The Manchester City Library is pleased to offer to our patrons two book clubs. Each club meets once per month.
Thursday Evening Book Club
Do you like talking about books as much as you enjoy reading them? Join our Thursday Evening Book Club! Selections are chosen by the group, and include fiction, nonfiction and biography. We try to offer titles that are available in a wide variety of formats (large print, audiobook on CD, ebook, etc.) whenever possible. Many books for the Thursday Evening Book Club can be found on Hoopla, and there is no wait to check out and download the book. To place a hold on a physical book, please call the library at 603-624-6550 x 7619. Meeting dates and times subject to change.
Click here to jump to the Brown Bag Book Club list!
Thursday Evening Book Club: Thursdays @ 6:30 PM in the Hunt Room and via ZOOM. Email Steve Viggiano for an invitation to join the meeting.
September 8, 2022
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Stories of Captain Charles Rider. 1945, 315 p. Fiction (classic)
Set in 1920's England, the story examines the wealthy Flyte family through the eyes of Sebastian Flyte's less wealthy school friend Charles Ryder, who is eventually tempted into an extramarital affair with Sebastian's sister, Lady Julia. The novel is a story of faith and disillusionment in a glamorous upper-class world.
October 13, 2022
Gladwell, Malcolm. Talking to Strangers: What we Should know About the People We Don't Know. 2019, 386 p. Nonfiction
Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.
November 10, 2022
Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks. 1932, 289 p. Biography
Guest lecturer Damion Costello will facilitate the discussion. Reveals the life of Lakota healer Nicholas Black Elk as he led his tribe's battle against white settlers who threatened their homes and buffalo herds, and describes the victories and tragedies at Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee. Participants will receive a free copy of the book to keep. This program is made possible by a grant from New Hampshire Humanities. Learn more at www.nhhumanities.org.
December 8, 2022
Swanson, Peter. Eight Perfect Murders. 2020, 270 p. Fiction
Years after establishing a literary career through his compilation of the mystery genre’s most unsolvable classics, an unsuspecting bookseller is tapped by the FBI for help solving murders that eerily mimic the books on his list.
January 12, 2023
Williams, Pip. The Dictionary of Lost Words. 2021, 376 p. Fiction
As a team of male scholars compiles the first Oxford English Dictionary, one of their daughters decides to collect the "objectionable" words they omit.
February 9, 2023
Abrams, Stacy. While Justice Sleeps: A Novel. 2021, 366 p. Fiction
Plunged into an explosive role she never anticipated, Avery Keene, now the legal guardian of power of attorney for the legendary Justice Howard Wynn, must unravel the clues he left behind in regards to a dangerous conspiracy that has infiltrated the highest power corridors of Washington.
March 9, 2023
Cooper, Anderson. Vanderbilt: the Rise and Fall of an American Dynasy. 2021, 317 p. Nonfiction
When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father's small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires - one in shipping and another in railroads - that would make him the richest man in America. By 2018, when the last Vanderbilt was forced out of The Breakers - the seventy-room summer estate in Newport, Rhode Island - the family would have been unrecognizable to the tycoon who started it all. Now, the Commodore's great-great-great-grandson Anderson Cooper joins with historian Katherine Howe to explore the story of his legendary family and their outsized influence.
April 13, 2023
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Klara and the Sun. 2021, 303 p. Fiction
Waiting to be chosen by a customer, an Artificial Friend programmed with high perception observes the activities of shoppers while exploring fundamental questions about what it means to love.
May 11, 2023
Tyson, Neil deGrasse. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. 2017, 222 p. Nonfiction
The notable host of StarTalk reveals just what people need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.
June 8, 2023
Kurov, Andrei. Death and the Penguin. 2003, 200 p. Fiction
Hired to write obituaries of Kiev VIPs to be kept on file, Ukranian writer Viktor, who owns a penguin Misha, discovers he is writing death warrants when the VIPs die with regularity and realizes someone is writing his own obituary.
The Brown Bag Book Club meets on the last Tuesday of each month from 12:15-1:30
Call the Info Desk at 603-624-6550 Ext. 7619 for more information on how to participate.
This group meets in the Hunt Room.
September 27, 2022
Min Jin Lee. Pachinko.
Follow a Korean family through four generations beginning with Sunja, the prized daughter, to their exile in Japan and their lives in a country not their own.
October 25, 2022
Amor Towles. The Lincoln Highway.
Come for a joyride with four boys, three eighteen year olds who met in a reformatory, and a brainy eight year old as they set off from Nebraska in search of something better.
November 29, 2022
Elizabeth Stout. Oh William!.
Lucy Barton, age 64, is mourning the death of her first husband when she distractedly finds herself revisiting her relationship with her philandering first husband, William. limit.
December 27, 2022
Nita Prose. The Maid: a Novel.
A heartwarming mystery with a lovable oddball in charge. Molly’s job at the Regency Hotel is a perfect fit until a wealthy guest is found dead in his suite and Molly learns that she is the prime suspect.
January 31, 2023
Kate Morton. The House at Riverton.
The time: England between the wars. An aristocratic family, a house, a mysterious death, and a way of life that is vanishing forever. Told in flashbacks by a woman who witnessed it all and kept a secret for decades.
February 28, 2023
Sara Nisha Adams. The Reading List: a Novel.
A bored teenager working at the library for the summer finds a list of novels in a library book and shares it with an older patron. This simple exchange forges an unexpected bond between the two.
March 28, 2023
Carson McCullers. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
John Singer is a deaf man who lives in a 1930’s mill town in Georgia. When his mute companion of ten years is declared insane, Singer becomes a sounding board for the town’s misfits.
April 25, 2023
Chester Nez & Judith Scheiss Avila. Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One ofthe Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII.
During WWII the Japanese managed to crack every code the United States used until the Marines turned to their Navajo recruits to develop the only unbroken code in modern warfare.
May 30, 2023
Joseph Conrad. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women.
A true story of the brave women who were exposed to radium in factories during the early twentieth century, and their heartbreaking battle against their employers, their doctors, and the government.
June 27, 2023
Mary Ann Shelter & Annie Barrows. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
The GLPPPS was born as an alibi to shield its members who were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans who occupied their island during WWII. This charming, funny, deeply human and diverse cast of characters were all literature lovers, but what else were they up to?