The next Books & Beyond meeting will be on Tuesday, October
27 @ 6:30pm at the Levite Jewish Community Center located at 3960 Montclair Rd,
Birmingham, AL 35213. A valid photo ID is
required to sign in at their reception desk.
We will be chatting about British and American crime classics. If you’d rather attend online, register here
for a Google Meet link: https://oneallibrary.org/event/14436799
The votes are in! Here
is the 2027 Books & Beyond meeting lineup:
Jan 26 – Short Story Collections
Feb 23 – Exploration & Travel
Mar 30 – Horses
Apr 27 – Biography
May 25 – Stonewall Awards
June 29 – Salon Discussion
July 27 – Essay Collections
Aug 31 – Weird Fiction
Sep 28 – U.S. Constitution
Oct 26 – Author Study: Samuel Delaney
Nov 30 – Ships & Shipping
Dec 28 – Salon Discussion
September’s meeting was a chat about hunting &
fishing. Have a look at what we
discussed!
The Hunting Wives by May Cobb
Sophie O'Neill left behind an envy-inspiring career and the
stressful, competitive life of big-city Chicago to settle down with her husband
and young son in a small Texas town. It seems like the perfect life with a
beautiful home in an idyllic rural community. But Sophie soon realizes that
life is now too quiet, and she's feeling bored and restless. Then she meets
Margot Banks, an alluring socialite who is part of an elite clique secretly
known as the Hunting Wives. Sophie is completely drawn to Margot and swept into
her mysterious world of late-night target practice and dangerous partying.
The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
During the languid days of the Christmas break, a group of
thirtysomething friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a
tradition they began as students ten years ago. For this vacation, they’ve
chosen an idyllic and isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands—the perfect
place to get away and unwind by themselves. But after a decade, the weight of
secret resentments has grown too heavy for the group’s tenuous nostalgia to
bear. Two days later, on New Year’s Day, one of them is dead. . . and another
of them did it.
The Village Library Demon Hunting Society by C. M. Waggoner
Librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle keeps finding bodies—and
solving murders. But she's concerned by just how many killers she's had to
track down in her quaint village. None of her neighbors seem surprised by the
rising body count...but Sherry is becoming convinced that whatever has been
causing these deaths is unnatural.
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John
Vaillant
A gripping story of man pitted against nature’s most
fearsome and efficient predator. This "travelogue about tiger
poaching in Russia’s far east opens up a new genre ... [the] conservation
thriller" (Nature).
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo by
J.H. Patterson
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is a semi-autobiographical
book written by British soldier and author John Henry Patterson. Published in
1907, it recounts his experiences in East Africa while supervising the
construction of a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya, in 1898. It is
titled after a pair of man-eating lions that terrorized the undertaking for
nine months. (The lions were taxidermied and are in the collection of Chicago's Field Museum.)
© The Field Museum, Z94352c, Photographer John Weinstein.
The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest toFind the Mythical Giant Panda by Nathalia Holt
The stunning true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons and
their 1929 Himalayan expedition to prove the existence of the panda to the
western world. (I believe the skins collected during this expedition are also
held by Chicago’s Field Museum...more info here: https://www.fieldmuseum.org/page/theodore-and-kermit-roosevelt)
The Bear by William Faulkner
This is the story of a boy’s coming to terms with the adult
world. By learning how to hunt, the boy is taught the real meaning of pride,
humility, and courage.
Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America by Eric Jay Dolin (not available in the JCLC, but you can request it from Interlibrary Loan.)
"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty
theme," Herman Melville proclaimed, and this absorbing history
demonstrates that few things can capture the sheer danger and desperation of
men on the deep sea as dramatically as whaling. This sweeping social and
economic history provides rich and often fantastic accounts of the men
themselves, who mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, scrimshawed, and
recorded their experiences in journals and memoirs.
Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall
They are monsters, legends, gods. They are our prey.
Earth is dead. Which leaves us stuck living in atmospheric
domes on planets that will kill us if we blink wrong, or run out of fuel. And
by “fuel” I mean “the cerebrospinal fluid of gargantuan, quasi-psychic space
monsters”. I joined the hunt hoping to get paid and maybe laid, but mostly
paid. Instead, I followed a captain chasing abominations in the skies of
Jupiter. We battled the Möbius Beast itself, there in the red eye of the world.
Spoiler: we lost.
The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator by
Timothy Winegard
A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction
that offers a dramatic new perspective on the history of humankind, showing how
through millennia, the mosquito has been the single most powerful force in
determining humanity’s fate.
The Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped theModern World by Lizzie Collingham
Told through 20 meals over the course of 450 years, from the
Far East to the New World, Collingham explains how Africans taught Americans
how to grow rice, how the East India Company turned opium into tea, and how
Americans became the best-fed people in the world. Collingham masterfully shows
that only by examining the history of Great Britain's global food system, from
16th-century Newfoundland fisheries to our present-day eating habits, can we
fully understand our capitalist economy and its role in making our modern
diets.
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War by Joe Bageant
A raucous mix of storytelling and political commentary, Deer
Hunting with Jesus is Bageant’s report on what he learned by coming home.
He writes of his childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly
on the verge of being outsourced; the mortgage and credit card rackets that
saddle the working poor with debt, i.e., “white trashonomics”; the ubiquitous
gun culture—and why the left doesn’t get it; Scots Irish culture and how it
played out in the young life of Lynddie England; and the blinkered “magical
thinking” of the Christian right.
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E.O. Wilson
Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges
dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the
genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying
works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in
prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a
dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions
of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.
Time is a River by Mary Alice Monroe
Recovering from breast cancer and reeling from her husband's
infidelity, Mia Landan flees her Charleston home for the mountains near
Asheville, North Carolina, and takes refuge in a neglected cabin recently
inherited by her fly-fishing instructor, Belle Carson. The cabin once belonged
to Belle’s grandmother—the legendary fly fisher and journalist of the 1920s,
Kate Watkins, whose life fell into ruins after she was accused of murdering her
lover, a scandal that plagued Belle’s family for generations. But Mia is compelled
to find out more about Kate…especially when she discovers Kate's journal.
Item descriptions pulled from Amazon.
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