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December 2024 Book, Our Missing Hearts

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  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday at Guilford Free Library at 5:00 . This is a change from our past 6:30 start. We are hopeful that the new time will be more convenient during colder, darker winter days. In Celeste Ng's third novel, twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old. Bird has grown up disavo...
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November 2024 Book, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. Call or email the library if you would like a copy of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous for the November 20th discussion. A zoom option is available, but people do find that gathering in person is much more enjoyable. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but un...
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October 2024 Book, Beautiful World Where Are You?

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  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. Sally Rooney's third novel in five years takes its title from a line from a poem by Friedrich Schiller, which Schubert set to music in 1819. "Beautiful world, where are you?" is a question her two main female characters, best friends from college now on the cusp of 30, grapple with repeatedly in their struggles to figure out how they should live and find meaning in a troubled world that has become increasingly unviable on multiple levels — ecologically, economically, ethically and emotionally. Alice and Eileen are best friends, about to turn 30, who agree that human civilisation is facing collapse, beauty is dead, art is commodified and the novel irrelevant as a form. These smart Irish Marxists are best friends from college, and they have lives that are, in very different ways. Alice is an unfeasibly successful young writer and Eileen works for a literary magazine, e...
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September 2024 Book, Lonesome Dove

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  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. Let us know if you would like to read this month's selection and we will reserve a copy for you. Join our discussions any time. All are welcome. The September selection is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas. His novels included Horseman, Pass By (1962), The Last Picture Show (1966), and Terms of Endearment (1975). He was also a prominent screenwriter, book collector and bookseller. The novel, set in the waning days of the Old West, centers on the relationships between several retired Texas Rangers and their adventures driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana. The novel contains themes including old age, death, unrequited love and friendship.  Lonesome Dove was critically acclaimed and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986.
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August 2024, Talk About Books on Vacation - no meeting

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July 2024 book, The Color of Water

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  Talk About books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. If the book of the month interests you, contact the library to reserve a copy and join in the discussion. In this memoir, James McBride tells the story of growing up as a son of his white, Jewish mother Ruth. Ruth was born in Poland and raised in Suffolk, Va, the daughter of an itinerant rabbi and a loving, disabled mother who spoke no English. At 17, Ruth fled the South, landed in Harlem, married a black man in 1941, founded a church, was twice widowed and raised 12 children in New York City. Despite hardship, poverty, and suffering, Ruth sent all 12 of her children to college. An astounding story of triumph over poverty and cruelty, through love, courage and determination. It leaves one to acknowledge that "truth can be stranger than fiction."
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June 2024 Book, Life of Pi

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Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. Pi is 17 when he and his zookeeper family decide to escape the political instability of 1970's India and move, animals and all, to Canada. They load their animals onto a Japanese cargo ship named the Tsimtsum and set sail, for the New World, but for reasons that will forever elude the maritime authorities, the Tsimtsum sinks -- suddenly and violently -- just before dawn on its fourth day out of Manila. Only five survivors are able to reach the single lifeboat that doesn't go down with the ship: Pi himself, an injured zebra, a prize Borneo orangutan, one very nervous hyena and a tiger who (thanks to a clerical error that confused the names of the animal and its captor) is called Richard Parker. They make for a rather volatile crew. The politics of the animal kingdom being what they are, the zebra, the orangutan and the hyena are quickly dispatched, leaving boy and tiger alone ...
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