Events

February Book Selection:

The Help
by Kathryn Stockett

In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another. Check Library Catalog »

Upcoming Books:

• TBA

March Book Selection:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz

Oscar is an overweight Dominican from the ghetto in New Jersey. He dreams of becoming a writer and finding love, but Fuko, the curse has haunted his family for generations. Check Library Catalog »

Upcoming Books:

• TBA

February Book Selection

Cold Sassy Tree
by Olive Burns

The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around - fast. When Grandpa E. Rucker Blakeslee announces one July morning in 1906 that he's aiming to marry the young and freckledy milliner, Miss Love Simpson - a bare three weeks after Granny Blakeslee has gone to her reward - the news is served up all over town with that afternoon's dinner. And young Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a major scandal. Boggled by the sheer audacity of it all, and not a little jealous of his grandpa's new wife, Will nevertheless approves of this May-December match and follows its progress with just a smidgen of youthful prurience.

As the newlyweds' chaperone, conspirator, and confidant, Will is privy to his one-armed, renegade grandfather's second adolescence; meanwhile, he does some growing up of his own. He gets run over by a train and lives to tell about it; he kisses his first girl, and survives that too. Olive Ann Burns has given us a timeless, funny, resplendent novel - about a romance that rocks an entire town, about a boy's passage through the momentous but elusive year when childhood melts into adolescence, and about just how people lived and died in a small Southern town at the turn of the century. Inhabited by characters who are wise and loony, unimpeachably pious and deliciously irreverent, Cold Sassy, Georgia, is the perfect setting for the debut of a storyteller of rare brio, exuberance, and style. Check Library Catalog »

April Book Selection

The Glass Castle
by Jeanette Walls

The second child of a scholarly, alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing from the Arizona desert, to Las Vegas, to an Appalachian mining town, during which her siblings and she fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities. Check Library Catalog »

Upcoming Book Schedule:

• May 13: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
• June 10: My Dog Skip, by Willie Morris
• July 8: Three Junes, by Julia Glass
• August 12: The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
• September 9: Breathing Lessons, by Ann Tyler

March Book Selection

Same Kind of Different As Me
by by Ron Hall & Denver Moore, with Lynn Vincent

A dangerous, homeless drifter who grew up picking cotton in virtual slavery. An upscale art dealer accustomed to the world of Armani and Chanel. A gutsy woman with a stubborn dream. A story so incredible no novelist would dare dream it.

It begins outside a burning plantation hut in Louisiana…and an East Texas honky-tonk…and, without a doubt, in the heart of God. It unfolds in a Hollywood hacienda…an upscale New York gallery…a downtown dumpster…a Texas ranch.

Gritty with pain and betrayal and brutality, this true story also shines with an unexpected, life-changing love. Check Library Catalog »

Upcoming Book Schedule:

• April 27: The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
• May 25: Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder
• June 22: Skeletons at the Feast, by Christopher Bohjalian
• July 27: Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson
• August 24: The Guernsey Literary Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

March Book Selection

The Magician's Assistant
by Ann Patchett

After the death of Parsifal, a homosexual magician, his female assistant and wife journeys from Los Angeles to Nebraska in search of the man's hidden past and discovers his estranged family, as well as the love she has always been denied Check Library Catalog »

Upcoming Book Schedule

• April 20: The Zoo Keeper's Wife, by Diane Ackerman
• May 18: South of Broad, by Pat Conroy

March Book Selection

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery

We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. René, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, René is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and René hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through René's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us. Check Library Catalog

Upcoming Book Schedule

• April 27: Bridge of Sighs, by Richard Russo
• May 25: The Lace Reader, by Brunonia Barry
• June 22: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows