Talk About Books

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at the Library at 6:30. Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction. Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a ...

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. Books are selected for the next month by  group consensus at the meeting. Days Without End by Sebastian Barry is the story of  Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen who, having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the U.S. Army in the 1850s. With his brother in arms, John Cole, Thomas goes on to fight in the Indian Wars—against the Sioux and the Yurok—and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, the men find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in. Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry’s latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history.

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. We are not committed to any particular genre, but select according to group interest for the next month.  For May we selected The Lost City of the Monkey God , a work of nonfiction by Douglas Preston. Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on ...

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. We are not committed to any particular genre, but select according to group interest for the next month. At the March meeting, the attendees decided they wanted to read a classic, thus Persuasion by Jane Austen is our choice for discussion on April 20th.   Persuasion is the last novel completed by Jane Austen. It was published at the end of 1817, six months after her death.  The story concerns Anne Elliot, a young Englishwoman of twenty-seven years, whose family moves to lower their expenses and reduce their debt by renting their home to an Admiral and his wife. The wife's brother, Navy Captain Frederick Wentworth, was engaged to Anne in 1806, but the engagement was broken when Anne was "persuaded" by her friends and family to end their relationship. Anne and Captain Wentworth, both single and unattached, meet again after a seven-year separation, setting the scene for many...

  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 current book by emailing or calling the library. Nora Webster is set in a small town in Ireland in the 1960s, where a fiercely compelling, too-young widow and mother of four moves from grief, fear, and longing to unexpected discovery.  Set in Wexford, Ireland, and in breathtaking Ballyconnigar by the sea, Colm Toibin's eighth novel introduces the formidable, memorable Nora Webster. Widowed at 40, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world she was born into. Wounded and self-centered from grief and the need to provide for her family, she struggles to be attentive to her children's needs and their own difficult loss. In masterfully detailing the intimate lives of one small family, Toibin has given us a vivid portrait of a time and an intricately ...

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday at 6:30. There is a choice of attending via zoom or coming to the Library. Dictionaries tend to be utilitarian, unglamorous things—pulled off of a shelf when needed, but otherwise gathering dust, especially as readers turn to digital resources. But in the preface of her debut novel, The Liar’s Dictionary , Eley Williams shrugs off that drab image, inviting readers through her spry language to imagine their own perfect dictionary and all the tangibles and intangibles it would possess. The structure of the book even mimics a dictionary, with a chapter for every letter of the alphabet, beginning with “A” for “artful” and “Z” for the tongue-twisting “zugzwang.” This invitation to see dictionaries as playgrounds and words as chewing gum sets a jovial yet cerebral tone that suits the stories of the two main characters, doubles living a century apart. In the modern day, Mallory is an intern at the struggling Swansby House, publish...

  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. If this book appeals to you, contact the library for a copy and join in on our discussion in the New Year, January 19, 2022.  “Hamnet”  by Maggie O'Farrell, is an exploration of marriage and grief written into the silent opacities of a life that is at once extremely famous and profoundly obscure." [ The editors of The Book Review chose this as one of the 10 best books of 2020 . ] Countless scholars have combed through Elizabethan England’s parish and court records looking for traces of William Shakespeare. But what we know for sure, if set down unvarnished by learned and often fascinating speculation, would barely make a slender monograph. As William Styron once wrote, the historical novelist works best when fed on short rations. The rations at Maggie O’Farrell’s disposal are scant but tasty, just the kind of morsels to nourish an empathetic imagination. We know, for instance, that ...