Talk About Books

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 5:30 at Guilford Free Library. All are welcome to join in the discussion. If this book interests you, contact the library for a copy. "Samantha Harvey, one of the most consistently surprising contemporary British novelists, becomes something like the cosmic artificer of our era with her slim, enormous novel Orbital , which imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Orbital is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it’s barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare. It’s barely a novel because it barely tells a plotted set of human stories, and the stories it does tell barely interact with one another....But this minimal fictionality is not really the point; it’s merely the ransom paid to the genre in order to resemble the novelistic. The point is everything else: the alm...

Talk About Books meets every Wednesday of the month at 5:30 at Guilford Free Library. Contact the library for a copy if you are interested in reading and talking about this.   Cristabel Seagrave has always wanted her life to be a story, but there are no girls in the books in her dusty family library. For an unwanted orphan who grows into an unmarriageable young woman, there is no place at all for her in a traditional English manor. But from the day that a whale washes up on the beach at the Chilcombe estate in Dorset, and twelve-year-old Cristabel plants her flag and claims it as her own, she is determined to do things differently. With her step-parents blithely distracted by their endless party guests, Cristabel and her siblings, Flossie and Digby, scratch together an education from the plays they read in their freezing attic, drunken conversations eavesdropped through oak-panelled doors, and the esoteric lessons of Maudie their maid. But as the children grow to a...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 5:30 at Guilford Free Library. All are welcome to attend any of the meetings. Call or email to request a copy of the March selection, Let the Great world Spin by colum McCann.    In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful novel comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the tightrope walker’s “artistic crime of the century.”

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 5:30.  All are welcome. There is no registration required. Just let the library know if you would like a copy of the book.   Long Bright River by Liz Moore, is a poignant and thought-provoking read that delves deep into the ties that bind and the forces that tear us apart. Moore’s empathetic storytelling offers a window into the struggles of addiction and the enduring hope of redemption. While it may not be a breezy read, its emotional depth and compelling characters make it a worthwhile journey. The story centers on two sisters, Mickey and Kacey, who, despite sharing the same troubled upbringing, have chosen starkly different paths. Mickey is a dedicated police officer patrolling the gritty streets of Kensington, a neighborhood ravaged by addiction. Kacey, on the other hand, has succumbed to the very vices Mickey battles daily, living on the streets and grappling with heroin addict...

Talk About Books   meets the third Wednesday of the month at the Guilford Free Library. Winter meeting time is at 5:30.   Home tells the story of Frank Money, an African-American veteran traumatized by his experiences in the Korean war. He has been back in America for a year, but feels too violent and dislocated to go home to Georgia, where his younger sister still lives. As the novel opens, Frank finds himself restrained in a hospital, but can't remember exactly why he's there. He has received a mysterious letter from a woman named Sarah, telling him that he must hurry home and rescue his younger sister from some unnamed danger: "Come fast. She be dead if you tarry." So Frank breaks out of the hospital, shoeless in the dead of the winter, and begins to make his way cross-country to Georgia, relying on the kindness of strangers and trying to suppress his traumatic memories of the war as he goes.  Morrison cross-cuts Frank's story with that of his sist...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at the Guilford Free Library. Current meeting time is 5:30.  This discussion is scheduled for December 17th to provide extra reading time for this 498 page book. In William Boyd's  Any Human Heart, the fictional writer,  Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, was born in 1906, and died of a heart attack on October 5, 1991, aged 85. From his early childhood in Montevideo, son of an English corned beef executive and his Uraguayan secretary, through his years at a Norfolk public school and Oxford, Mountstuart traces his haphazard development as a writer. Early and easy success is succeeded by a long half-century of mediocrity, disappointments and setbacks, both personal and professional, leading him to multiple failed marriages, internment, alcoholism, and abject poverty. Mountstuart's sorry tale is also the story of a British way of life in inexorable decline, as his journey takes in the Bloomsbury set, the General Str...