About us
Suggest new books or locations using this link: Baltimore Books and Brews Suggestions
It's hard to make friends as an adult. Come join a low-stakes kind of book club where we hang out, chat about our monthly book, and build community.
Didn't finish the book? Only watched the movie? Hated it? Just want to listen to other people talk about a book you've never read? Everyone is welcome!
We'll rotate breweries or coffee shops for meet ups once a month (usually the 3rd Saturday of the month).
What to expect:
- To encourage and spark conversations we'd like to open meet ups by going around the room, introducing ourselves by rating the book 1-5 stars and a couple sentences about what you thought about the book.
- At the end of the meeting we’ll spin a wheel full of genres for a random genre and then use that to select a book from out Suggestion list at random for future events.
- Events planned a few months in advance to give everyone more time to find, place on hold, and read the book.
- We want your suggestions! - we really value the input from the group and wanted to keep all those great book and location suggestions in one spot where they won't get lost for future meetups.
Featured event
May Book Club: Heaven is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
May Genre: Journalism/Essays
May Book: Heaven is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
Location: Heavy Seas Brewery
Didn't finish the book? Only watched the movie? Hated it? Just want to listen to people talk about a book you've never read? Everyone is welcome!
An exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one millennial's quest to live a more communal life under late-stage capitalism
Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments—from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement—through the lens of one woman’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity.
When Adrian Shirk’s father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husband—both adjuncts in their midtwenties—become his primary caretakers. The stress of these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America’s broken health-care system and ordinary twenty-first-century financial insecurity, propels Shirk into an odyssey through the history and present of American utopian experiments in the hope that they might offer a way forward.
Along the way, Shirk seeks solace in her own community of friends, artists, and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life, examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making, and what might be doomed. Rather than “no place,” Shirk reframes utopia as something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn’t be able to exist—but does anyway, if only for a moment.
Where to find:
Libby (Baltimore County Public Library)
Libby (Maryland Digital Library)
Baltimore County Public Library
Enoch Pratt
BookShip Dot Org
GoodReads
StoryGraph
Upcoming events
2
May Book Club: Heaven is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
Heavy Seas Beer, 4615 Hollins Ferry Road, Halethorpe, MD, USMay Genre: Journalism/Essays
May Book: Heaven is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
Location: Heavy Seas BreweryDidn't finish the book? Only watched the movie? Hated it? Just want to listen to people talk about a book you've never read? Everyone is welcome!
An exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one millennial's quest to live a more communal life under late-stage capitalism
Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments—from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement—through the lens of one woman’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity.
When Adrian Shirk’s father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husband—both adjuncts in their midtwenties—become his primary caretakers. The stress of these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America’s broken health-care system and ordinary twenty-first-century financial insecurity, propels Shirk into an odyssey through the history and present of American utopian experiments in the hope that they might offer a way forward.
Along the way, Shirk seeks solace in her own community of friends, artists, and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life, examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making, and what might be doomed. Rather than “no place,” Shirk reframes utopia as something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn’t be able to exist—but does anyway, if only for a moment.
Where to find:
Libby (Baltimore County Public Library)
Libby (Maryland Digital Library)
Baltimore County Public Library
Enoch Pratt
BookShip Dot Org
GoodReads
StoryGraph7 attendees
June Book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (book 1)
Mobtown Brewery, 4015 Foster Avenue, Baltimore, MD, USJune Genre: Humor
June Book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (book 1)
Location: Mobtown BrewingDidn't finish the book? Only watched the movie, listened to the audio book, or read the comic instead? Hated it? Just want to listen to other people talk about a book you've never read? Everyone is welcome!
Description:
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. . . .
Where to find:
Libby (Baltimore County Public Library)
Libby (Maryland Digital Library)
Baltimore County Public Library
Enoch Pratt
BookShip Dot Org
GoodReads
StoryGraph4 attendees
Past events
14
Group links
Organizers
Members
674
