Talk About Books

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 5:30 at Guilford Free Library. All are welcome to contact the library, request a copy of the current book selection and join the discussion. F ranny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever further from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool—a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime—it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds. When Franny's dark secrets catch up with her, how much is she willing to risk for one more chance at redemption? Epic and intimate, heartbreaking and galvanizing, Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations is an ode ...

Local Vermont Author, Peter Gould will join us on August 19th to read and discuss his latest novel, Part for the Hole . This meeting will take place at the Broad Brook Community Center at 7:00 pm. on Wednesday, August 19th. About the author:  Peter Gould is a beloved Vermont-based writer and physical comedy performer. His first novel Burnt Toast was a back-to-the land fantasy. His young adult novel Write Naked sends a heart-felt climate change  message and his memoir Horse-drawn Yogurt is widely known. Peter is also a Shakespeare scholar running the annual "Get Thee to a Nunnery" Shakespeare theatre camp for kids. The list is impressively longer. Part for the Hole begins; "Call me Bob, Bob B. I rescued the National Endowment for the Arts at gunpoint. Not a brag, and if you don't want to believe me, then don't. I'll push on anyway. When you have an urge to tell the truth, ignoring it can be harmful to the health."  A simple news story can seize your im...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 5:30. All are welcome to contact the library, request a copy of the current book selection and join the discussion. Travels with Charley  is an intimate journey across America in 1962 as told by one of its most beloved writers, John Steinbeck. To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light--these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and the unexpected kindness of strangers.    

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 5:30 at Guilford Free Library. Let us know if you would like a copy of this selection.   The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline is an historical fiction novel set in 1840s Australia, focusing on the intersecting lives of three English female convicts and an orphaned Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, as they navigate hardship, oppression, and the search for freedom in a brutal penal colony . The story follows the women's journey from London's Newgate Prison to the penal colony in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) and explores themes of female friendship, resilience, and the devastating impact of colonization on the Aboriginal people.   The Exiles is  praised for its meticulous research and emotional depth, as  was Kline's previous success,  Orphan Train .    

  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...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at the Guilford Free Library at 6:30.  If this book interests you, you can request a copy from the library.  Fourth Uncle in the Mountain by Marjorie Pivar is an odyssey of a single-father folk hero and his foundling son in a land ravaged by the atrocities of war. It is a classic story complete with humor, tragedy, and insight, from a country where ghosts and magic are real. Set during the French and American wars in South Vietnam, Fourth Uncle in the Mountain is the true story of an orphan, Quang Van Nguyen, adopted by a sixty-four-year-old monk, Thau Van Nguyen Thau carries great responsibility for his people as a barefoot doctor. Wanted by the French regime, he must occasionally must flee in to the jungle, where he is perfectly at home living among the animals. As wise and resourceful as Thau is, he meets his match in his mischievous son. Quang is more interested in learning Cambodian sorcery and martial ...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. All are welcome to request a copy of the current selection and join in the discussion.  Maggie and Ira Moran have been married for twenty-eight years–and it shows: in their quarrels, in their routines, in their ability to tolerate with affection each other’s eccentricities.  Maggie is daring, enterprising and indulges her habit of pouring her heart out to every listening stranger, which naturally infuriates Ira, who, uncommunicative to start with, has reached the point where Maggie can divine his moods only from the pop songs of the 1950's that he whistles. Besides whistling, his pleasure is playing solitaire. He had dreamed of working on the frontiers of medicine, but after he graduated from high school his father, complaining of a heart problem, dumped the little family business on him, as well as the duty of suppo...

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at the Guilford Free Library at 6:30. The library provides copies of the monthly selection upon request. All are welcome to join any discussion. H is for Hawk is a 2014 memoir by British author Helen Macdonald. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year award, among other honours. As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White's tortured masterpiece, "The Goshawk," which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for £800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest o...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. All are welcome to request a copy of the month's selection and join the discussion  In 1915 Minnesota, Monte Becket—“a man fading, a disappointer of persons”—has lost his sense of purpose. His only success long behind him, Monte lives a simple life with his loving wife and whipsmart son. But when he befriends outlaw Glendon Hale, a new world of opportunity and experience presents itself. Glendon has spent years in obscurity, but the guilt he harbors for abandoning his wife, Blue, over two decades ago, has finally lured him from hiding. As the modern age marches swiftly forward, Glendon aims to travel back into his past—heading to California to seek Blue’s forgiveness. Beguiled and inspired, Monte soon finds himself leaving behind his own family to embark for the unruly West with his fugitive guide—a journey that will test the depth of his loyalties, the inviolability of his morals, and ...

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. Copies of the current month's selection are made available to patrons upon request. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, Erik Larson begins his nonfiction account of Berlin in 1933 when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person...

  Talk About Books meets every 3rd Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. All are welcome to participate at any time. Copies of the current month's selection are available at the library. You can reserve one by contacting us at 802-257-4603 or email from this website. The Sun Also Rises is the first novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway, following his experimental novel-in-fragments, In Our Time .  It portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bull fights. An early modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work," and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel . The characters are based on people in Hemingway's circle and the action is based on events, particularly Hemingway's life in Par...

Talk About Books meets every third Wenesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. 1491 is a groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, in which Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492. Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative...

 Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the Month at 5:00 at the Guilford Free Library.  Our March selection is Poetry 180: a Turning Back to Poetry. This anthology was inspired by Billy Collins's poem-a-day program with the Library of Congress. The poems were selected for readers who appreciate engaging, thoughtful poems that give immediate pleasure.   180-degree turn implies a turning back; in this case, to poetry. 180 poems represent the richness and diversity of the form, and is designed to beckon readers with a selection of poems that are impossible not to love at first glance.   Billy Collins was United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003.                                                                                  ...

  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...

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...