Talk About Books

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...

  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...

  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...

  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.