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April 2024 Book, A Visit from the Goon Squad

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  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month a Guilford Free Library at 6:30. Zoom is available, though we enjoy meeting in person. On April 17, 2024 we are discussing A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Kenya. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures

March 2024 Book, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

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  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library.    In American Dialogue, Ellis divides four chapters into two parts each: Then and Now.  Each chapter focuses on what he identifies as four enduring issues that are more salient and challenging in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Ellis establishes the historical foundation for each subject and then examines the complexity of each in the context of a divisive political climate complicated by domestic and international obstacles.  Acknowledging that a true conversation with the founders is obviously impossible, he attempts to connect their concerns regarding these controversial topics with those of modern America. Hence, his use of the term dialogue in his title.  The four areas he identifies are race, equality, law, and foreign policy. In each case, Ellis chooses one member of the founding generation as the central figure with whom to engage in his “dialogue”: For race,
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 Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. It's 1932, a time of hardship, adversity, and despair. Especially at the Lincoln Indian Training School, formerly a military outpost called Fort Sibley. It's a place where Indian children who have been taken from their families are sent so they can be educated in the ways of the white world. But it's really a place meant to obliterate every trace of their Indianness, by force if necessary. Odie O'Banion and his older brother Albert, orphans, are the only two white boys in the school. The opening pages describe their time in the school's quiet room, what used to be the military's solitary confinement cell. Odie tells the story from the viewpoint of his younger self: "The night was moonless, the tiny cell as black as pitch, our bed a thin matting of straw laid on the dirt floor, the door a great rectangle of rusted iron with a slot at the bottom for the de

January 2024 Book, The Mermaid Chair

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  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30 pm. On January 17th we will be discussing the Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd. Inside the church of a Benedictine monastery on Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. When Jessie is summoned home to the island to cope with her eccentric mother's inexplicable act of violence, she is living a conventional life with her husband, Hugh. Jessie loves Hugh, but once on the island, she finds herself drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk who is soon to take his final vows. Monk creates a community of unforgettable island women living in a natural setting of marshlands, tidal creeks and majestic egrets.  Is the power of the mermaid chair only a myth or will it alter the course of Jessie's life? What transpires will unlock the roots of her mo

December 2023 Book, Crossing to Safety

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  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at the Guilford Free Library at 6:30. On December 20th we will be discussing Wallace Stegner's novel, Crossing to Safety. Stegner is known as one of the "grand masters of American fiction". Set during the Depression in the mid 1930's, this is the story of two couples who form a fast, lifelong friendship. There is the open, couple from the West, with talents and dreams, but no prospects or connections who meets an open couple from the East with wealth, lakeside cottages, long lines of family certainties and generosity. Through the magic of friendship, what could have been a story of dreams and broken lives becomes a story of acceptance and affirmation. Stegner writes of the pleasures and perils and occasional penalties of closeness and about how much forgiveness can ever be given, or asked.

November 2023 Book, West With Giraffes

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  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. In this novel of historical fiction, Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave. It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world’s first female zoo director, a crusty old man with a past, a young female photographer with a secret, and assorted reprobates as spotty as the giraffes. Part adventure, part

October 2023 Book , Go with Me

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Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library.  The October 2023 selection is a short novel of only 160 pages, set in backwoods Vermont where the local villain, Blackway, is making life hellish for Lillian, a young woman from outside the area. Her boyfriend has fled the state in fear, and local law enforcement can do nothing to protect her. She resolves to stand her ground, and to fight back. Lillian enlists the powerful brute Nate and the wily old-timer Lester to take the fight to her tormenter whilst an eccentric Greek chorus of locals ponders her likely fate.   The novel was inspired by Thomas Malory's King Arthur Tales, specifically "The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkney".  This unusual little gem of a book is part comic romp and part nail-biting thriller. Castle Freeman writes with both wit and a deep understanding of the human psyche, and he does not cheat us out of a dramatic climax.