Talk About Books

  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

  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.

  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."

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

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. TransAtlantic begins in 1919 with the first nonstop aerial crossing of the Atlantic by two British pilots, John Alcock and Arthur Brown. The pair flew from Newfoundland to Ireland. (Eight years later, Alcock and Brown would be nudged into history's shadows by Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic.) Bring your airsickness bags into this opening chapter because McCann straps readers into that open cockpit and throttles forward on his spinning and spiraling descriptions of early air travel. Alcock and Brown were both veterans of World War I and, in McCann's account of their historic flight, the men are attempting to reclaim flying as a joyous freedom rather than an instrument of death. Freedom as well as war and peace are the big themes running throughout the other two history-based ocean crossings in this novel: Frederick Douglass visited Ireland in 1845