Book Discussion Groups
Our AAPI Month title is Thousand Cranes Yasunari Kawabata. We will be virtual again this month.
Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes is a luminous story of desire, regret, and the almost sensual nostalgia that binds the living to the dead. REGISTER HERE.
For National Poetry Month, we’ll be discussing selections from Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets. To receive a copy of the selected poems, please email programs@maplewoodlibrary.org.
We’ll be meeting on Zoom this month. Register here.
Our March title is Middlemarch by George Eliot
George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Through interweaving stories, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama.
The group will meet via Zoom this month. REGISTER HERE.
Our February read is In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
Inspired by a true story, this tale of courage during the Trujillo dictatorship follows three young sisters who were murdered for their part in an underground plot to overthrow the government.. Register here.
Our Black History Month read is Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Harlem Shuffle continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.
Register here to attend via Zoom.
Last House Before the Mountain by Monika Helfer
Based on the award-winning novelist’s own family history, this is a spellbinding multigenerational family saga set in a fractured rural village in WWI Austria.
In person at Hilton Branch AND virtual
Our January read is On Beauty by Zadie Smith, a wise, hilarious story of an interracial family whose misadventures in the culture wars serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political.
Register here to attend online
Upcoming titles:
February: Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
March: Middlemarch by George Eliot (This is a long read—plan ahead!)
Our December title is Woman of the Ashes by Mia Couto
Alternating between two voices, this novel combines folkloric prose with extensive historical research to give a spellbinding and unsettling account of war-torn Mozambique at the end of the nineteenth century. REGISTER HERE.
In person at Hilton Branch AND virtual
Our December title is Howards End by E.M. Forster
In turn-of-the-century England, a strong-willed and intelligent woman refuses to allow the pretensions of her husband's smug English family to ruin her life.
Upcoming titles are:
January: On Beauty by Zadie Smith
February: Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
March: Middlemarch by George Eliot (This is a long read—plan ahead!)
Our November title is In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner
This novel,rich with history, mythology, folklore, and emotion, will take you to the very depths of despair and reveal a gorgeously rich culture struggling to survive during the Cambodian genocide.
In person at Hilton Branch AND virtual
Our Native American Heritage Month title is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, and that the awakening of an ecological consciousness requires a celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.
Our October title is Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce, which centers the female body in a radical exploration of desire, choice, and consequences and revels in the narrator’s autonomy to make choices and face the outcomes. REGISTER HERE.
In person at Hilton Branch AND virtual
Our October title is The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Based on real events, this work of historical fiction is set against a missing-heir trial that divided Victorian England. Who gets to tell their story, and who is to be believed?
Our September title is The World in Half by Christina Henriquez. A woman sets out on a search for her father, the man she hopes can heal her ailing mother-and who can help her find the pieces of her own identity. Register here.
In person at Hilton Branch AND virtual
Our September title is Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli
An emotionally resonant, fiercely imaginative new novel about a family on the brink of a crisis, whose road trip across America collides with an immigration crisis at the southwestern border. Register here to attend via Zoom.
In person at Hilton Branch AND virtual
Our August title is Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Inspired by Dickens’ David Copperfield, this brilliant novel enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to maturity. Register to attend on Zoom.
Our July title is A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towle
Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose. Register to attend virtually.
In person at Hilton Branch AND virtual
Our Pride Month title is Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of black British women. It paints a vivid portrait of the state of post-Brexit Britain, as well as looking back to the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. Register to attend virtually.
Our June title is The Hop by Diana Clarke
A compelling feminist novel that tells the story of a poor scrappy girl from rural New Zealand who grows reluctantly into a sex icon, the face of a movement, and a mother, all at the same time.
Register here.
Our Pride Month title is Fine: a Comic About Gender by Rhea Ewing
Tender and wise, inclusive and inviting, Fine is an indispensable account for anyone eager to define gender in their own terms. Register here.
In our G(r)ay Matter Book Group we discuss works by contemporary LGBTQIA+ and Two-spirit authors in a variety of genres, including fiction, history, memoirs, poetry, science fiction, and graphic novels.
Our AAPI Month title is The Third Son by Julie Wu
The Third Son is a sparkling and moving story about a young boy with his head in the clouds who, against all odds, finds himself on the frontier of America’s space program.
REGISTER HERE
This is a virtual only event
AAPI Month read is the short story “The Elephant Vanishes” by Haruki Murakami. Murakami crosses the border between separate realities—and comes back bearing remarkable treasures.
Our May title is Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith by Grace Ellis, fictional and complex portrait of bestselling author Patricia Highsmith caught up in the longing that would inspire her queer classic, The Price of Salt.
In our G(r)ay Matter Book Group we discuss works by contemporary LGBTQIA+ and Two-spirit authors in a variety of genres, including fiction, history, memoirs, poetry, science fiction, and graphic novels.
Our April title is Under Milk Wood; a Play for Voices by Dylan Thomas
A moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh town, the play begins with dreams and ghosts before dawn and closes “as the rain of dusk brings on the bawdy night.”
Our April title is Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank by Erik Orner
The acclaimed cartoonist of one of the country’s most popular and longest-running gay comic strips presents a dazzling, irreverent biography of the iconic and iconoclastic Barney Frank, one of the first gay and out congressmen and a front-line defender of civil rights.
In our G(r)ay Matter Book Group we discuss works by contemporary LGBTQIA+ and Two-spirit authors in a variety of genres, including fiction, history, memoirs, poetry, science fiction, and graphic novels.
Our Women’s History Month title is Girl at War by Sara Novic Haunted by the civil war that forever changed her family, a young woman returns alone to Croatia, where she must rediscover the place that was once her home and search for the ghosts of those she's lost. REGISTER.
Our Women’s History Month title is The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray. J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, had to go to great lengths to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.
In person at Hilton Branch AND virtual. REGISTER TO ATTEND VIRTUALLY.
Our Women’s History Month title is What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart
This simmering, unsettling novel reveals the consequences of desire and influence, portraying two women whose lives have been transformed by love, loss, and secrecy. REGISTER.
In our G(r)ay Matter Book Group we discuss works by contemporary LGBTQIA+ and Two-spirit authors in a variety of genres, including fiction, history, memoirs, poetry, science fiction, and graphic novels.
Our Black History Month title is Mount Pleasant by Patrice Nganang
A majestic tale of colonialism and transformation, Mount Pleasant tells the astonishing story of the birth of modern Cameroon, a place subject to the whims of the French and the Germans, yet engaged in a cultural revolution. REGISTER HERE.
In person at Hilton Branch AND virtual
Our Black History Month title is Jazz by Toni Morrison. This profound story of love and obsession is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life.It transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery.
To attend via Zoom, REGISTER HERE.
Our February title is The Memory Librarian: and Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae
Monáe and collaborators write of the Afrofuturistic world of her critically acclaimed album, exploring how different threads of liberation -- queerness, race, gender plurality and love—become tangled with future possibilities of memory and time in such a totalitarian landscape ... and what the costs might be when trying to unravel and weave them into freedoms. REGISTER HERE.
In our G(r)ay Matter Book Group we discuss works by contemporary LGBTQIA+ and Two-spirit authors in a variety of genres, including fiction, history, memoirs, poetry, science fiction, and graphic novels.