Do you love to talk about what you’re reading? Join a book club to share your thoughts and hear what others have to say about books that spark discussion, curiosity, and debate! Discover new “Books to Talk About” and join a community of booklovers at NVDPL. Simply read the book and join us at the meeting!
Register online for the time and location that’s most convenient for you to receive meeting instructions and information in advance of the discussion! Join us every month or just for the meetings you prefer. If you miss a meeting but still want to discuss the book, you can also join us at a different time or location. Click here to see all six Books to Talk About book clubs.
Copies of the next book will be available to pick-up from Parkgate Library. All books are offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Copies are also available in other formats, such as print, ebook, audiobooks, and more. Ask staff to help you find a copy!
2022–2023 Schedule for the Parkgate Tuesday Afternoon Book Club:
What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J.A. Chancy
October 4 at 2:30pm
At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster. Brilliantly crafted, fiercely imagined, and deeply haunting, What Storm, What Thunder is a singular, stunning record, a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and—at the same time—an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit. Learn more.
My Conversations with Canadians by Lee Maracle
November 1 at 2:30pm
On her first book tour at the age of 26, Sto:lo author Lee Maracle was asked a question from the audience, one she couldn't possibly answer at that moment. But she had been thinking about it ever since. As time passed, she has been asked countless similar questions, all of them too big to answer, but not too large to contemplate. These questions, which touch upon subjects such as citizenship, segregation, labour, law, predjudice and reconcilliation (to name a few), are the heart of My Conversations with Canadians. In prose essays that are both conversational and direct, Maracle seeks not to provide any answers to these questions she has lived with for so long. Rather, she thinks through each one using a multitude of experiences she's had as a Canadian, a First Nations leader, a woman and mother and grandmother over the course of her life. Learn more.
Care Of by Ivan Coyote
December 6 at 2:30pm
In the early days of the coronavirus lockdown, like every artist and creator, writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote was faced with a calendar full of cancelled shows and a heart full of questions around what now? To keep busy while figuring out what to write about next, Ivan began to answer the backlog of mail and correspondences that had come in while they were on the pre-pandemic road: emails, letters, direct messages on social media, soggy handwritten notes found tucked under the windshield wiper of their car after a gig, all of it. In Care Of, Coyote combines the most moving and powerful of these letters with the responses they've sent in the months since the lockdown. Learn more.
Rabbit Foot Bill by Helen Humphreys
February 7 at 2:30pm
Canwood, Saskatchewan, 1947. Leonard Flint, a lonely boy in a small farming town befriends the local tramp, a man known as Rabbit Foot Bill. Bill doesn't talk much, but he allows Leonard to accompany him as he sets rabbit snares and to visit his small, secluded dwelling. Being with Bill is everything to young Leonard--an escape from school, bullies and a hard father. So his shock is absolute when he witnesses Bill commit a sudden violent act and loses him to prison. Fifteen years on, as a newly graduated doctor of psychiatry, Leonard arrives at the Weyburn Mental Hospital, both excited and intimidated by the massive institution known for its experimental LSD trials. To Leonard's great surprise, at the Weyburn he is reunited with Bill and soon becomes fixated on discovering what happened on that fateful day in 1947. Based on a true story. Learn more.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
March 7 at 2:30pm
Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house-a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known. Winner of the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Learn more.
Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
April 4 at 2:30pm
With sharp turns and charming characters, this debut thriller by Annishinabe author Boulley centers 18-year-old Daunis Fontaine, who loves and fits into her community but yearns for official citizenship in the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. A lover of both science and hockey, Daunis had planned on going away for college, but after her uncle overdoses on meth and her grandmother has a stroke, she stays closer to her Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan home, negotiating a complex familial situation having to do with her deceased Annishinabe father and the infiltration of meth into her community. Winner of the American Library Association’s 2022 Printz and Morris Awards. Learn more.
Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? By Roz Chast
May 2 at 2:30pm
In her first memoir, renowned New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies--an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades--the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care. Learn more.
The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
June 6 at 2:30pm
The remarkable story of J. P. Morgan's personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white to leave a lasting legacy that enriched the nation. Historical fiction based on true events. Learn more.
Location:
Parkgate
Time:
Repeats every month on February, March, April, May, June, October, November, December on the first Tuesday until Tue Jun 06 2023.
Tuesday, October 4, 2022 - 2:30pmTuesday, November 1, 2022 - 2:30pm
Tuesday, December 6, 2022 - 2:30pm
Tuesday, February 7, 2023 - 2:30pm
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 - 2:30pm
Tuesday, April 4, 2023 - 2:30pm
Tuesday, May 2, 2023 - 2:30pm
Tuesday, June 6, 2023 - 2:30pm
Audience:
- Adults
