by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian
Our Friends of the Litchfield Library group is alive and
reinvigorated. I held an informational
session about the Friends group on Tuesday, November 13th. Six people attended and joined, and a seventh
joined afterward. They made plans to
start working on book sale prep in weeks to come.
If you missed the meeting, or you just want to join without
having to go to a meeting, ask one of the library staff for a Friends of the
Library brochure. You can fill out the
application on the brochure and drop it off with your $5 dues (or $1 if you’re
under 18). We actually did gain two
child members. One was very excited to
come to “library club”. The other really
wanted the membership card, and she loves the library.
The next meeting of the Friends, an official member meeting,
will be on the third Tuesday in January at 7 p.m. According to the current bylaws, meetings are
to be held only three times per year: January, May, and September. It’s not a big commitment. I hope more of you will join us. It looks like a great group of people.
Our new adult book club is going swimmingly. We’ve had ten to twelve people per meeting
this fall, with thoughtful, lively discussions.
I’m trying a variety of types of books, both to make it interesting and
to find out what members of the group like and dislike reading. We read a fantasy novel first, Erin
Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. Many in the group loved it, and a few hated
it, but it certainly gave us a lot to talk about. I loved the lush descriptions of the magical
circus, but I found that the complicated timeline made it too difficult to
listen to as an audiobook, which is my usual method for finding time to read for book club; I switched to reading the print.
Our next title was The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This classic collection of mystery stories is
familiar to everyone in some general way, or at least the characters are, but
most of us in the group had not actually read the original books. I’ve been enjoying the new BBC modern
translation Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch
and Martin Freeman, which is one of the flurry of recent Sherlock Holmes
variations on screen. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a
collection of short stories, which makes it very easy to read one or two of the
intriguing cases at a sitting. Our book
club found it remarkable that Doyle could create characters that are still
fascinating to readers and viewers 125 years later.
For our November meeting we read The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. This was a popular choice. The dog Enzo narrates the story of his
master, race car driver Denny, who goes through some terrible times with his
family. Enzo has a soul that’s ready to
be human, and he looks forward to being reincarnated as a man like he learned
about in a TV documentary on Mongolia.
He has a very philosophical outlook, applying lessons learned from auto racing
to life: “The car goes where the eyes go.”
Next month’s book is Bossypants
by Tina Fey. If you want to read a funny
memoir or, even better, listen to it on audio, and then come to book club to
talk about it, stop in to pick up a copy.
It was on every best-of-the-year list last year, which means I can get
us enough copies to work with this year.
Our next meeting is Tuesday, December 11, at noon.
If you’ve been thinking about joining the Litchfield Friends
or the new lunchtime book club, but you’ve wondered, “Is anyone going?” the
answer is yes. There are some neat new
groups forming here that are worth coming to.
Hope to see you at the next meeting!
