Friday, January 25, 2008

Book Club Kits now available at SAPL


This year we are offering a new service to all you book club enthusiasts out there. We have assembled 10 Book Club Kits to help your discussion group have a successful meeting with minimal preparation required on your part.

Each kit contains 8 copies of the book, a resource guide with information about the book and the author, tips on how to lead a discussion, questions to discuss, and suggestions for your next pick.

The loan period for a kit is 6 weeks (no renewals). The person who checks out the kit is
financially responsible for any lost or damaged items. Please reserve Book Club Kits at the Adult Information Desk on the 2nd floor of the library (459-1682).

Here are the titles we have so far:

















































February Seniors Book Club Selection


The Seniors Book Club will meet on Wednesday, February 13th, at 2pm. We will discuss

The Other Side of the Bridge
by Mary Lawson

In this follow-up to her acclaimed Crow Lake, Lawson again explores the moral quandaries of life in the Canadian North. At the story's poles are Arthur Dunn, a stolid, salt-of-the-earth farmer, and his brother, Jake, a handsome, smooth-talking snake in the grass, whose lifelong mutual resentments and betrayals culminate in a battle over the beautiful Laura, with Arthur, it seems, the unlikely winner. Observing, and eventually intervening in their saga, is Ian, a teenager who goes to work on Arthur's farm to get close to Laura, seeing in her the antithesis of the mother who abandoned his father and him. It's a standard romantic dilemma—who to choose: the goodhearted but dull provider or the seductive but unreliable rogue?—but it gains depth by being set in Lawson's epic narrative of the Northern Ontario town of Struan as it weathers Depression, war and the coming of television. It's a world of pristine landscapes and brutal winters, where beauty and harshness are inextricably intertwined, as when Ian brings home a puppy that gambols adorably about—and then playfully kills Ian's even cuter pet bunny. Lawson's evocative writing untangles her characters' confused impulses toward city and country, love and hate, good and evil. (From Publisher's Weekly)

February Evening Book Club Selection



On Monday, February 11th, the Monday Evening Book Club will meet in the program room at 7 pm. New members are always welcome! We will discuss the Canada Reads 2007 winning title:

Lullabies for Little Criminals
by Heather O'Neill


In her debut novel, This American Life contributor O'Neill offers a narrator, Baby, coming of age in Montreal just before her 12th birthday. Her mother is long dead. Her father, Jules, is a junkie who shuttles her from crumbling hotels to rotting apartments, his short-term work or moneymaking schemes always undermined by his rage and paranoia. Baby tries to screen out the bad parts by hanging out at the community center and in other kids' apartments, by focusing on school when she can and by taking mushrooms and the like. (She finds sex mostly painful.) Stints in foster care, family services and juvenile detention ("nostalgia could kill you there") usually end in Jules's return and his increasingly erratic behavior. Baby's intelligence and self-awareness can't protect her from parental and kid-on-kid violence, or from the seductive power of being desired by Alphonse, a charismatic predator, on the one hand, and by Xavier, an idealistic classmate, on the other. When her lives collide, Baby faces choices she is not equipped to make. (From Publisher's Weekly)