2015 with metastatic melanoma in her brain’s frontal lobe. As the cancer progressed and was treated, she experienced behavioral and cognitive symptoms connected to a range of mental disorders, including dementia and her professional specialty, schizophrenia. 

Lipska’s family and associates were alarmed by the changes in her behavior, which she failed to acknowledge herself. Gradually, after a course of immunotherapy, Lipska returned to normal functioning, amazingly recalled her experience, and through her knowledge of neuroscience identified the ways in which her brain changed during treatment. 

Lipska admits her condition was unusual; after recovery she was able to return to her research and resume her athletic training and compete in a triathalon. Most patients with similar brain cancers rarely survive to describe their ordeal. Lipska’s memoir, coauthored with journalist Elaine McArdle, shows that strength and courage but also an encouraging support network are vital to recovery. 

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Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman 

What if Romeo and Juliet had different shades of skin? Sephy (short for Persephone), nearly 14 at the start of the novel, is dark-skinned, a member of the ruling “Crosses,” and the wealthy daughter of a powerful politician. Her best friend is 15-year-old Callum, a pale-skinned “naught” whose mother had been Sephy’s nursemaid. The two continue to meet on the sly after Callum’s mother is fired. When a new law allows “the crème de la crème of naught youth” to attend Cross high schools, Sephy believes she and Callum can be friends in public. Callum hopes a good education will help him rise out of poverty. Instead, the introduction of naughts into Cross classrooms leads to taunting, fist fights and expulsions. British author Blackman’s plot, told in Sephy and Callum’s alternating voices, is an amalgam of 20th-century race relations. The setting resembles England, but the author mixes in issues similar to American history (such as a school integration scenario reminiscent of Little Rock in 1957). The naughts’ protest organization (the Liberation Militia), however, more closely resembles the Irish Republican Army than members of the nonviolent U.S. Civil Rights movement. Indeed, an IRA-like bombing at a shopping center (linked to Callum’s family) propels the second half of the story. Unfortunately, the first half unspools leisurely, but those who stick with this novel will get a tragic tale of star-crossed lovers and plenty to ponder. – Publishers Weekly Review  

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The Power by Naomi Alderman  

All over the world, teenage girls develop the ability to send an electric charge from the tips of their fingers.It might be a little jolt, as thrilling as it is frightening. It might be powerful enough to leave lightning-bolt traceries on the skin of people the girls touch. It might be deadly. And, soon, the girls learn that they can awaken this new–or dormant?–ability in older women, too. Needless to say, there are those who are alarmed by this development. There are efforts to segregate and protect boys, laws to ensure that women who possess this ability are banned from positions of authority. Girls are accused of witchcraft. Women are murdered. But, ultimately, there’s no stopping these women and girls once they have the power to kill with a touch. Framed as a historical novel written in the far future–long after rule by women has been established as normal and, indeed, natural–this is an inventive, thought-provoking work of science fiction that has already been shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in Britain. Alderman (The Liars’ Gospel, 2013, etc.) chronicles the early days of matriarchy’s rise through the experiences of four characters. Tunde is a young man studying to be a journalist who happens to capture one of the first recordings of a girl using the power; the video goes viral, and he devotes himself to capturing history in the making. After Margot’s daughter teaches her to use the power, Margot has to hide it if she wants to protect her political career. Allie takes refuge in a convent after running away from her latest foster home, and it’s here that she begins to understand how newly powerful young women might use–and transform–religious traditions. Roxy is the illegitimate daughter of a gangster; like Allie, she revels in strength after a lifetime of knowing the cost of weakness. Both the main story and the frame narrative ask interesting questions about gender, but this isn’t a dry philosophical exercise. It’s fast-paced, thrilling, and even funny. Very smart and very entertaining. – Starred Kirkus Review  

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The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger 

In 1958, a small Minnesota town is rocked by a shocking murder, pouring fresh fuel on old grievances in this dazzling novel, an instant New York Times bestseller and “a work of art” (The Denver Post). 

On Memorial Day in Jewel, Minnesota, the body of wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn is found floating in the Alabaster River, dead from a shotgun blast. The investigation falls to Sheriff Brody Dern, a highly decorated war hero who still carries the physical and emotional scars from his military service. Even before Dern has the results of the autopsy, vicious rumors begin to circulate that the killer must be Noah Bluestone, a Native American WWII veteran who has recently returned to Jewel with a Japanese wife. As suspicions and accusations mount and the town teeters on the edge of more violence, Dern struggles not only to find the truth of Quinn’s murder but also put to rest the demons from his own past. 

Caught up in the torrent of anger that sweeps through Jewel are a war widow and her adolescent son, the intrepid publisher of the local newspaper, an aging deputy, and a crusading female lawyer, all of whom struggle with their own tragic histories and harbor secrets that Quinn’s death threatens to expose. 

Both a complex, spellbinding mystery and a masterful portrait of mid-century American life that is “a novel to cherish” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), The River We Remember offers an unflinching look at the wounds left by the wars we fight abroad and at home, a moving exploration of the ways in which we seek to heal, and a testament to the enduring power of the stories we tell about the places we call home. 

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The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides  

Alicia Berenson is a famous painter, living a life that many envy with her handsome fashion-photographer husband, Gabriel. With a gorgeous house, complete with a painting studio, and that perfect marriage, Alicia couldn’t be happier. Until one day Gabriel comes home late from work, and Alicia shoots him in the face. In the brutal aftermath that leads to an indefinite stay in a psychiatric hospital, Alicia mutely accepts her punishment. Forensic psychotherapist Theo Faber is put in charge of her therapy; however, since the night of the shooting, she hasn’t spoken a word. With a nod to Greek mythology, art, and love, debut novelist Michaelides effectively blurs the lines between psychosis and sanity. Multiple story lines are told with a writing style that combines past diary entries with present-day prose, becoming more tangled as they weave together, keeping readers on edge, guessing and second-guessing. The Silent Patient is unputdownable, emotionally chilling, and intense, with a twist that will make even the most seasoned suspense reader break out in a cold sweat. – Booklist Review  

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The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan 

From the Middle East and its political instability to China and its economic rise, the vast region stretching eastward from the Balkans across the steppe and South Asia has been thrust into the global spotlight in recent years. Frankopan teaches us that to understand what is at stake for the cities and nations built on these intricate trade routes, we must first understand their astounding pasts. 

Frankopan realigns our understanding of the world, pointing us eastward. It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures and religions. From the rise and fall of empires to the spread of Buddhism and the advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to the great wars of the twentieth century—this book shows how the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East. 

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Small Town Sins by Ken Jaworoski 

New York Times editor Jaworowski shines in his artful debut, which interweaves the stories of several struggling residents in the Rust Belt town of Locksburg, Pa. When Nathan was 17, he impregnated the first girl he slept with and had to come up with the $1,000 she needed to get an abortion. He resorted to pawning his disabled mother’s wedding ring, but when its disappearance was noted, the search for it ended tragically. Decades later, Nathan is a volunteer firefighter whose marriage is troubled by his wife’s fertility issues. His fortunes change when he stumbles on millions in cash while saving a man from a burning building and chooses to keep the loot. Violent complications ensue, and Jaworowski weaves them with the stories of other desperate town residents, including the former-addict father of a disabled child and a nurse with a congenital facial disfigurement who hopes to give a girl with terminal cancer her dying wish, even if doing so would break the law. Jaworowski skillfully toggles between his plot threads, never sacrificing character development for cheap thrills. Admirers of Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan will be eager for more from this talented storyteller. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review  

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Somewhere Towards The End: A Memoir by Diana Athill  

Noted British editor and writer Athill decided at 91 to have a go at writing about the process of getting old. In this refreshingly candid memoir, she traces some of the landmarks she has passed since her seventies, faculties lost and gained, actions taken causing pleasure or regret. Her somewhat tardy discovery of adult-education classes led to a love of sewing, painting, and gardening, though dwindling energy finally curtailed that latter activity, much to her chagrin. Following a lengthy discussion of her lack of faith in an afterlife, which entails proceeding toward death without the support of religion, Athill recalls the deaths of her parents and grandparents, many of whom lived into their nineties with their mental faculties intact, leading her to conclude she has inherited a good chance of going fairly easily. One regret is not having the courage to escape the narrowness of her pleasant, easily navigable life. She concludes with what she terms random thoughts, choice pearls sparkling with dry wit for the reader to ponder, reflect upon, and perhaps assimilate. – Booklist Review  

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Wandering Through Life by Donna Leon 

The internationally bestselling author of the Guido Brunetti mysteries tells her own adventurous life story as she enters her eighties 

In a series of vignettes full of affection, irony, and good humor, Donna Leon narrates a remarkable life she feels has rather more happened to her than been planned. 

Following a childhood in the company of her New Jersey family, with frequent visits to her grandfather’s farm and its beloved animals, and summers spent selling homegrown tomatoes by the roadside, Leon got her first taste of the classical music and opera that would enrich her life. She also developed a yen for adventure. In 1976, she made the spontaneous decision to teach English in Iran, before finding herself swept up in the early days of the 1979 Revolution. After teaching stints in China and Saudi Arabia, she finally landed in Venice. Leon vividly animates her decades-long love affair with Italy, from her first magical dinner when serving as a chaperone to a friend, to the hunt for the perfect cappuccino, to the warfare tactics of grandmothers doing their grocery shopping at the Rialto Market. 

Some things remain constant throughout the decades: her adoration of opera, especially Handel’s vocal music, and her advocacy for the environment, embodied in her passion for bees—which informs the surprising crux of the Brunetti mystery Earthly Remains. Even as mass tourism takes its toll on the patience of residents, Leon’s passion for Venice remains unchanged: its outrageous beauty and magic still captivate her. 

Having recently celebrated her eightieth birthday, Leon poignantly confronts the dual challenges and pleasures of aging. Complete with a brief letter dissuading those hoping to meet Guido Brunetti at the Questura, and always suffused with music, food, and her sharp sense of humor, Wandering through Life offers Donna Leon at her most personal. 

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Viewing: 

The Boys In The Boat (2023) 

A 1930s-set story centered on the University of Washington’s rowing team, from their Depression-era beginnings to winning gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. – IMDB 

The Boys In The Boat Trailer: 

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The Color Purple (2023) 

A woman faces many hardships in her life, but ultimately finds extraordinary strength and hope in the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood. – IMDB (Based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel)  

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Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017) (Netflix) 

Literary icon Joan Didion reflects on her remarkable career and personal struggles in this intimate documentary directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne. 

Trailer available via the following link, but you have to sign in to your free YouTube (Gmail) account as, according to YouTube, all material isn’t suitable for all ages: 

The Center Will Not Hold Trailer: 

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Noughts + Crosses (2020-present) (BBC) 

A British drama television series based on the Noughts & Crosses novel series by Malorie Blackman. The series is set in an alternative history where black “Cross” people rule over white “Noughts”. 

The BBC synopsis “Against a background of prejudice, distrust and powerful rebellion mounting on the streets, a passionate romance builds between Sephy and Callum which will lead them both into terrible danger.” 

Noughts + Crosses Trailer: 

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A Tale of O: Video on Diversity (from YouTube – the video cuts out during the last 30 seconds – but it is still an interesting 9 minute watch) 

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Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019) (Netflix) 

Late author Toni Morrison talks about life and writing in this documentary exploring the ways her work reflects themes of race and American history. 

The Pieces I Am Trailer: 

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Other Things Discussed: 

Activist Dorothy Day, who cofounded the social justice group, the Catholic Worker Movement with Peter Maurin in the nineteen thirties.  

For more information:  

https://www.biography.com/activists/dorothy-day

https://dorothydaycwfarm.org/

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Have a great day & I hope to see everyone at the library next Friday!

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, a belated post regarding our December 2023 read.

In December 2023 we read and discussed the only short story ever published by Toni Morrison; the thought provoking Recitatif. 

The story packs quite a bit into less than 100 pages, chronicling the relationship of two women, Twyla and Roberta, who first meet as children in the late fifties, when both are left at an orphanage by their respective mothers. The girls spend months living as roommates and building a keeping-us-safe-from-the-rest-of-the-world type of friendship, only to part and meet again four times during their adult lives; once as young women at a Howard Johnson’s, then as wives at school busing protests, later at a grocery store and finally, the two more mature women, meet, by chance at a party, and subsequently have their most  in-depth and reflective conversation. 

And the big, purposely unanswered question the author raises, and weaves through the text, is about race; as readers know from the beginning one girl is black and one is white, but Morrison never reveals which is which, giving readers much to ponder about the interaction between the two women, the historical events unfolding at the time of each meeting and how race has, and continues to impact the way we live in America.  

December book club attendees gave Recitatif a sold thumbs up read rating!

And here is the current book club schedule:

Friday, February 9, 2024 Crook Manifesto: A Novel by Colson Whitehead (336 pages)

Friday, March 8, 2024 The Half Moon : A Novel by Mary Beth Keane (296 pages)

Friday, April 12, 2024 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel by James McBride (385 pages)

Friday, May 10, 2024 The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant (322 pages)

Friday, June 14, 2024 Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward (305 pages)

Friday, July 12, 2024 The Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood (256 pages)

And here is a listing of the items the library has ordered in January 2024:

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL

P.S. Notes from the January 2024 book club gathering will be posted later this week; and our February Read: Crook Manifesto is the second book in a series by Colson Whitehead. You do not have to read the first book in the series to enjoy the second book. However, should you wish to read the first book first, it is titled Harlem Shuffle.

Hi everyone, first the reminder! The SSC Library Book Club for Adults December gathering will be held this Friday, December 8, 2023, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m., in the Community Room at the library.

We’ll be discussing our December Read, Recitatif, a short story by Toni Morrison with an interesting and in-depth analysis introduction by Zadie Smith; which it is recommended that you read after you finish reading the short story – should you wish to!

Looking forward, our January 2024 gathering will be held on Friday, January 12, 2024, at the usual time of 3:00 – 4:00 pm. Our January Read is Birnam Wood: A Novel by Eleanor Cattan.

Copies of the January Read may be picked up at the Circulation Desk at any time.

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Hi everyone, first off, looking forward, our December Book Club for Adults gathering will be held at the library on Friday, December 8, 2023, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.  

We’ll be reading and discussing Toni Morrison’s short story Recitatif, and it has been recommended by book club members who have read the book to skip the lengthy and intelligent introduction, which if you read if first might be distracting, and read the book first – then you can read Zadie Smith’s introduction if you’d like to do so.   

Here is an overview of the Recitatif plot:  

The only short story Nobel laureate Morrison ever wrote, “Recitatif” concerns Twyla and Roberta, friends in childhood, who lost touch as adults but keep encountering each other at places like a grocery store, a diner, and a protest march. One is white, one is black, but readers don’t know which is which, Morrison having aimed to craft “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” Bearing an introduction by Zadie Smith, this is the story’s first-time appearance as a stand-alone. – Library Journal   

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Our November 2023 Read was Maame by Jessica George  

And in a nutshell, Maame is a bildungsroman tale focusing on twenty-five-year-old Maddie Wright.   

In Twi, the native langue of Maddie’s Ghanian born parents, the word “Maame” means “woman” and refers to a responsible woman who can be relied upon; usually in a familial setting.  And Maddie certainly fits that bill, becoming the main breadwinner, caregiver and household organizer for her family.   

As the novel opens, readers are introduced to Maddie who lives in Croydon, a borough of London, England. Maddie’s parents immigrated to the U.K. from Ghana before she was born, and Maddie and her sibling James were born and raised in the U.K. and are more English than Ghanian.   

Maddie’s mother has spent years at a time living apart from the family; living in Ghana helping her brother, Maddie’s uncle, run a family business. Thus Maddie, from the age of twelve, has been the person that takes care of the family’s household, paying bills, making meals, cleaning etc.   

Maddie’s parents did not get along well when they were living in the same household; and Maddie’s elder brother James moved out of the house as soon as he was old enough to do so, leaving Maddie to run the household alone.   

And just as Maddie was finishing up at university and becoming open to the possibility of moving out of the family home and away from the responsibility of taking care of her parent’s household, her father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.   

So, Maddie goes from taking care of the family household to taking care of the family household, and her father’s caregiving needs and working full-time.  

Maddie’s father is assigned a health aide who helps him with personal tasks and assists him in eating meals, so Maddie is able to work outside the home; which is a good thing for the family as her mother frequently calls from Ghana to ask her for money. However, it is not a good thing for Maddie personally, as she is expected to put money into the household and has no support, financial or otherwise, from her mother or brother.   

So, Maddie is struggling to juggle all the things she is responsible for, when two big things occur. Firstly, she is unfairly fired from her job; and secondly, after several years of living abroad her strongly opinionated mother returns home.   

The rest of the novel unfolds as Maddie’s mother pick up the tasks of running the household and taking care of her husband, Maddie’s father; Maddie moves out of the family home into a flat with two other young women and, in essence, begins to truly live her life. She lands a new job that she likes, dates several young men before finding one that seems to be a good match, works on having healthier relationships with her mother and brother, and slowly gains confidence in herself.  

Towards the end of the book a not unexpected death occurs, and revelations about Maddie’s parent’s early life, shed light on why their lives, and Maddie’s early life, unfolded the way they did.   

And one cannot offer a cliff notes overview of the novel, without noting that Maddie is a big Googler. She googles questions to see how other people do things, in contrast, to how the Generation X member typing this overview would use Google, to look for information.   

Maddie, being a Digital Native, uses a Google search as a touch stone to determine how she should do things; including inquiring how long one should wait after a flat mate breaks up with a boyfriend to go out on a date with her flat mate’s former boyfriend.  

The consensus of book club members was that Maame was a fun first novel with a lead character readers can happily cheer on; and that readers can expect more top-notch novels from the author, who is only in her twenties, in the future.   

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Book Club Members Recommended Reads & Watches:   

Recommended Reads:  

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer:  

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).  

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return  

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The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune: 

Quirk and charm give way to a serious exploration of the dangers of complacency in this delightful, thought-provoking Orwellian fantasy from Klune (Heartsong). Caseworker Linus Baker of the Department in Charge of Magical Youths (DICOMY) believes he is doing right by the preternaturally gifted children placed in DICOMY-sanctioned orphanages. But Linus begins to question DICOMY’s methods when the ominous Extremely Upper Management tasks Linus with evaluating the isolated Marsyas Island Orphanage and reporting not only on the island’s extraordinary children—among them a female gnome, a blob of uncertain species who wants to be a bellhop, and a shy teenage boy who turns into a small dog when startled—but also on the orphanage master, Arthur Parnassus. The bonds Linus forms with the children and the romantic connection he feels for Arthur set Linus on a path toward redemption for the unwitting harm he caused as a cog in an uncaring bureaucratic machine. By turns zany and heartfelt, this tale of found family is hopeful to its core. Readers will revel in Klune’s wit and ingenuity. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review  

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Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, et al :  

Based on the Yale class, a guide to defining and then creating a flourishing life, and answering one of life’s most pressing questions: how are we to live?  

What makes a good life? The question is inherent to the human condition, asked by people across generations, professions, and social classes, and addressed by all schools of philosophy and religions. This search for meaning, as Yale faculty Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz argue, is at the crux of a crisis that is facing Western culture, a crisis that, they propose, can be ameliorated by searching, in one’s own life, for the underlying truth.   

In A Life Worth Living, named after its authors’ highly sought-after undergraduate course, Volf, Croasmun, and McAnnally-Linz chart out this question, providing readers with jumping-off points, road maps, and habits of reflection for figuring out where their lives hold meaning and where things need to change.  

Drawing from the major world religions and from impressively truthful and courageous secular figures, A Life Worth Living is a guide to life’s most pressing question, the one asked of all of us: How are we to live?   

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Storied Life of A. J. Fickey: A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin: 

A.J. Fikry is the owner of Island Books on Alice Island (think Martha’s Vineyard) near Hyannis, MA. Over his porch hangs the faded sign “No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World.” A.J. is a young widower, struggling to keep the bookstore afloat and his increasingly lonely life intact. Matchmaking attempts by the islanders for Fikry have failed miserably. His prickly reactions to friends and customers have discouraged attempts to help him heal. Even the publishers’ sales reps who call on the store cringe at his strident and curmudgeonly manner. Then one day A.J. discovers in his store a child abandoned by her mother, and his life takes a surprising turn. Maya is a bright and precocious two-year-old who steals his heart. As word spreads of his efforts at single parenting, the store becomes a community focus once again, and everyone takes a hand in raising young Maya–including a charming rep who had been so gruffly chased away. VERDICT Readers who delighted in Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, and Jessica Brockmole’s Letters from Skye will be equally captivated by this adult novel by a popular YA author about a life of books, redemption, and second chances. Funny, tender, and moving, it reminds us all exactly why we read and why we love. – Library Journal Review    

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The War Librarian by Addison Armstrong: 

The Paris Library meets The Flight Girls in this captivating historical novel about the sacrifice and courage necessary to live a life of honor, inspired by the first female volunteer librarians during World War I and the first women accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy. 

Two women. One secret. A truth worth fighting for. 

1918. Timid and shy Emmaline Balakin lives more in books than her own life. That is, until an envelope crosses her desk at the Dead Letter Office bearing a name from her past, and Emmaline decides to finally embark on an adventure of her own—as a volunteer librarian on the frontlines in France. But when a romance blooms as she secretly participates in a book club for censored books, Emmaline will need to find more courage within herself than she ever thought possible in order to survive. 

1976. Kathleen Carre is eager to prove to herself and to her nana that she deserves her acceptance into the first coed class at the United States Naval Academy. But not everyone wants female midshipmen at the Academy, and after tragedy strikes close to home, Kathleen becomes a target. To protect herself, Kathleen must learn to trust others even as she discovers a secret that could be her undoing.  

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Young Jane: A Novel by Gabrielle Zevin:   

If you’re going to have an affair with a married congressman, don’t blog about it. That’s one of the tough lessons young Aviva Grossman learns in this splendid novel. As a 20-year-old intern for an up-and-coming politician in South Florida, Aviva makes a series of poor choices that lead to a scandal, destroying her career before it has even begun. Years later, an event planner named Jane Young is running for mayor in her Maine town when the specter of the Grossman affair threatens to derail her candidacy. A witty, strongly drawn group of female voices tells Aviva’s story, three generations exploring the ripple effect her actions created. Zevin, whose works include several YA and adult novels, including The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry (2014), has created a fun and frank tale. Her vibrant and playful writing, and the fully realized characters taking turns as narrator, bring the story a zestful energy, even while exploring dark themes of secrecy and betrayal. Zevin perfectly captures the realities of the current political climate and the consequences of youthful indiscretions in an era when the Internet never forgets. – Booklist   

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Suggested Watching:  

Recommended Watches:   

Kim’s Convenience (2016-2021) (Netflix)   

Link to access trailer:  

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Have a great day!

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, our October 2023 Book Club for Adults gathering was held at the library, on Friday, October 13, 2023, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.  

Our October 2023 Read was the novel The Library of Lost Words by Pip Williams.  

The novel, set during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a skip forward to the nineteen eighties in the last chapter, tells the story of Esme Nicoll, the daughter of Harry Nicoll, one of the editors working on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, hereafter referred to as the O.E.D. 

Compiling the O.E.D. took years to complete. Work on the dictionary began in 1884 and the first edition was completed in 1928.  

So the backdrop of the story is the compiling of the dictionary, while in the forefront of the story, readers follow Esme, who as a child sat  under the editor’s table at the O.E.D. office, known as the Scriptorium, and picked up discarded slips containing words rejected by the editors, then placing them in a trunk so they wouldn’t be lost.  

As she grew from a child to a youth, Esme, realized the creators of the O.E.D. were all relatively affluent, educated men who saw the world from that vantagepoint, and thus had a tendency to discard words that reflected more diverse points of view; and she worked on creating her own dictionary of words, safeguarding words that offered a more diverse view of the world, especially those used by women and people of the lower classes, words that would otherwise have been lost – the “lost words” of the title of the book;  words that she knew wouldn’t meet with the approval of the editors working on the O.E.D. and thus, wouldn’t be included in the dictionary and saved for posterity.  

As a young adult, Esme was sent away to school, and later was hired by James Murray, the head editor of the O.E.D. project, to work as a clerical assistant, but not as an editor despite her background and in keeping with the patriarchal society of the day.  

Esme had a love affair, became pregnant and, in keeping with the societal norms of the day, and with support from her father Harry and godmother Edith kept the birth secret and gave her child to a couple her godmother knew, who adopted the baby girl they named Meghan, the newly created family then moving to Australia.  

After her child was adopted, Esme returned to Oxford and continued her work at the Scriptorium. World War I broke out, she fell in love with Gareth Owen, a feminist who privately published her Dictionary of Lost Words, who subsequently became a soldier and was killed in action during the war. After her husband’s death, and with a new supervisor taking over the O.E.D. project, Esme left her job at the O.E.D. to work in a hospital and continued her quiet work of saving the words of unrecognized people, particularly women. She was killed in a street accident at the age of 46. And in the last part of the book readers discover that after her untimely death her godmother sent her collection of lost words to her daughter, Meghan in Australia. Meghan, who had recently lost her adoptive mother, was upset in both finding her birth mother had died and in receiving Esme’s collection of lost words, and an in-depth note of explanation from Esme’s erudite godmother. However, at the very end of the book, in the late nineteen eighties, Meghan is found giving a speech on the occasion of the publication of the second edition of the O.E.D. and readers understand, in reading between the lines, that Meghan, like her mother Esme and grandfather Harry before her, dedicated her career to saving words so they, and the cultural aspects they reflected, wouldn’t be lost. 

Esme’s story is the main one in the book; however, the book also relays the story of the power of language, the lack of power of minority groups of the day, namely women and members of the lower classes, how difficult it was for women to rise above the boxes society of the era placed them in; and how the roles of women were changing during that era with the rise of the Suffragette movement, which cumulated in women gaining the right to vote shortly after the end of World War I.   

The majority of the book club attendees liked the book; one person thought it was too long and the pace too slow; and the book club host didn’t like the ending of the book. 

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The next Book Club for Adults gathering will be held at the library, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m., on Friday, November 10, 2023; and starting in November, after the main book club discussion and our attendees recommend reads of the month; we’ll be adding a “tell us your favorite book stories” section; which will offer anyone who wishes, to share stories regarding their love of reading.  

Our November 2023 Read is Maame by Jessica George 

And here is a bit about the plot: 

Maame (ma-meh) has many meanings in Twi but in my case, it means woman. 

It’s fair to say that Maddie’s life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced stage Parkinson’s. At work, her boss is a nightmare and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting. 

So when her mum returns from her latest trip, Maddie seizes the chance to move out of the family home and finally start living. A self-acknowledged late bloomer, she’s ready to experience some important “firsts”: She finds a flat share, says yes to after-work drinks, pushes for more recognition in her career, and throws herself into the bewildering world of internet dating. But when tragedy strikes, Maddie is forced to face the true nature of her unconventional family, and the perils―and rewards―of putting her heart on the line. 

Smart, funny, and affecting, Jessica George’s Maame deals with the themes of our time with humor and poignancy: from familial duty and racism, to female pleasure, the complexity of love, and the life-saving power of friendship. Most important, it explores what it feels like to be torn between two homes and cultures―and it celebrates finally being able to find where you belong. 

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Book Club Members Recommended Reads for the Month: 

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. 

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. 

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. 

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Book Binder by Pip Williams  

A young British woman working in a book bindery gets a chance to pursue knowledge and love when World War I upends her life in this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club pick The Dictionary of Lost Words. 

“Williams spins an immersive and compelling tale, sweeping us back to the Oxford she painted so expertly in The Dictionary of Lost Words.”—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife 

It is 1914, and as the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, women must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who live on a narrow boat in Oxford and work in the bindery at the university press. 

Ambitious, intelligent Peggy has been told for most of her life that her job is to bind the books, not read them—but as she folds and gathers pages, her mind wanders to the opposite side of Walton Street, where the female students of Oxford’s Somerville College have a whole library at their fingertips. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has: to spend her days folding the pages of books in the company of the other bindery girls. She is extraordinary but vulnerable, and Peggy feels compelled to watch over her. 

Then refugees arrive from the war-torn cities of Belgium, sending ripples through the Oxford community and the sisters’ lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can educate herself and use her intellect, not just her hands. But as war and illness reshape her world, her love for a Belgian soldier—and the responsibility that comes with it—threaten to hold her back. 

The Bookbinder is a story about knowledge—who creates it, who can access it, and what truths get lost in the process. Much as she did in the international bestseller The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams thoughtfully explores another rarely seen slice of history through women’s eyes. 

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Counting The Cost by Jill Duggar, Derick Dillard & Craig Borlase  

For the first time, discover the unedited truth about the Duggars, the traditional Christian family that captivated the nation on TLC’s hit show 19 Kids and Counting. Jill Duggar and her husband Derick are finally ready to share their story, revealing the secrets, manipulation, and intimidation behind the show that remained hidden from their fans. 

Jill and Derick knew a normal life wasn’t possible for them. As a star on the popular TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting, Jill grew up in front of viewers who were fascinated by her family’s way of life. She was the responsible, second daughter of Jim Bob and Michelle’s nineteen kids; always with a baby on her hip and happy to wear the modest ankle-length dresses with throat-high necklines. She didn’t protest the strict model of patriarchy that her family followed, which declares that men are superior, that women are expected to be wives and mothers and are discouraged from attaining a higher education, and that parental authority over their children continues well into adulthood, even once they are married. 

But as Jill got older, married Derick, and they embarked on their own lives, the red flags became too obvious to ignore. 

For as long as they could, Jill and Derick tried to be obedient family members—they weren’t willing to rock the boat. But now they’re raising a family of their own, and they’re done with the secrets. Thanks to time, tears, therapy, and blessings from God, they have the strength to share their journey. Theirs is a remarkable story of the power of the truth and is a moving example of how to find healing through honesty. 

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Diary Keepers: World War II in the Netherlands, as Written by the People Who Lived Through It by Nina Siegal 

A riveting look at the story of World War II and the Holocaust through the diaries of Dutch citizens, firsthand accounts of ordinary people living through extraordinary times 

Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to record this unparalleled time, and maintained by devoted archivists, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before, from the stories of a Nazi sympathizing police officer to a Jewish journalist who documented daily activities at a transport camp. 

Journalist Nina Siegal, who grew up in a family that had survived the Holocaust in Europe, had always wondered about the experience of regular people during World War II. She had heard stories of the war as a child and Anne Frank’s diary, but the tales were either crafted as moral lessons — to never waste food, to be grateful for all you receive, to hide your silver — or told with a punch line. The details of the past went untold in an effort to make it easier assimilate into American life. 

When Siegal moved to Amsterdam as an adult, those questions came up again, as did another horrifying one: Why did seventy five percent of the Dutch Jewish community perish in the war, while in other Western European countries the proportions were significantly lower? How did this square with the narratives of Dutch resistance she had heard so much about and in what way did it relate to the famed tolerance people in the Netherlands were always talking about? Perhaps more importantly, how could she raise a Jewish child in this country without knowing these answers? 

Searching and singular, The Diary Keepers mines the diaries of ordinary citizens to understand the nature of resistance, the workings of memory, and the ways we reflect on, commemorate, and re-envision the past. 

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Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson   

From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter. 

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist. 

His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive. 

At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said. 

It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground. 

For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress? 

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And the link to a related podcast, On With Kara Swisher, which features journalist Swisher’s interview with author Walter Isaacson – they have a lively discussion focusing on Isaacson’s biography of Musk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgOtmau-kJs

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People Of The Book by Geraladine Brooks  

The “complex and moving”(The New Yorker) novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks follows a rare manuscript through centuries of exile and war 

Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called “a tour de force “by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century S pain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding-an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair-only begin to unlock its deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics. 

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The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger  

In 1958, a small Minnesota town is rocked by a shocking murder, pouring fresh fuel on old grievances in this dazzling novel, an instant New York Times bestseller and “a work of art” (The Denver Post). 

On Memorial Day in Jewel, Minnesota, the body of wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn is found floating in the Alabaster River, dead from a shotgun blast. The investigation falls to Sheriff Brody Dern, a highly decorated war hero who still carries the physical and emotional scars from his military service. Even before Dern has the results of the autopsy, vicious rumors begin to circulate that the killer must be Noah Bluestone, a Native American WWII veteran who has recently returned to Jewel with a Japanese wife. As suspicions and accusations mount and the town teeters on the edge of more violence, Dern struggles not only to find the truth of Quinn’s murder but also put to rest the demons from his own past. 

Caught up in the torrent of anger that sweeps through Jewel are a war widow and her adolescent son, the intrepid publisher of the local newspaper, an aging deputy, and a crusading female lawyer, all of whom struggle with their own tragic histories and harbor secrets that Quinn’s death threatens to expose. 

Both a complex, spellbinding mystery and a masterful portrait of mid-century American life that is “a novel to cherish” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), The River We Remember offers an unflinching look at the wounds left by the wars we fight abroad and at home, a moving exploration of the ways in which we seek to heal, and a testament to the enduring power of the stories we tell about the places we call home. 

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Saving Emma: A Novel by Allen Eskens  

“Ambitious, absorbing, and deeply satisfying.”―Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 

“Eskens brilliantly combines legal and personal drama.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review) 

“Superb . . . another Eskens novel to be savored.” ―South Florida Sun-Sentinel 

When Boady Sanden first receives the case of Elijah Matthews, he’s certain there’s not much he can do. Elijah, who believes himself to be a prophet, has been locked up in a psychiatric hospital for the past four years, convicted of brutally murdering the pastor of a megachurch. But as a law professor working for the Innocence Project, Boady agrees to look into Elijah’s file. When he does, he is alarmed to find threads that lead back to the death of his colleague and friend, Ben Pruitt, a man shot to death four years earlier in Boady’s own home. 

Ben’s daughter, Emma, has lived with Boady and Boady’s wife Dee ever since that awful night. Now fourteen years old, Emma has been growing distant, and soon makes a fateful choice that takes her far from the safety of her godparents. Desperate to bring her home, and to free an innocent man, Boady must do all he can to investigate Elijah’s case while fighting to save the family he has deeply come to love. 

Written with energy, propulsion, and his characteristic pathos and insight, Eskens delivers another pitch-perfect legal thriller that reveals a twisted murder and explores faith, love, family, and redemption along the way. 

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Small Town Sins by Ken Jaworowski 

Ken Jaworowski’s Small Town Sins is a gripping Rust Belt thriller that captures the characters of a down-and-out Pennsylvania town, revealing their troubled pasts and the crimes that could cost them their lives. 

In Locksburg, Pennsylvania, a former coal and steel town whose best days seem long past, five thousand residents have toughed it out, and have reasons for both worry and hope as this neglected place teeters between decay and renewal. For some of them, their biggest troubles have just arrived. 

After years of just scraping by, three restless souls have their lives upended: Nathan, a volunteer fireman who uncovers a secret stash of money in a burning building and takes it; Callie, a nurse whose tender patient may not have long to live, despite the girl’s fundamentalist parents’ ardent beliefs; and Andy, a recovering heroin addict who undertakes a nightmare mission to hunt down and stop a serial predator. 

Before long, Nathan’s stolen riches threaten to destroy everyone around him as he tries to cover his haphazard trail of lies. Callie risks her career to grant her young patient a final, and likely illegal, wish. And Andy’s hunger for vigilante justice becomes a fierce obsession that may end in violence. 

As their stories barrel toward unexpected ends, Nathan, Callie, and Andy struggle to endure—or escape. They each face their pasts and gamble on their futures, and confront the underside of their rough Rust Belt town. Riveting, evocative, and unforgettable, Small Town Sins is a debut novel that marks the arrival of a major new talent. 

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Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder  

Tracy Kidder’s “riveting” (Washington Post) story of one company’s efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has become essential reading for understanding the history of the American tech industry. 

Computers have changed since 1981, when The Soul of a New Machine first examined the culture of the computer revolution. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations. 

The Soul of a New Machine is an essential chapter in the history of the machine that revolutionized the world in the twentieth century. 

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To Infinity And Beyond: A Journey Of Cosmic Discovery by Neil Degrassi Tyson  

This enlightening illustrated narrative by the world’s most celebrated astrophysicist explains the universe from the solar system to the farthest reaches of space with authority and humor. 

No one can make the mysteries of the universe more comprehensible and fun than Neil deGrasse Tyson. Drawing on mythology, history, and literature—alongside his trademark wit and charm—Tyson and StarTalk senior producer Lindsey Nyx Walker bring planetary science down to Earth and principles of astrophysics within reach. In this entertaining book, illustrated with vivid photographs and art, readers travel through space and time, starting with the Big Bang and voyaging to the far reaches of the universe and beyond. Along the way, science greets pop culture as Tyson explains the triumphs—and bloopers—in Hollywood’s blockbusters: all part of an entertaining ride through the cosmos. 

The book begins as we leave Earth, encountering new truths about our planet’s atmosphere, the nature of sunlight, and the many missions that have demystified our galactic neighbors. But the farther out we travel, the weirder things get. What’s a void and what’s a vacuum? How can light be a wave and a particle at the same time? When we finally arrive in the blackness of outer space, Tyson takes on the spookiest phenomena of the cosmos: parallel worlds, black holes, time travel, and more. 

For science junkies and fans of the conundrums that astrophysicists often ponder, To Infinity and Beyond is an enlightening adventure into the farthest reaches of the cosmos. 

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What You Are Looking For Is In The Library by Michiko Aoyama 

For fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a charming, internationally bestselling Japanese novel about how the perfect book recommendation can change a readers’ life. 

What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it. 

A restless retail assistant looks to gain new skills, a mother tries to overcome demotion at work after maternity leave, a conscientious accountant yearns to open an antique store, a recently retired salaryman searches for newfound purpose. 

In Komachi’s unique book recommendations they will find just what they need to achieve their dreams. What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is about the magic of libraries and the discovery of connection. This inspirational tale shows how, by listening to our hearts, seizing opportunity and reaching out, we too can fulfill our lifelong dreams. Which book will you recommend? 

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How To Talk by Howard D. Moore 

LR Note: I think this is the title and author mentioned during our October Book Club gathering, however, I may be wrong! As in searching for more information on the book, I didn’t find a book with that exact title by that exact author.  

So, if you recommended the book – let me know if that is the correct title and author – thanks! 

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Have a great day! 

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, our email system administrators have done a major upgrade of our email system, in Library Land. And I’ve lost access to my email list of the Book Club for Adults members.

Thus this email reminder that the October Southeast Steuben County Library Book Club for Adults gathering will be held next Friday, October 13, 2023 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Our October Read is The Dictionary of Lost Words, and we have freebie copies of the title, available at the Circulation Desk, if anyone needs a copy.

If you have questions about the book club, let me know!

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Email: reimerl@stls.org

Tel: 607-936-3713 x 212

Hi everyone, here is the Book Club for Adults Overview for September 2023! Our September Read was Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Malibu Rising unfolds in the Malibu region of California over a few days at the end of August 2023, with interspersed back stories telling the tale of the main characters: Famous rock star Mick Rivara, Mick’s first wife June Costas Rivara, and their children Nina a model and surfer, Jay a championship surfer, Hud a surfer and photographer and Kit, a college student and the best surfer of the bunch.

The main action unfolds in 1983 with the Riva siblings, who form a close family unit, getting together and catching up in the days prior to Nina’s annual end of summer party; which is the party to attend and to be seen to attend by the famous and influential people in the media industry of the day.  

The author then fills in the back story of the parents, Mick & June, their backgrounds, how they met and were married and how June supported Mick and held down the home front taking care of their two eldest children Nina & Jay, while ladies man Mick became a big rock star and focused on his career, spending most of his time away from home.

Mick it transpired, was incapable of fidelity, and despite many assurances that he would reform, eventually, after June married and divorced him and married him again, and they added more children to the family, Mick walked out to pursue his carefree lifestyle; and June; who was awarded money in their second divorce but never received it, and choose not to go after Mick to get it, wound up working at her parent’s fish fry restaurant and providing a paycheck-to-paycheck existence for her kids.

In the years after the second divorce, June becomes an alcoholic. And after eldest child Nina turned 17, she drowned in the family’s bathtub never really having a chance to reach for her highest potential in life as she wished to do. In the aftermath of June’s death, not quite 18-year-old Nina took charge, taking care of her siblings, dropping out of high school to work in the family restaurant and struggling to take care of the Rivara household; before being spotted by a modeling agent while surfing and beginning a lucrative modeling career. The novel goes on to relay what each of the Rivara children have been doing as adults and the fact that all four of them are at a crossroad in their lives.

Things come to a crux during the days just before the end-of-summer-party, during the party itself and in its aftermath, during which Mick makes an appearance. All four children choose new paths to take in their lives and Mick, self-centered and carless individual that he is, and always has been, inadvertently makes sure the 1983 end-of-summer bash is the last one – when he carelessly throws away a cigarette end starts a wildfire that burns Nina’s house down.  

Malibu Rising was a popular summer read the year it was published 2021. The book club members thought the book was a lightweight summer read and could have been better written.

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The next SSC Library Book Club for Adults Meeting will be held at the library the second Friday in October – that is Friday, October 13, 2023 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Our October Read is The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Copies should be available at the library soon – I have a list of people who I will call when they come in – if you’d like to be added to the list, please let me know!

And here is an overview of the plot of:

The Dictionary of Lost Words

DEBUT Esme Nicoll’s love of words began underneath her father’s desk inside the Scriptorium, a garden shed where a team of lexicographers and assistants fashioned the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. One day, a slip falls from a Scriptorium desk and lands in Esme’s lap. Believing it to be discarded, Esme pockets the slip and stores it in a wooden chest. As she grows, Esme continues to collect words and slowly begins to understand that the words used by women and poor people are often deemed unworthy to be immortalized in print. As she diligently devotes her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, Esme decides to give voice to the unwritten words by writing her own lexicon in secret–the Dictionary of Lost Words. Set in England in the harrowing era of women’s suffrage and the Great War, this fiction debut, by social researcher and memoirist Williams (One Italian Summer), uncovers perspectives that might have been lost if not for Esme’s love and dedication. VERDICT Enchanting, sorrowful, and wonderfully written, the book is a one-of-a-kind celebration of language and its importance in our lives. A must-have for every library collection. – Starred Library Journal Review

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Book Club Members Recommended Reads: September 2023

Everything’s Fine by Cecilia Rabess

On Jess’s first day at Goldman Sachs, she’s less than thrilled to learn she’ll be on the same team as Josh, her white, conservative sparring partner from college. Josh loves playing the devil’s advocate and is just…the worst.

But when Jess finds herself the sole Black woman on the floor, overlooked and underestimated, it’s Josh who shows up for her in surprising—if imperfect—ways. Before long, an unlikely friendship—one tinged with undeniable chemistry—forms between the two. A friendship that gradually, and then suddenly, turns into an electrifying romance that shocks them both.

Despite their differences, the force of their attraction propels the relationship forward, and Jess begins to question whether it’s more important to be happy than right. But then it’s 2016, and the cultural and political landscape shifts underneath them. And Jess, who is just beginning to discover who she is and who she has the right to be, is forced to ask herself what she’s willing to compromise for love and whether, in fact, everything’s fine.

A stunning debut that introduces Cecilia Rabess as a blazing new talent, Everything’s Fine is a poignant and sharp novel that doesn’t just ask will they, but…should they?

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Heaven And Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
    

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

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The Murder of King Tut: The Plot to Kill the Child King – A Nonfiction Thriller by James Patterson

The mystery of King Tut’s death in Ancient Egypt has haunted the world for centuries. Discover the ultimate true crime story of passion and betrayal, where the clues point to murder.

Thrust onto Egypt’s most powerful throne at the age of nine, King Tut’s reign was fiercely debated from the outset. Behind the palace’s veil of prosperity, bitter rivalries and jealousy flourished among the Boy King’s most trusted advisors, and after only nine years, King Tut suddenly perished, his name purged from Egyptian history. To this day, his death remains shrouded in controversy.

Now, in The Murder of King Tut, James Patterson and Martin Dugard dig through stacks of evidence-X-rays, Carter’s files, forensic clues, and stories told through the ages-to arrive at their own account of King Tut’s life and death. The result is an exhilarating true crime tale of intrigue, passion, and betrayal that casts fresh light on the oldest mystery of all.

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Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health by Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham

As a University of Chicago–trained economist and Harvard medical school professor and doctor, Anupam Jena is uniquely equipped to answer these questions. And as a critical care doctor at Massachusetts General who researches health care policy, Christopher Worsham confronts their impact on the hospital’s sickest patients. In this singular work of science and medicine, Jena and Worsham show us how medicine really works, and its effect on all of us.

Relying on ingeniously devised natural experiments—random events that unknowingly turn us into experimental subjects—Jena and Worsham do more than offer readers colorful stories. They help us see the way our health is shaped by forces invisible to the untrained eye. Is there ever a good time to have a heart attack? Do you choose the veteran doctor or the rookie?  Do you really need the surgery your doctor recommends? These questions are rife with significance; their impact can be life changing. Addressing them in a style that’s both animated and enlightening, Random Acts of Medicine empowers you to see past the white coat and find out what really makes medicine work—and how it could work better.

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Revival Season: A Novel by Monica West

Every summer, fifteen-year-old Miriam Horton and her family pack themselves tight in their old minivan and travel through small southern towns for revival season: the time when Miriam’s father—one of the South’s most famous preachers—holds massive healing services for people desperate to be cured of ailments and disease. But, this summer, the revival season doesn’t go as planned, and after one service in which Reverend Horton’s healing powers are tested like never before, Miriam witnesses a shocking act of violence that shakes her belief in her father—and her faith.

When the Hortons return home, Miriam’s confusion only grows as she discovers she might have the power to heal—even though her father and the church have always made it clear that such power is denied to women. Over the course of the following year, Miriam must decide between her faith, her family, and her newfound power that might be able to save others, but if discovered by her father, could destroy Miriam.

Celebrating both feminism and faith, Revival Season is a “tender and wise” (Ann Patchett) story of spiritual awakening and disillusionment in a Southern, Black, Evangelical community.

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Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today

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The Zookeepers’ War: An Incredible True Story from the Cold War by J.W. Mohnhaupt and Shelley Frisch

Living in West Berlin in the 1960s often felt like living in a zoo, everyone packed together behind a wall, with the world always watching. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, East Berlin and its zoo were spacious and lush, socialist utopias where everything was perfectly planned… and then rarely completed.

Berlin’s two zoos in East and West quickly became symbols of the divided city’s two halves. So no one was terribly surprised when the head zookeepers on either side started an animal arms race—rather than stockpiling nuclear warheads, they competed to have the most pandas and hippos. Soon, state funds were being diverted toward giving these new animals lavish welcomes worthy of visiting dignitaries. West German presidential candidates were talking about zoo policy on the campaign trail. And eventually politicians on both side of the Wall became convinced that if their zoo proved to be inferior, that would mean their country’s whole ideology was too.

A quirky piece of Cold War history unlike anything you’ve heard before, The Zookeepers’ War is an epic tale of desperate rivalries, human follies, and an animal-mad city in which zookeeping became a way of continuing politics by other means.

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Hi everyone, this post includes a brief recap of our August gathering, a bit of information on our September read and the list of titles recommended by book club members at our August gathering.

The SSC Library Book Club for Adults met on Friday, August 11, 2023.

We discussed our August read, Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn.

In brief, the thriller follows a group of four women who were recruited in the late nineteen seventies, when in their early twenties, by a clandestine vigilante agency known as The Museum. Once recruited, the Museum trained the women in all aspects of completing successful assassinations, including how to blend into the background in almost any situation; and then assigned them to assassinate evil individuals that international law was unable to bring to justice through normal legal channels.

Fast forward forty years, and the women are given a retirement cruise with all the bells and whistles as a thank you for work well done. The cruise has only just begun, when the women realize that the Museum has marked them to be eliminated! The balance of the book follows the women as they figure out a way out of their predicament, while utilizing their finely honed assassination skill set.

The majority of book club attendees greatly enjoyed the book; while one book club member thought the premise and action of the plot wasn’t realistic.

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Looking forward to September, our September Book Club for Adults gathering will be the Friday just after Labor Day – that is Friday, September 8, 2023.

We’ll be meeting for coffee, cookies, and conversation in the Community Room at the library from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Our September read is a sort of bon voyage to summer read, as the novel is set during an end of summer party. The book, Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid, is a family drama, focusing on the four adult children of a famous rock star who get together for their annual end of the summer bash and wind up awash in a sea of revelations and reflections that will alter the course of their lives.

 Copies of Malibu Rising may be picked up at the Circulation Desk at any time.

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And here are the books & videos our book club members recommended this month:

Books: The List

Apex: Hides The Hurt by Colson Whitehead

At The Broken Places: A Novel by John Boyne

Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man by David Von Drehle

Euphoria by Lisa King

First Ladies by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Amy Tan

Librarianist: A Novel by Patrick deWitt

Red Knife by William Kent Krueger

Videos: The List:

The Wife with Meryl Streep

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Books: The List with Descriptions:

Apex: Hides The Hurt by Colson Whitehead:

This “wickedly funny” (The Boston Globe) New York Times Notable Book from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys is a brisk, comic tour de force about identity, history, and the adhesive bandage industry.

The town of Winthrop has decided it needs a new name. The resident software millionaire wants to call it New Prospera; the mayor wants to return to the original choice of the founding black settlers; and the town’s aristocracy sees no reason to change the name at all. What they need, they realize, is a nomenclature consultant. And, it turns out, the consultant needs them. But in a culture overwhelmed by marketing, the name is everything and our hero’s efforts may result in not just a new name for the town but a new and subtler truth about it as well.

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At The Broken Places: A Novel by John Boyne:

Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She doesn’t talk about her escape from Nazi Germany at age 12. She doesn’t talk about the grim post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she doesn’t talk about her father, who was the commandant of one of the Reich’s most notorious extermination camps.

Then, a new family moves into the apartment below her. In spite of herself, Gretel can’t help but begin a friendship with the little boy, Henry, though his presence brings back memories she would rather forget. One night, she witnesses a disturbing, violent argument between Henry’s beautiful mother and his arrogant father, one that threatens Gretel’s hard-won, self-contained existence.

All The Broken Places moves back and forth in time between Gretel’s girlhood in Germany to present-day London as a woman whose life has been haunted by the past.  Now, Gretel faces a similar crossroads to one she encountered long ago. Back then, she denied her own complicity, but now, faced with a chance to interrogate her guilt, grief and remorse, she can choose  to save a young boy. If she does, she will be forced to reveal the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting. This time, she can make a different choice than before—whatever the cost to herself….

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Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man by David Von Drehle:

One of our nation’s most prominent writers finds the truth about how to live a long and happy life in the centenarian next door.

When a veteran Washington journalist moved to Kansas, he met a new neighbor who was more than a century old. Little did he know that he was beginning a long friendship—and a profound lesson in the meaning of life. Charlie White was no ordinary neighbor. Born before radio, Charlie lived long enough to use a smartphone. When a shocking tragedy interrupted his idyllic boyhood, Charlie mastered survival strategies that reflect thousands of years of human wisdom. Thus armored, Charlie’s sense of adventure carried him on an epic journey across the continent, and later found him swinging across bandstands of the Jazz Age, racing aboard ambulances through Depression-era gangster wars, improvising techniques for early open-heart surgery, and cruising the Amazon as a guest of Peru’s president.

David Von Drehle came to understand that Charlie’s resilience and willingness to grow made this remarkable neighbor a master in the art of thriving through times of dramatic change. As a gift to his children, he set out to tell Charlie’s secrets. The Book of Charlie is a gospel of grit—the inspiring story of one man’s journey through a century of upheaval. The history that unfolds through Charlie’s story reminds you that the United States has always been a divided nation, a questing nation, an inventive nation—a nation of Charlies in the rollercoaster pursuit of a good and meaningful life.

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Euphoria by Lisa King:

From New England Book Award winner Lily King comes a breathtaking novel about three young anthropologists of the 1930s caught in a passionate love triangle that threatens their bonds, their careers, and ultimately, their lives.

English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers’ deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband, Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell’s poor health, are hungry for a new discovery. When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby—the artistic, female-dominated Tam—he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone’s control.

Set between two World Wars and inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is an enthralling story of passion, possession, exploration, and sacrifice from accomplished author Lily King.

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First Ladies by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

A novel about the extraordinary partnership between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune—an unlikely friendship that changed the world, from the New York Times bestselling authors of the Good Morning America Book Club pick The Personal Librarian.

The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Mary McLeod Bethune refuses to back down as white supremacists attempt to thwart her work. She marches on as an activist and an educator, and as her reputation grows she becomes a celebrity, revered by titans of business and recognized by U.S. Presidents. Eleanor Roosevelt herself is awestruck and eager to make her acquaintance. Initially drawn together because of their shared belief in women’s rights and the power of education, Mary and Eleanor become fast friends confiding their secrets, hopes and dreams—and holding each other’s hands through tragedy and triumph.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected president, the two women begin to collaborate more closely, particularly as Eleanor moves toward her own agenda separate from FDR, a consequence of the devastating discovery of her husband’s secret love affair. Eleanor becomes a controversial First Lady for her outspokenness, particularly on civil rights. And when she receives threats because of her strong ties to Mary, it only fuels the women’s desire to fight together for justice and equality.

This is the story of two different, yet equally formidable, passionate, and committed women, and the way in which their singular friendship helped form the foundation for the modern civil rights movement.

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Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin

An eccentric young caretaker brings exuberant life to a smalltown French cemetery in this #1 international bestselling novel: “Enchanting” (Publishers Weekly).

Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne, France. Traversing the grounds by unicycle, tending to her many gardens—and being present for the intimate, often humorous confidences of visitors—Violette’s life follows the predictable rhythms of mourning. But then Violette’s routine is disrupted by the arrival of Julien Sole, the local police chief.

Julien has come to scatter the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger. It soon becomes clear that Julien’s inexplicable gesture is intertwined with Violette’s own complicated past.

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Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer:

Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites listeners to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book is not an identification guide, nor is it a scientific treatise. Rather, it is a series of linked personal essays that will lead general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings, from salmon and hummingbirds to redwoods and rednecks. Kimmerer clearly and artfully explains the biology of mosses, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us. Drawing on her diverse experiences as a scientist, mother, teacher, and writer of Native American heritage, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

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Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Amy Tan:

According to Confucius, “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” but Tan Yunxian—born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness—is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations—looking, listening, touching, and asking—something a man can never do with a female patient.

From a young age, Yunxian learns about women’s illnesses, many of which relate to childbearing, alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose—despite the prohibition that a doctor should never touch blood while a midwife comes in frequent contact with it—and they vow to be forever friends, sharing in each other’s joys and struggles. No mud, no lotus, they tell themselves: from adversity beauty can bloom.

But when Yunxian is sent into an arranged marriage, her mother-in-law forbids her from seeing Meiling and from helping the women and girls in the household. Yunxian is to act like a proper wife—embroider bound-foot slippers, pluck instruments, recite poetry, give birth to sons, and stay forever within the walls of the family compound, the Garden of Fragrant Delights.

How might a woman like Yunxian break free of these traditions, go on to treat women and girls from every level of society, and lead a life of such importance that many of her remedies are still used five centuries later? How might the power of friendship support or complicate these efforts? Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is a captivating story of women helping other women. It is also a triumphant reimagining of the life of a woman who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today.

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Librarianist: A Novel by Patrick deWitt:

From bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes the story of Bob Comet, a man who has lived his life through and for literature, unaware that his own experience is a poignant and affecting narrative in itself.

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.

Behind Bob Comet’s straight-man façade is the story of an unhappy child’s runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian’s vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob’s experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsize players to welcome onto the stage of his life.

With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition. The Librarianist celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity.

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Red Knife by William Kent Krueger:

Private investigator Cork O’Connor finds himself caught in the middle of a racial gang war that’s turning picturesque Tamarack County, Minnesota, into a battlefield.

When the daughter of a powerful businessman dies as a result of her meth addiction, her father, strong-willed and brutal Buck Reinhardt, vows revenge. His target is the Red Boyz, a gang of Ojibwe youths accused of supplying the girl’s fatal drug dose. When the head of the Red Boyz and his wife are murdered in a way that suggests execution, the Ojibwe gang mobilizes, and the citizens of Tamarack County brace themselves for war, white against red.

Both sides look to Cork O’Connor, a man of mixed heritage, to uncover the truth behind the murders. A former sheriff, Cork has lived, fought, and nearly died to keep the small-town streets and his family safe from harm. He knows that violence is never a virtue, but he believes that it’s sometimes a necessary response to the evil that men do. Racing to find answers before the bloodshed spreads, Cork himself becomes involved in the darkest of deeds. As the unspeakable unfolds in the remote and beautiful place he calls home, Cork is forced to confront the horrific truth: violence is a beast that cannot be contained.

In Red Knife, Krueger gives his readers a vivid picture of racial conflict in small-town America, as well as a sensitive look at the secrets we keep from even those closest to us and the destructive nature of all that is left unsaid between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, friends and lovers.

Reader’s Note: Red Knife is the eighth book in the Cork O’Connor mystery series. If you’d like to jump in and start reading from the beginning, check out book one: Iron Lake.

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Videos: The List with Description(s):

The Wife (2017) starring Meryl Streep and Jonathan Pryce

“Like a bomb ticking away toward detonation, Glenn Close commands the center of The Wife: still, formidable and impossible to look away from.

Playing the devoted wife of a celebrated novelist (Jonathan Pryce), and the keeper of his deepest, darkest secret, the actress gives one of the richest, most riveting and complicated performances of her career. Close is so extraordinary — at once charming and inscrutable, alternately warm and withering, tender but full of contained fury — that she lifts an otherwise ordinary movie; thanks to her, the film’s slightly on-the-nose satire of the literary world and its somewhat familiar portrait of a problematic marriage take on a gnawing urgency.

Directed by Swedish filmmaker Bjorn Runge (Daybreak) and adapted by Jane Anderson from Meg Wolitzer’s novel, The Wife opens in 1992. Joe and Joan Castleman are in their Connecticut home, trying, and failing, to fall asleep. The reason for their restlessness: Joe has been tipped to win the Nobel Prize in literature, and they’re hoping for an early-morning call from the committee. As they toss and turn, teasing each other and fooling around, the film establishes the ticklish, exasperated intimacy of a happily long-married couple.

The phone rings: Joe has indeed won the Nobel. At a party to celebrate the news, Joe’s agent informs the Castlemans that a major magazine is “bumping a story about Bill Clinton” to make room for a piece on Joe. The mention of the Clinton name is hardly incidental. Razor-sharp, disciplined and stoic (she barely flinches at Joe’s affairs), Joan is above all the dutiful guardian of her husband’s “brand” — and distinctly reminiscent of a certain presidential candidate who struggled to free herself from the shackles of her husband’s stature (and ego).” – Review from The Hollywood Reporter

Access the full review here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/wife-review-1039862/

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Have a great month!

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Hi everyone, the July SSCL Book Club for Adults gathering took place at the library on Friday, July 14, 2023.

We had a good time discussing our July read, Lessons In Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus.

Lessons in Chemistry relayed the story of chemist Elizabeth Zott as she struggled to maintain a scientific career in the nineteen fifties and sixties when, ahem…to say the least, America was a patriarchal society. And as happens in real life too, her life took several unanticipated turns including the unexpected death of her lover & fellow chemist Calvin Evans, the birth of her daughter Madeline and her side career as a TV cooking host. Elizabeth uses chemistry and the scientific method of reasoning in to make sense of her life, to assist her in cooking and, by extension, through her TV show to empower other women of the era.

The general consensus of book club members is that Lessons In Chemistry is a thumbs up, recommended read.  

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And as usual, at the end of our session, club members discussed books/movies, TV shows & podcasts they had enjoyed in the past month, and that they recommend.

Here is the list!

Book Club Members Recommended Reads:

Apex Hides The Hurt by Colson Whitehead

This “wickedly funny” (The Boston Globe) New York Times Notable Book from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys is a brisk, comic tour de force about identity, history, and the adhesive bandage industry.

The town of Winthrop has decided it needs a new name. The resident software millionaire wants to call it New Prospera; the mayor wants to return to the original choice of the founding black settlers; and the town’s aristocracy sees no reason to change the name at all. What they need, they realize, is a nomenclature consultant. And, it turns out, the consultant needs them. But in a culture overwhelmed by marketing, the name is everything and our hero’s efforts may result in not just a new name for the town but a new and subtler truth about it as well.

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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, this domestic drama serves as a microcosm for a profound political upheaval.

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Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

From the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to maturity

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

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The Fourth Enemy by Anne Perry

Working his way up at the London law firm fford Croft and Gibson, Daniel Pitt is named junior counsel on a fraud case with the potential to make or break his—and the firm’s—reputation. The trouble is, Malcolm Vayne, the man on trial, has deep pockets, and even deeper connections. Vayne’s philanthropic efforts paint him a hero in the eyes of the public, but Daniel’s friend Ian, a police officer, has evidence to suggest otherwise. Nervously working alongside Gideon Hunter, the new head of his firm, Daniel must find a way to prove that Vayne is guilty.

Meanwhile, Daniel’s new bride, forensic scientist Miriam fford Croft, befriends Rose Hunter, Gideon’s wife, and the two become engrossed in the women’s suffrage movement. Miriam finds herself among women who are brave and determined enough to undergo hunger strikes and prison sentences. Vayne’s image is improved by his support of their cause, but Miriam is not deceived.

Vayne’s trial reveals his deep political ambitions, and it heats up further when a crucial witness is found dead. When another witness is kidnapped, Daniel must set out on a rescue mission that puts his life—and the case against Vayne—in peril.

Anne Perry delivers another pulse-pounding mystery in her latest stand-alone Daniel Pitt novel.

Reader’s Note: This is the sixth book in the Daniel Pitt series; the successor to Perry’s Thomas Pitt series.

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Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book is not an identification guide, nor is it a scientific treatise. Rather, it is a series of linked personal essays that will lead general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings, from salmon and hummingbirds to redwoods and rednecks. Kimmerer clearly and artfully explains the biology of mosses, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us.

Drawing on her diverse experiences as a scientist, mother, teacher, and writer of Native American heritage, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

Gathering Moss will appeal to a wide range of readers, from bryologists to those interested in natural history and the environment, Native Americans, and contemporary nature and science writing.

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Home Front Girls by Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan

Dear Glory,

Loneliness is built into the fabric of this war, isn’t it? I say a little prayer before I stick my hand in the mailbox. The “Rockport, Massachusetts” stamp on the front of an envelope means the clouds will part, revealing a brilliant sun….

It’s January 1943 when Rita Vincenzo receives her first letter from Glory Whitehall. Glory is an effervescent young mother from New England, impulsive and free as a bird. Rita is a Midwestern professor’s wife with a love of gardening and a generous, old soul. These two women have nothing in common except one powerful bond: the men they love are fighting in a war a world away from home.

Brought together by an unlikely twist of fate, Glory and Rita begin a remarkable correspondence. The friendship forged by their letters allows them to survive the loneliness and uncertainty of waiting on the home front, and gives them the courage to face the battles raging in their very own backyards. Connected across the country by the lifeline of the written word, each woman finds her life profoundly altered by the other’s unwavering support.

Filled with unforgettable characters and unbridled charm, Home Front Girls is a timeless celebration of the strength and solidarity of women. It is a luminous reminder that even in the darkest of times, true friendship will carry us through.

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Independence by Chitra Divakaruni

Set during the partition of British India in 1947, a time when neighbor was pitted against neighbor and families were torn apart, award-winning author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel brings to life the sweeping story of three sisters caught up in events beyond their control, their unbreakable bond, and their incredible struggle against powerful odds.

India, 1947.

In a rural village in Bengal live three sisters, daughters of a well-respected doctor.

Priya: intelligent and idealistic, resolved to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a doctor, though society frowns on it.

Deepa: the beauty, determined to make a marriage that will bring her family joy and status.

Jamini: devout, sharp-eyed, and a talented quiltmaker, with deeper passions than she reveals.

Theirs is a home of love and safety, a refuge from the violent events taking shape in the nation. Then their father is killed during a riot, and even their neighbors turn against them, bringing the events of their country closer to home.

As Priya determinedly pursues her career goal, Deepa falls deeply in love with a Muslim, causing her to break with her family. And Jamini attempts to hold her family together, even as she secretly longs for her sister’s fiancé

When the partition of India is officially decided, a drastic—and dangerous—change is in the air. India is now for Hindus, Pakistan for Muslims. The sisters find themselves separated from one another, each on different paths. They fear for what will happen to not just themselves, but each other.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni outdoes herself with this deeply moving story of sisterhood and friendship, painting an account of India’s independence simultaneously exhilarating and devastating, that will make any reader—new or old—a devoted fan.

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Murder on Bedford Street by Victoria Thompson

Midwife Sarah Malloy and her private investigator husband, Frank, must stop a killer lurking among a young family in the newest installment of the USA Today bestselling Gaslight Mysteries.

Hugh Breedlove is far from the most agreeable client private investigator Frank Malloy has ever had, but his case is impossible to refuse: his young niece, Julia, has been wrongfully committed to an insane asylum by her cruel and unfaithful husband, Chet Longly. Though Breedlove and his wife seem more interested in protecting the family reputation than their niece’s safety, Frank and Sarah agree to help for the sake of Julia and the young son she left behind.

Frank and Sarah’s investigation reveals a dark secret—a maid at the Longly home died suspiciously under Chet’s watch, and now it seems Julia’s son might also be in danger. The Malloys fear they are dealing with a man more dangerous than they had anticipated, one who will do anything to defame his wife. But all is not as it seems in the Longly family, and perhaps another monster is hiding in plain sight….

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The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.

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Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel by Shelby Van Pelt

For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow’s unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus

After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors—until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late.

Shelby Van Pelt’s debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.

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The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.

In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.

As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.

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The Unknown Errors of Our Lives by Chitra Divakaruni

From acclaimed and beloved author Chitra Banerjee Divakarunicomes a new collection of moving stories about family, culture, and the seduction of memory. With the rich prose and keen insight that made Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart national bestsellers, these tales of journeys and returns, of error, of loss and recovery, all resound with her unique understanding of the human spirit.

“Don’t we all have to pay, no matter what we choose? “a young woman asks in “The Love of a Good Man,” one of the unforgettable stories in Chitra Divakaruni’s beautifully crafted exploration of the tensions between new lives and old. In tales set in India and the United States, she illuminates the transformations of personal landscapes, real and imagined, brought about by the choices men and women make at every stage of their lives.

“The Love of a Good Man” tells of an Indian woman happily settled in the United States who must confront the past when her long-estranged father begs to meet his only grandson. In the acclaimed “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter,” a widow, inadvertently eavesdropping, discovers that her cherished, old-fashioned ways are an embarrassment to her daughter-in-law. A young American woman joins a pilgrimage of women in Kashmir and, in the land of her ancestors, comes to view herself and her family in a new light in “The Lives of Strangers.” Two women, uprooted from their native land by violence and deception, find unexpected comfort and hope in each other in “The Blooming Season for Cacti.” And in the title story, a young woman turns to her painting and the wisdom of her grandmother for the strength to accept her fiance’s past when it arrives on her doorstep.

Whether writing about the adjustments of immigrants to a foreign land or the accommodations families make to the disruptive differences between generations, Divakaruni poignantly portrays the eternal struggle to find a balance between the pull of home and the allure of change.

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The Women’s Room by Marilyn French

“With The Women’s Room, Marilyn French joined Simone de Beauvoir, Ralph Ellison, and that very small group of writers whose words spark a movement.” —Gloria Steinem

In the 1950s, many American women left education and professional advancement behind in order to marry, only to find themselves adrift and unable to support themselves after divorcing their husbands twenty years later. Some became destitute; a few went insane. But many went back to school in the heyday of the Women’s Liberation movement, and were swept up in the promise of equality for both sexes.

The Women’s Room tells the story of one such woman: a suburban 1950s housewife named Mira who divorces her loathsome husband and returns to graduate school at Harvard. Loosely based on Marilyn French’s own life, the story of Mira and her friends offers wry, piercing insight into the inner lives of a generation of American women. A powerful indictment of the patriarchal social norms of the time, it caused an uproar when it was first published in 1977, changing the course of the feminist movement forever. Today, it remains timely and eerily relevant—a courageous novel infused with revolutionary fervor that examines the world of hopeful believers looking for new truths.

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Media:

Videos (of old cooking TV Shows – clips found on YouTube)

The Galloping Gourmet with Graham Kerr | Apple Barnhoff

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Julia Child | Boeuf Bourguignon | The French Chef Season 1

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The Bear TV Series, Season 1 & 2 (Hulu)

The Bear is an American comedy-drama television series created by Christopher Storer. It premiered on Hulu on June 23, 2022, and stars Jeremy Allen White as a young, award-winning chef who returns to his hometown, Chicago, to manage the chaotic kitchen at his deceased brother’s sandwich shop. The supporting cast includes Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Ayo Edebiri, Lionel Boyce, Liza Colón-Zayas, Abby Elliott, and Matty Matheson

The series has received widespread critical acclaim (particularly for the directing and performances of its cast) and numerous accolades. The first season earned 13 Emmy nominations including Outstanding Comedy Series and acting nominations for White, Moss-Bachrach, Edebiri, Jon Bernthal and Oliver Platt. – Wikipedia

The Bear, Season 1 Trailer

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Podcast:

Fresh Air (NPR): Getting To Know Co-host Tonya Mosley – Terry Gross interviews the new Fresh Air co-host Tonay Mosley:

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/11/1186958273/getting-to-know-co-host-tonya-mosley

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Moving on to August:

The SSC Library August Book Club for Adults gathering will be held at the library on Friday, August 11, 2023 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. and we’ll be moving into the Community Room where we will have more room to spread out and drink coffee.

The August Read is Killers Of A Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn.

In a nutshell, the book tells the tale of four friends and co-workers who were recruited by a shadowy government agency known as The Museum, forty years ago to become assassins. They are now about to retire and have been sent on a bon-voyage cruise by the head honchos of the Museum, and the cruise has only just begun when they discover someone from the Museum has decided to assassinate them! They must, of course, find out who wants them out of the way and why, and counteract that person or persons.

Copies of the book were picked up by several book members after our July meeting and we ran out. Additional copies of the book will be available at the library next week. If you have a challenging time obtaining a copy; or would like me to set one aside for you – let me know.

Have a great day,

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Email: reimerl@stls.org

Hi everyone, just a quick reminder the July Southeast Steuben County Library Book Club for Adults gathering it this Friday, July 14, 2023, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

We’ll be gathering in the Conference Room and will be be discussing Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus.

Looking forward to August, our August read is Killers of a Certain Age by Deana Raybourn.

And we’ll be meeting on Friday, August 11, 2023 at our usual time, 3:00 – 4:00 p.m., to discuss the mystery, which by the way features a cast of female middle age spies – I haven’t read the book yet but it got good reviews and sounds cool!

Stay cool & I hope to see everyone this Friday, July 14,

Linda

Hi everyone, our June gathering will be a week later than usual, so yours truly can attend staff training.

So we’ll be meeting at the library, in the Conference Room, one week later than usual, on Friday, June 16 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Our June Read is:

The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama, copies can be picked up at the Circulation Desk at any time.

And here are the notes for our May meeting:

Our May Book Club gathering was held on Friday, May 12, 2023.

Our May Read was Fox Creek by William Kent Krueger.

Fox Creek is the nineteenth book in the Cork O’Connor mystery series, which starts out with the mystery Iron Lake.

The main cast of Fox Creek includes:

The Good Guy Team:

The landscape – the mysteries are set in and around Aurora, Minnesota, which the author describes as being “A stone’s throw from the Canadian border.” And the author offers compelling descriptions of the landscape, almost as if the landscape is another character, in the mystery novels of the series, including this one.

Cork O’Connor, former police chief of Aurora, a private investigator and owner of Sam’s Place, a burger joint, at the edge of Iron Lake. Notably, Cork’s grandmother was a member of the local Iron Lake Ojibwe tribe. So Cork has a connection to the local Native peoples, including his wife Rainey and the elder healer Henry Meloux.

Henry Meloux, a Ojibwe elder, a member of the Grand Medicine Society, and a healer and spiritual advisor who has a home on the edge of the wilderness, between Aurora and the local Native American Reservation. 

Rainey Bisonette, Cork’s second wife a great-niece of Henry Meloux who assists Henry in his medicinal/healing ceremonies.

Stephen O’Connor, 21-year-old son of Cork and his late first wife Jo. Stephen has inherited Ojibwe spiritual gifts from his paternal great-grandmother and catches glimpses of future events in dreams. Stephen has previously had a dream showing Henry Meloux laying spread eagle on the ground as if he were dead. When Stephen told Henry about his prophetic dream, Henry replied that he had had the same dream.

Jenny O’Connor, Cork and his late wife Jo’s eldest child. Jenny is married to Daniel Bisonette, a nephew of Cork’s wife Rainey. She is also the mother of Aaron Small Dog O’Conner also know as Waabo or “Little Rabbit.”

Delores Morriseau, a woman looking for guidance, who as the book opens is with Henry and Rainey at Henry’s house, on the edge of the wilderness, is participating in a healing ceremony. Dolores’s husband Lou is currently missing.

Louis Morriseau, a real estate agent and a person of European and Native ancestry who has chosen to forgo forging a connection with his native heritage. Louis travels for work and frequently travels to Canada.

Anton Morriseau, Louis’s brother and a tribal policeman.

Bell Morriseau, Louis’s younger sister.

And in opposition, the Bad Guys Team:

An imposter Lou Morriseau who shows up at Cork’s burger stand looking for Delores

Kimball the man in charge of the bad guys.

And most prominently, on the bad guy side, the brains of the operation,  a former military man named LeLoup who has Native American heritage, a sixth sense about tracking prey and people, but who did not know his parents and has thus far led a wandering life, never putting down roots, simply becoming a mercenary for hire who is most comfortable in a wilderness setting.

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With those characters in mind, the basic plot of this adventure tale, briefly introduces Cork and Stephen who are flipping burgers at the family burger stand and meet a man who introduces himself as Louis Morriseau. This imposter tells Cork that he thinks his wife, Dolores, is having an affair with a local man, Henry Meloux. Cork doubts the man is who he says he is, is suspicious of his motives and clandestinely takes a photo of the man to show Henry and Dolores whom he believes is at Henry’s house.

The trio at Henry Meloux’s place, include Henry himself, aged about 100, Rainey and Dolores. Henry, has a spiritual sense about the world and has spent much time over the years in the woods that border his home – he is an outdoorsman of exceptional skill with dashes of Native spiritualism mixed in. And Henry leads Rainey and Dolores into the wilderness  and away from the danger he senses is coming; basically, away from the bad guys that are tracking Dolores. Readers learn that the bad guys are after Dolores as a means to making her missing husband Louis give them information they believe he has; what the information is, isn’t disclosed until readers get near the end of the book.

Cork visits Henry’s home to show Henry and Dolores a photograph of the fake Louis, and Dolores confirms the man in the photo isn’t her husband. Everything seems fine at Henry’s place, so Cork goes home, expecting Rainey to come home later – when she doesn’t arrive, he returns to Henry’s house and discovers the trio is gone, that bad guys are pursuing them; and he, in turn, and with the assistance of Louis’s brother Anton, pursues the bad guys hoping to bring Henry, Rainey and Dolores home safely.

And then Stephen goes on a side trip to visit Louis and Dolores’s home, and eventually Louis’s parent’s home on a quest to gather more information on Louis and what he has been working on. While on this mission he meets Louis’s sister, Belle, who joins him on the trip and they gather information that leads them to believe Louis is hiding out at the family’s cabin in remote Canada.

Returning to the other characters, Cork and Anton are still in the wilderness tracking the bad guys pursuing Henry, Rainey and Dolores.

And as one of the bad guys, LeLoup continues tracking the Henry/Rainey/Dolores trio he experiences a gradual spiritual awakening and eventually comes to the conclusion that the tracking mission he was paid for – to find Dolores – isn’t important – understanding the spiritual road he has found himself on, becomes his goal; and with Henry’s assistance and a spiritual ceremony that allows him a greater understanding of who he is – LeLoup, becomes known as The Prophet and switches sides from the bad guys team, to the good guys team.

Cork is eventually able to find Rainey, Henry and Dolores and is followed by a local recue team. Everyone, sans Henry, who intends to return to his home on foot, goes back to Aurora.

Longer rest-of-the-story short, Cork and Anton join Stephen and go to the Morriseau family cabin in Canada, where they find the real Louis who has been injured.

While the Cork-Anton-Stephen team are looking for and finding Louis, LeLoop, now the Prophet, goes to Cork & Rainey’s house in Aurora, where Rainey, Jenny, Daniel and Waboo are currently residing; because he realizes the head bad guy, Kimball, will break into the O’Connor family home to try and get information from Rainey and will likely kill her and other members of the family in the process.

LeLoop/The Prophet arrives at the Connor family home just in time, saves Rainey and then travels to Canada to assist the Cork-Anton-Stephen team in defeating the bad guys and getting Louis back to civilization safely.

And in the end, it turns out the big secret that Louis has been hiding and is ready to make public, is a secret international conspiracy to divert water from the wilderness, and lands of native tribes in the region and, in essence, leaving the local populations, in the impacted area, without an adequate supply of water.

LeLoop become The Prophet and goes on his now much more altruistic way into the wilderness. Louis is taken to a hospital for treatment and subsequently released and reunited with Dolores and the Cork-Stephen-Anton team returns home.  

Then the locals, and family members, gather at Henry Meloux’s cabin waiting to see if the ancient, and beloved, healer will return from the wilderness, or if the vision Henry and Stephen experienced means that his long-life is over and he will not return. Days and nights go by, Cork, Rainey and other locals wait around the campfire at Henry’s house. And…Henry returns saying that he is pleasantly surprised to find that his time to leave the physical world is not yet at hand.

End of book!

Several book club members loved the book and said they would like to read more titles by William Kent Krueger

The Cork O’Conner Mystery Series book order can be found here: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/k/william-kent-krueger/cork-oconnor/

Other book club members didn’t care for the book finding it a bit long, the switching of stories from Cork & Anton to Henry, Rainey & Dolores, to Stephen and Belle, distracting. And others said that the ending, having the locals and Cork, Rainey & family wait around the campfire for Henry to return, or not return – seemed superfluous.

And the book club hostess has thought about it, and decided that perhaps reading a book in a series, isn’t the best pick for a book club as there are story threads and character development that you might not be aware of if you only read one book in the series – but that you would be fully aware of if you read all the books in a series, making the reading experience much more fun. So we’ll skip reading any future series books for our book club; unless, of course, someone in the club recommends a series book that they think is outstanding.

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Book Club Members Recommended Reads & Views for May:

Catharine, Queen of the Tumbling Waters by Cynthia G Neale: A story of another strong woman, a real life Native American with French blood who lived in the 1700s in Pennsylvania and New York during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. Catharine Montour, obscure, but a heroine in our history, meets Benjamin Franklin and leads her people to safety when the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign to destroy all Iroquois villages is enacted. Another strong woman who breaks the lock on history’s understanding of Native American women. The author lives in the Finger Lakes region.

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Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964): Director Robert Aldrich’s all-star shocker concerns a Southern family with several skeletons in its closet. Believed by many to have murdered her lover over 30 years earlier, aging, reclusive-and wealthy-spinster Charlotte Hollis (Bette Davis) begins to lose her grip on sanity just as distant cousin Miriam (Olivia de Havilland) comes to live with her. Could it be a coincidence, or is something more sinister taking place? Joseph Cotten, Victor Buono, Mary Astor co-star in this macabre suspenser.

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The Kate Burkholder Mysteries by Linda Castillo

Book One is: Sworn To Silence: This is an exciting new thriller set against an English/Amish backdrop. Some secrets are too terrible to reveal… Some crimes are too unspeakable to solve… Painter’s Creek, Ohio may be a sleepy, rural town with both Amish and ‘English’ residents, but it’s also the place where a series of brutal murders shattered the lives of an entire community over a decade ago. When the killing stopped, it left in its aftermath a sense of fragility, and for the young Amish girl, Katie Burkholder, a realization that she didn’t belong. Now, 15 years, two dead parents and a wealth of experience later, Katie has been asked to return as Chief of Police.

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Psycho (1960): The Alfred Hitchcock’s landmark masterpiece of the macabre stars Anthony Perkins as the troubled Norman Bates, whose old dark house and adjoining motel are not the place to spend a quiet evening. No one knows that better than Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), the ill-fated traveler whose journey ends in the notorious “shower scene.” First a private detective, then Marion’s sister (Vera Miles) searches for her, the horror and the suspense mount to a terrifying climax where the mysterious killer is finally revealed.

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Three Pines TV Series (2022): Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and his team investigate a series of perplexing murders in the mysterious Eastern Townships village of Three Pines, uncovering the buried secrets of its eccentric residents and in the process forcing Gamache to confront buried secrets of his own. Based on the Louise Penney mysteries.

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The Tony Hillerman Leaphorn And Jim Chee Series: Book One is: The Blessing Way (1970): Witchcraft appears to be involved in the death of an Indian, whose body is found in Many Ruins Canyon, and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is charged with the task of solving the crime.

Viewing Note: There is a TV series based on the Hillerman western Leaphorn & Chee mysteries, titled Dark Winds, starring Zach McClarnon on AMC – that has received great reviews.

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Have a great day!

Linda