Books & Brews Book Club

Hello Books & Brews! For our next meeting, we'll be discussing A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. You can read all about it below, and if you'd like copies of the books we'll have some available at the Reference Desk of the James Blackstone Memorial Library in Branford.

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
This is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s. They have waited long enough for their turn . . .

This was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of them all . . .

In the middle of the night, a woman wakes to find her beloved city engulfed in flames. Ten seemingly endless years of conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans are over. Troy has fallen.

From the Trojan women whose fates now lie in the hands of the Greeks, to the Amazon princess who fought Achilles on their behalf, to Penelope awaiting the return of Odysseus, to the three goddesses whose feud started it all, these are the stories of the women whose lives, loves, and rivalries were forever altered by this long and tragic war.

A woman’s epic, powerfully imbued with new life, A Thousand Ships puts the women, girls and goddesses at the center of the Western world’s great tale ever told.

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*Due to Thimble Island Brewery's closure, our discussions are being held in the Blackstone Library auditorium* We're asking that everyone continue to RSVP if you intend on joining us so we can keep an eye on the headcount for the meeting. New members always welcome!

Hello Books & Brews! For our next meeting, we'll be discussing Vigil by George Saunders. You can read all about it below, and if you'd like copies of the books we'll have some available at the Reference Desk of the James Blackstone Memorial Library in Branford.

Vigil by George Saunders
Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.

She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?

Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.

With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.

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*Due to Thimble Island Brewery's closure, our discussions are being held in the Blackstone Library auditorium* We're asking that everyone continue to RSVP if you intend on joining us so we can keep an eye on the headcount for the meeting. New members always welcome!

Hello Books & Brews! For our next meeting, we'll be discussing Ancestor Trouble by Maud Newton. You can read all about it below, and if you'd like copies of the books we'll have some available at the Reference Desk of the James Blackstone Memorial Library in Branford.

Ancestor Trouble by Maud Newton
Maud Newton’s ancestors have fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father was said to have married thirteen times. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts.

Newton’s family inspired in her a desire to understand family patterns: what we are destined to replicate and what we can leave behind. She set out to research her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and other harms. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them.

Searching and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to make peace with the secrets and contradictions of her family's past and face its reverberations in the present, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.

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*Due to Thimble Island Brewery's closure, our discussions are being held in the Blackstone Library auditorium* We're asking that everyone continue to RSVP if you intend on joining us so we can keep an eye on the headcount for the meeting. New members always welcome!