Upcoming programs! Visit the O'Neal Library calendar for more information and program registration!
Sat, Nov 30 – 10am-noon: Great Short Stories Film Series
screening Smoke (Rated R/1h52m)
Sun, Dec 8 – 3pm: City of Mountain Brook Holiday Parade ( I had the date wrong
at the meeting!)
Mon, Dec 9 – 6:30pm: Great Short Stories Bookclub discussing “Augie Wren’s
Christmas Story” by Paul Auster
Sat, Dec 14 – 9am-noon: Crafterday!
Bring your own craft
Sun, Jan 12 – 3-4:30pm: Great Short Stories Film series screening The Swimmer
(Rated PG/1h34m)
Mon, Jan 13 – 6:30pm: Great Short Stories Bookclub discussing The Swimmer by John
Cheever
Tue, Jan 28 – 6:30pm: Books & Beyond Discussion Group discussing air travel
& space exploration
This week, Books & Beyond met to talk about reading & writing!
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry Tortugas,
Vowell visits locations immortalized and influenced by the spilling of
politically important blood, reporting as she goes with her trademark blend of
wisecracking humor, remarkable honesty, and thought-provoking criticism. The
resulting narrative is much more than an entertaining and informative
travelogue—it is the disturbing and fascinating story of how American death has
been manipulated by popular culture, including literature, architecture,
sculpture, and—the author’s favorite—historical tourism.
There There by Tommy Orange
A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows
twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland
Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.
Drunk History (tv program)
The passage of time often has a way of rewriting history. So does a few drinks. The half-hour series "Drunk History" -- based on the award-winning web series – offers reenactments of famous events in history as told by inebriated storytellers. Each episode takes a tour of a U.S. city to explore stories and people from its rich past. Those stories are related in often-confusing ways by drunken narrators and performed by an all-star cast that includes Jack Black, Lisa Bonet, Connie Britton, Michael Cera, Bill Hader, Kevin Nealon, Bob Odenkirk and Winona Ryder. Figures such as Teddy Roosevelt, Patty Hearst, Billy the Kid, Al Capone, and Lewis and Clark are profiled, as are seminal moments like the Battle of the Alamo, Watergate, and the Scopes Monkey Trial. Click here to enjoy one of my favorite episodes about the Kellogg brothers!
Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera
After Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her
best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer. It’s been
years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about,
and she has since moved to LA and started a new life. But now the phenomenally
huge hit true crime podcast "Listen for the Lie," and its too-good
looking host Ben Owens, have decided to investigate Savvy’s murder for the
show’s second season. Lucy is forced to return to the place she vowed never to
set foot in again to solve her friend’s murder, even if she is the one that did
it. The truth is out there, if we just listen.
The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes (not available in the JCLC, request via Interlibrary Loan)
In The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes, an author who has
taught writing for more than thirty years, assures us that anxiety is felt by
writers at every level, especially when they dare to do their best. He
describes the sequence of "courage points" through which all writers
must pass, from the challenge of identifying a worthwhile project to the
mixture of pride and panic they feel when examining a newly published book or
article.
Keyes also offers specifics on how to root out dread of public
"performance" and of the judgment of family and friends, make the
best use of writers' workshops and conferences, and handle criticism of works
in progress. Throughout, he includes the comments of many accomplished writers
-- Pat Conroy, Amy Tan, Rita Dove, Isabel Allende, and others -- on how they
transcended their own fears to produce great works.
Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice by Vanessa Zoltan
Our favorite reads keep us company, give us hope, and help
us find meaning in a chaotic world. In this fresh and relatable work, atheist
chaplain Vanessa Zoltan blends memoir and personal growth as she grapples with
the notions of family legacy and identity through the lens of her favorite
novel, Jane Eyre. Informed by her training at the Harvard Divinity School
and filtered through the pages of Jane Eyre as well as Little
Women, Harry Potter, and The Great Gatsby, Zoltan explores topics
ranging from the trauma she has inherited as the granddaughter of four
Holocaust survivors to finding hope, meaning, and even magic in our deeply
fractured times.
Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina by Michael
Casey
Examines the Western tradition of lectio divina (a
spiritual and prayerful approach to reading the sacred texts) in order to help
readers expand their spiritual approach to living.
Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams
Nashville Legends second baseman Gavin Scott's marriage is
in major league trouble. He’s recently discovered a humiliating secret: his
wife Thea has always faked the Big O. When he loses his cool at the revelation,
it’s the final straw on their already strained relationship. Thea asks for a
divorce, and Gavin realizes he’s let his pride and fear get the better of
him.
Distraught and desperate, Gavin finds help from an unlikely
source: a secret romance book club made up of Nashville's top alpha men. With
the help of their current read, a steamy Regency titled Courting the
Countess, the guys coach Gavin on saving his marriage. But it'll take a lot
more than flowery words and grand gestures for this hapless Romeo to find his
inner hero and win back the trust of his wife.
Ghostwriter by Alessandra Torre
Helena Roth is known for her stories, and four years ago,
she told the best one of all - a story the police and the public swallowed
without question. Now, she lives alone with her secrets and her regrets, her
solitude interrupted by a diagnosis that will force her to confess the truth.
She sits down to pen her final novel, one that shares every sorbid detail, but
is running out of time and must enlist the help of her biggest competition and
arch rival: Marka Vantly. When these two polar opposites collide, an unlikely
connection emerges and breathes life into a true story that will stun the
readers, the police, and the world.
The Thirteenth Tale by Curtis Sittenfeld
Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of
twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of
alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the
truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has
kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled
by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good.
Margaret is mesmerized by the author's tale of gothic strangeness—featuring the
beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost,
a governess, a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and
Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed
by the truth themselves.
I Want You More by Swan Huntley
Reeling from her father’s death, Zara Pines accepts a
ghostwriting gig for celebrity chef Jane Bailey. Jane, star of the wildly
popular cooking show 30 Bucks Tops, invites Zara to live in her East
Hampton home for the summer. Zara doesn’t want to go, but Jane insists.
As the two women create Jane’s book, their attachment grows stronger. Zara,
who’s lost and in search of an identity, finds one in the shadow of Jane. She
starts wearing Jane’s clothes. And speaking like Jane. And adopting Jane’s
mannerisms. Eventually, the line between them blurs and Zara starts to see the
side Jane keeps hidden from the cameras. this dark and twisty novel about fame,
lies, and obsession will make even the most open-hearted reader question how
safe it is to trust the people they love.
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is
a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It
is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and
responsibility that bind us together.
McGuffey and His Readers: Piety, Morality, and Education in Nineteenth-Century America by John H. Westerhoff
William Holmes McGuffey -- teacher, preacher, college
president, writer, educational reformer, and schoolbook compiler -- is perhaps
the most important figure in the history of American public education, yet very
few people know much about the man himself. Except for a few letters, a pair of
handwritten sermons, and one unpublished manuscript on moral philosophy, his
known writings are few. This book makes available some of those scarce writings
as it looks at the man and his textbooks. It is estimated that at least 120
million copies of McGuffey's Readers were sold between 1836 and 1920, placing
their sales in a class with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary. Indeed, since
1961 they have continued to sell at a rate of some thirty thousand copies a
year.
Genius (Rated PG-13, 2016, 1h 44m)
Renowned editor Maxwell Perkins (Colin Firth) develops a
friendship with author Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law) while working on the writer's
manuscripts.
The British Booksellers by Kristy Cambron
From deep in the trenches of the Great War to the storied
English countryside and the devastating Coventry Blitz of World War II, The
British Booksellers explores the unbreakable bonds that unite us through
love, loss, and the enduring solace that can be found between the pages of a
book.
The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: True Stories of the Magic of Reading by James Patterson and Matt Eversmann
This “celebration of the world of books” (Kirkus) from New
York Times bestselling author James Patterson is a collection of riveting
stories celebrating the heroic efforts of the people who are on the front lines
getting our books into the world.
Loving Literature: A Cultural History by Deidre Lynch
One of the most common—and wounding—misconceptions about
literary scholars today is that they simply don’t love books. While those
actually working in literary studies can easily refute this claim, such a
response risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why should they?
That question led Deidre Shauna Lynch into the historical and cultural
investigation of Loving Literature. How did it come to be that
professional literary scholars are expected not just to study, but to love literature,
and to inculcate that love in generations of students? What Lynch discovers is
that books, and the attachments we form to them, have played a vital role in
the formation of private life—that the love of literature, in other words, is
deeply embedded in the history of literature. Yet at the same time, our love is
neither self-evident nor ahistorical: our views of books as objects of
affection have clear roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publishing,
reading habits, and domestic history.
The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods
On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to
be found…
For too long, Opaline, Martha and Henry have been the side characters in their
own lives. But when a vanishing bookshop casts its spell, these three
unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as
extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. And by
unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a
world of wonder… where nothing is as it seems.
The Wildest Sun by Asha Lemmie
When tragedy forces Delphine Auber, an aspiring writer
on the cusp of adulthood, from her home in postwar Paris, she seizes the
opportunity to embark on the journey she's long dreamed of: finding the
father she has never known. But her quest—spanning from Paris to New
York’s Harlem, to Havana and Key West—is complicated by the fact that she
believes him to be famed luminary Ernest Hemingway, a man just as elusive as he
is iconic. She desperately yearns for his approval, as both a
daughter and a writer, convinced that he holds the key to who she's truly meant
to be. But what will happen if she is wrong, or if her real
story falls outside of the legend of her parentage that she’s revered all her
life?
The King in Yellow by Richard Chambers
In a world that teeters between reality and hallucination, The King in Yellow, first published in 1895, stands as a collection of tales that unravel the fabric of
the mind. Step into the haunting landscapes and unsettling cities, where you'll
meet characters entranced by a mysterious play—a play so powerful, it drives
its readers mad. Once its words have gripped your soul, there's no turning
back.
Haunting, philosophical, and irresistibly engrossing, this
literary masterpiece delves into forbidden knowledge and the human psyche's
darker recesses. Inspired by the cosmos, occultism, and the labyrinth of the
human condition, each story is an enigmatic tapestry woven of existential dread
and otherworldly intrigue.
Discover why H.P. Lovecraft and countless other masters of
the horror genre have found inspiration in this classic work. In a realm where psychological terror meets supernatural suspense, the
veil between worlds is thin—and the King in Yellow reigns supreme.
Book and film/tv descriptions pulled from Amazon and Rotten
Tomatoes.
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
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