Hello everyone, just a quick reminder post!

The February 2025 Book Club for Adults gathering will be next Friday, February 14 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Our February Read is The Women by Kristin Hannah and copies are available at the Circulation Desk.

Our January Read, a New York Public Library recommended title, was Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman. A cliff notes overview of the plot is that it is a slice of life-style novel that chronicles the lives of a group of workers at a big box company. The workers cover the late-night-to-early-morning shift at the store unloading a new, huge supply truck each morning.  Waldman details how the group unloads the truck and goes on to detail the lives of several members of the group, most of who are working part-time and living paycheck to paycheck. And then, when they learn the store manager position is opening up, they concoct a scheme to get their much-disliked supervisor, whose people skills are sadly lacking, promoted to store manager with the hope that a member of their group will get promoted to the position of group supervisor. The scheme doesn’t go as planned and several of the workers move on before the end of the novel, which ends, much like it began with the remaining staff members getting ready to unload another supply truck.

Book club members did not care for this title. A comment was made by one of our members that she had worked in just such an environment, for a big box store, and thus lived the experience and didn’t need to relive it.

So, thumbs down for our January Read, which although a critically acclaimed title, wasn’t enjoyed by our group.

I have high hopes book club members will enjoy our February Read: The Women by Kristin Hannah, as it has been the kind of a book that I have found so engrossing it has been hard from me to stop reading it to do anything else!

Looking forward to next month, our March Read is a non-fiction title, Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond The White House (332 pages of text, plus notes/references). The presidents whose post-presidential lives are chronicled are Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush. And as there are only two copies of this book in the system, I will be bringing freebie copies to our February gathering.

And just a quick note for any new book club members – please join us – registration is not required, just show up – everyone is welcome! And if you haven’t finished the book, or didn’t care for it – please come anyway – you are welcome to join in the discussion or just sit and listen if you prefer. Light refreshments will be provided.

Have a great day everyone,

Linda Reimer, SSCL

Email: reimerl@stls.org