August 2024, Talk About Books on Vacation - no meeting

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January 2025 Book, Crow Talk

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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...
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  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...
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  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 5:00. Zoom is available by request, but most people prefer in-person discussion. The Little Prince or Le Petit Prince , is a novella written and illustrated by French writer and military pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It was first published in April 1943 in the United States and then posthumously in France following liberation. de Saint-Exupéry's works had been banned by the Vichy Regime. The story follows a young prince who visits various planets, including Earth, and addresses themes of loneliness, friendship, love and loss. Despite its style as a children's book, The Little Prince makes observations about life, adults, and human nature. To determine if grownups are as enlightened as a child, the narrator shows them a picture depicting a boa  constrictor that has eaten an elephant. The adults always reply that the picture represents a hat, so he knows to only talk of "reasonable...
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