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Adult Book Clubs

We have three book clubs to choose from:

  • Books & Brews meets the first Thursday of each month at 6 p.m. at the Amery Ale Works. This club reads a variety of fiction books, and even non-fiction on occasion.​
  • Mystery Book Club meets the second Tuesday of each month at 2:00 p.m. at the library.
  • Non-fiction Book Club meets the last Thursday of each month at 2:00 p.m. at the library
Books & Brews

Our Missing Hearts book jacket image

Next Meeting: Thursday, December 5th at 6 p.m. at the Amery Ale Works.

Book: Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear. Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in Harvard University’s 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 disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is drawn into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change. Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s a story about the power–and limitations–of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact. MORE record

 

Mystery Book Club

Next Meeting: Tuesday,  December 10th at 2 p.m. at the library

For the December meeting we are reading two books: one of Christmas themed short stories and one set in the winter wonderland that is Alaska.

Books:

The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P. D. James

cover of The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories - a set of short stories by P. D. James

  1. The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories is a set of four short stories by P. D. James.
  2. Mistletoe murder: a best-selling crime novelist describes the crime she herself was involved in fifty years earlier.
  3. A very commonplace murder: A clerk’s secret taste for pornography is only the first reason he finds for not coming forward as a witness to a murder.
  4. The Boxdale inheritance: Adam Dalgliesh is implored by his godfather to reinvestigate a notorious murder that threatens to reveal a dark family secret.
  5. The twelve clues of Christmas: Dalgliesh is drawn into a case that involves a family with “an aversion to natural death.

from the MORE record

Thin Ice by Paige Shelton

cover of Thin Ice - a mystery by Paige Shelton which is set in Alaska.

Beth Rivers is on the run – she’s doing the only thing she could think of to keep herself safe. Known to the world as thriller author Elizabeth Fairchild, she had become the subject of a fanatic’s obsession. After being held in a van for three days by her kidnapper, Levi Brooks, Beth managed to escape, and until he is captured, she’s got to get away. Cold and remote, Alaska seems tailormade for her to hideout. Beth’s new home in Alaska is sparsely populated with people who all seem to be running or hiding from something, and though she accidentally booked a room at a halfway house, she feels safer than she’s felt since Levi took her. That is, until she’s told about a local death that’s a suspected murder. Could the death of Linda Rafferty have anything to do with her horror at the hands of Levi Brooks? As Beth navigates her way through the wilds of her new home, her memories of her time in the van are coming back, replaying the terror and the fear–and threatening to keep her from healing, from reclaiming her old life again. Can she get back to normal, will she ever truly feel safe, and can she help solve the local mystery, if only so she doesn’t have to think about her own? from the MORE record

Past Books

Non-fiction Book Club

Non-fiction book club

Do you enjoy reading non-fiction? Then this is the book club for you.

In most book clubs, the members all read and discuss the same book at a meeting. However, when it comes to non-fiction, it is often difficult to obtain multiple copies of the same book. So, this book club uses a thematic approach instead. Each month the members read a book of their own choice about a theme that the group agreed upon at the previous meeting. Then at the book club meeting, each member talks about their book and what they learned.

The theme for November is Collections. Read a a book about a collection, a collector, or on collecting in general  and share what you learned at the meeting.

  • Next Meeting: Thursday,  November 21t from 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
  • Theme: Collections
  • Meeting location: Makerspace Room on the lower level of the library

Questions? Contact Trevor Richards, the library’s Adult Services Librarian, at (715) 268-3431 or trichards@amerylibrary.org