Talk About Books

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at the Guilford Free Library at 6:30. The library provides copies of the monthly selection upon request. All are welcome to join any discussion. H is for Hawk is a 2014 memoir by British author Helen Macdonald. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year award, among other honours. As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White's tortured masterpiece, "The Goshawk," which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest o...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. All are welcome to request a copy of the month's selection and join the discussion  In 1915 Minnesota, Monte Becket—“a man fading, a disappointer of persons”—has lost his sense of purpose. His only success long behind him, Monte lives a simple life with his loving wife and whipsmart son. But when he befriends outlaw Glendon Hale, a new world of opportunity and experience presents itself. Glendon has spent years in obscurity, but the guilt he harbors for abandoning his wife, Blue, over two decades ago, has finally lured him from hiding. As the modern age marches swiftly forward, Glendon aims to travel back into his past—heading to California to seek Blue’s forgiveness. Beguiled and inspired, Monte soon finds himself leaving behind his own family to embark for the unruly West with his fugitive guide—a journey that will test the depth of his loyalties, the inviolability of his morals, and ...

  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.                                                                                  ...