Talk About Books

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. Copies of the current month's selection are made available to patrons upon request. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, Erik Larson begins his nonfiction account of Berlin in 1933 when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person...

  Talk About Books meets every 3rd Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. All are welcome to participate at any time. Copies of the current month's selection are available at the library. You can reserve one by contacting us at 802-257-4603 or email from this website. The Sun Also Rises is the first novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway, following his experimental novel-in-fragments, In Our Time .  It portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bull fights. An early modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work," and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel . The characters are based on people in Hemingway's circle and the action is based on events, particularly Hemingway's life in Par...

Talk About Books meets every third Wenesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. 1491 is a groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, in which Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative...

 Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the Month at 5:00 at the Guilford Free Library.  Our March selection is Poetry 180: a Turning Back to Poetry. This anthology was inspired by Billy Collins's poem-a-day program with the Library of Congress. The poems were selected for readers who appreciate engaging, thoughtful poems that give immediate pleasure.   180-degree turn implies a turning back; in this case, to poetry. 180 poems represent the richness and diversity of the form, and is designed to beckon readers with a selection of poems that are impossible not to love at first glance.   Billy Collins was United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003.                                                                                  ...

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 5:00. Zoom is available by request, but most people prefer in-person discussion. The Little Prince or Le Petit Prince , is a novella written and illustrated by French writer and military pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It was first published in April 1943 in the United States and then posthumously in France following liberation. de Saint-Exupéry's works had been banned by the Vichy Regime. The story follows a young prince who visits various planets, including Earth, and addresses themes of loneliness, friendship, love and loss. Despite its style as a children's book, The Little Prince makes observations about life, adults, and human nature. To determine if grownups are as enlightened as a child, the narrator shows them a picture depicting a boa  constrictor that has eaten an elephant. The adults always reply that the picture represents a hat, so he knows to only talk of "reasonable...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 5:00 at Guilford Free Library. Zoom is available, though we do love to meet in person. In LEileen Garvin's novel, Crow Talk , Frankie O’Neill and Anne Ryan would seem to have nothing in common. Frankie is a lonely ornithologist struggling to salvage her dissertation on the spotted owl following a rift with her advisor. Anne is an Irish musician far from home and family, raising her five-year-old, Aiden, who refuses to speak. At Beauty Bay, a community of summer homes nestled on the shores of June Lake, in the remote foothills of Mount Adams, it’s off-season with most houses shuttered for the fall. But Frankie, adrift, returns to the rundown caretaker’s cottage that has been in the hardworking O'Neill family for generations—a beloved place and a constant reminder of the family she has lost. And Anne, in the wake of a tragedy that has disrupted her career and silenced her music, has fled to the neighboring ho...