Bookworms and Popcorn
Love to read? Love popcorn? Come hang out with other kids who do too! Share your book suggestions or ask for recommendations. No assigned books, just great ideas and great snacks! Grades 2-5
Events Calendar / Book Discussion
McAuliffe Book Discussion (Evening): The Wedding People by Alison Espach
The McAuliffe Branch hosts two book discussion groups to discuss various fiction and nonfiction, as well as contemporary and classic literature. You can join us anytime to discuss one particular book or become a regular.
The Wedding People by Alison Espach
- "A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.
It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She’s immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years―she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan―which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.
In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined―and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us."
Sci-Fi Book Discussion: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Sci-Fi Book Discussion reads and discusses both classic and contemporary science fiction, covering subgenres such as speculative fiction, alternate history, and apocalyptic. This discussion meets the second Wednesday of the month, from 7-8 pm. This group is hybrid, meeting at the Main Library and streaming to Zoom. Register here: https://bit.ly/fpl-scifidiscussion
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- "It’s an ordinary Thursday morning for Arthur Dent . . . until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly after to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur’s best friend has just announced that he’s an alien.
After that, things get much, much worse.
With just a towel, a small yellow fish, and a book, Arthur has to navigate through a very hostile universe in the company of a gang of unreliable aliens. Luckily the fish is quite good at languages. And the book is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . . . which helpfully has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on its cover.
Douglas Adams’s mega-selling pop-culture classic sends logic into orbit, plays havoc with both time and physics, offers up pithy commentary on such things as ballpoint pens, potted plants, and digital watches . . . and, most important, reveals the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything.
Now, if you could only figure out the question. . . ."
Bookworms and Popcorn
Love to read? Love popcorn? Come hang out with other kids who do too! Share your book suggestions or ask for recommendations. No assigned books, just great ideas and great snacks! Grades 2-5
Queer Reads: Just Kids by Patti Smith
The Queer Reads Book Discussion celebrates queer authors, books, and themes. This discussion meets in person every third Tuesday of the month at the McAuliffe Branch.
Just Kids by Patti Smith
- "It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-Second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max’s Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous, the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years.
Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late sixties and seventies and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists’ ascent, a prelude to fame."
McAuliffe Book Discussion (Morning): The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
The McAuliffe Branch hosts two book discussion groups to discuss various fiction and nonfiction, as well as contemporary and classic literature. You can join us anytime to discuss one particular book or become a regular.
The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
- "Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.
Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?
Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.
A beautiful, foil cover, first edition.'
Bookworms and Popcorn
Love to read? Love popcorn? Come hang out with other kids who do too! Share your book suggestions or ask for recommendations. No assigned books, just great ideas and great snacks! Grades 2-5
Main Library Book Discussion: Isola by Allegra Goodman
"Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.
Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.
Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival."
Register here for the Zoom link.