Brown Bag Book Group
Thursday, March 28 at Noon. Feel free to bring your lunch. Dessert and beverages served.
The Mystery Book Group will be discussing Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance.
The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.
But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.
A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
18 membersLunch time Book Group of the Meredith Public Library. You must ask to join the group before you can post on the discussion boards.
Mystery Book Group
Thursday, April 11 at 10:30 AM. Refreshments served.
The Mystery Book Group will be discussing The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie.
It's seven in the morning. The Bantrys wake to find the body of a young woman in their library. She is wearing an evening dress and heavy makeup, which is now smeared across her cheeks. But who is she? How did she get there? And what is the connection with another dead girl, whose charred remains are later discovered in an abandoned quarry? The respectable Bantrys invite Miss Marple to solve the mystery ... before tongues start to wag.
Copies will be available at the circulation desk. This event is open to the public.
CONTACT:Matthew - MatthewB@meredithlibrary.org
Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Group
Tuesday, April 30 at 6:30 PM. Refreshments served.
The Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Group will be reading The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick.
It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.
Copies will be available at the circulation desk. This event is open to the public.
CONTACT:Erin - erin@meredithlibrary.org