Book Discussions

Third Thursday is an informal group, open to all, no sign up necessary. Reserve your book at the adult circulation desk or online. Summary "Catherine and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just fallen giddily in love yet again. Catherine, seemingly placid and content, has ghosts of a past she scarcely remembers. When Catherine's long-forgotten high school friend dies and leaves Catherine the guardian of her teenage daughter, that past comes rushing back. As Oliver manages his new love, and Catherine her new charge and darker past, local news reports turn up the volume on a serial killer who has reappeared after years of quiet" --Publisher description. Antonya Nelson is the author of eight books of fiction, including Female Trouble and the novelsTalking in Bed, Nobody's Girl, and Living to Tell. Nelson's work has appeared in theNew Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Redbook, and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Grant, and, recently, the Rea Award for Short Fiction. She is married to writer Robert Boswell and lives in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, where she holds the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Desperate and alone, game warden Mike Bowditch strikes up an uneasy alliance with a retired warden pilot, and together the two men journey deep into the Maine wilderness in search of a runaway fugitive--Mike's father. But the only way for Mike to save his father is to find the real killer--which could mean putting everyone he loves in the line of fire.   Join us on the first Monday of the month for a lively discussion of this month’s title and other of life’s mysteries. Copies of the book are usually available at the circulation desk or can be reserved online or by asking at the desk. This discussion also features cheese pizza while it lasts. Free and open to all.

“Clegg is both delicately lyrical and emotionally direct in this masterful novel, which strives to show how people make bearable what is unbearable.” Booklist Third Thursday is an informal group, open to all, no sign up necessary. Reserve your book at the adult circulation desk or online.

His tranquility as the established vicar of a New Age village shattered by the murder of an unpopular woman, former MI5 agent Max Tudor struggles with past demons while trying to identify a killer in his peaceful community. Join us on the first Monday of the month for a lively discussion of this month’s title and other of life’s mysteries. Copies of the book are usually available at the circulation desk or can be reserved online or by asking at the desk. This discussion also features cheese pizza while it lasts. Free and open to all.

Amy Donovan from Franklin County Solid Waste District will join us to discuss Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash by Edward Humes. "Zestful in his curiosity and irrepressible in his vivid chronicling...Humes finds hope in the innovative work of dedicated garbologists, trash trackers, and activists who are intent on exposing the hazards and travesties of excessive trash and pointing the way to the 'low-waste path.'" - Booklist (starred review) "An eye-opening account reminding us of something we try to forget:  We are a wasteful society with a trash problem that is polluting our oceans and packing our landfills." - The Boston Globe Books are available at the library.  This free Deerfield Reads event is sponsored in part by Deerfield Cultural Council, Friends of Tilton Library and Greenfield Cooperative Bank.

Join us on the first Monday of the month for a lively discussion of this month’s title and other of life’s mysteries. Copies of the book are usually available at the circulation desk or can be reserved online or by asking at the desk. This discussion also features cheese pizza while it lasts.  Free and open to all. Booklist Reviews *Starred Review* On remote and sparsely populated Ellesmere Island, half-Inuit Edie Kiglatuk, who has never lost a client, is the best guide in the Canadian High Arctic. Then one of two southerner white men, who hire Edie for a hunting expedition, is mysteriously shot and killed in an incident that local authorities cover up. When the victim's colleague returns for a trip led by Joe Inukpuk, Edie's beloved stepson, the man is lost in a blizzard, and Joe struggles home, incoherent and frostbitten, and soon commits suicide. Devastated by her loss, Edie—a 33-year-old divorcée, recovered alcoholic, and part-time teacher, who was financing Joe's nursing training—falls off the wagon temporarily before setting out to prove the connection between the recent events. With occasional help from police sergeant Derek Palliser, a man obsessed with lemmings and a failed love affair, she risks her life to find the truth. In a gripping debut novel, McGrath (who has written nonfiction as Melanie McGrath) transports the reader to a land of almost incomprehensible cold and an unfamiliar but fascinating culture, taking on issues of climate change, energy exploration, local politics, and drug and alcohol abuse. Edie, a fiercely independent woman in a male-dominated milieu, is sure to win fans. Expect great things from this series. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.    

Dr. Atul Gawande's acclaimed bestseller, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, has started a national conversation about the deep flaws in our society's current treatment of people with serious illness and those who are facing end of life. Using Dr. Gawande's book as a springboard and drawing on the rich resources of Cooley Dickinson Health Care, local librarians and medical professionals will look closely at our goals for end-of-life care and being to plan how to bring about better outcomes for ourselves and our loved ones.  Discussion led by Cooley Dickinson Health Care professional. This is a project of libraries in Hampshire and Franklin Counties and Cooley Dickinson Health Care and is free and open to all. Copies of the book are available online or at the adult circulation desk.

Join us on the first Monday of the month for a lively discussion of this month’s title and other of life’s mysteries. Copies of the book are usually available at the circulation desk or can be reserved online or by asking at the desk. This discussion also features cheese pizza while it lasts. Free and open to all. "When 13-year-old Jace Wilson witnesses a brutal murder, he's plunged into a new life, issued a false identity and hidden in a wilderness skills program for troubled teens. The plan is to get Jace off the grid while police find the two killers. The result is the start of a nightmare. The killers, known as the Blackwell Brothers, are slaughtering anyone who gets in their way in a methodical quest to reach him. Now all that remains between them and the boy are Ethan and Allison Serbin, who run the wilderness survival program; Hannah Faber, who occupies a lonely fire lookout tower; and endless miles of desolate Montana mountains. The clock is ticking, the mountains are burning, and those who wish Jace Wilson dead are no longer far behind" -- from publisher's web site.

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience of new love ends under threat of scandal. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude. John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world. Third Thursday is an informal group, open to all, no sign up necessary. Reserve your book at the adult circulation desk or online.

When a grisly murder occurs on a Scottish island, Edinburgh detective Fin Macleod must confront his past if he is ever going to discover if the killing has a connection to another one that took place on the mainland. Join us on the first Monday of the month for a lively discussion of this month’s title and other of life’s mysteries. Copies of the book are usually available at the circulation desk or can be reserved online or by asking at the desk. This discussion also features cheese pizza while it lasts. Free and open to all.