The Brookfield Citizen

Brenda Metterville

Liddle Kiddles Hour—Wednesday mornings 10:30 to 11:30.
Moms, dads, and babies/toddlers are welcome to join us. Debbie Kirk is fresh with great stories and songs, garnered from a recent Mother Goose Seminar she attended. Enjoy quality time and meet other moms, dads and babies.

New 'Addition' to the Library!
View a beautiful collaboration between local artisan Paul Kent and the Friends of the Library. Maintaining the architectural integrity of Banister Memorial Hall (aka Merrick Public Library), a finely crafted bookcase now graces our foyer. (Have you noticed, we tend to get very excited about book cases?!)

Book donations are accepted year round; you may leave them in the foyer. We review any special donations and may add them to the collection. Thank you for your continued support.

Banister Book Group—Plan ahead! Join us for one or more discussions! Books are available at the library one month before each discussion. Call ahead or ask at the main desk to reserve a copy.

Old School by Tobias Wolff
Tuesday, January 25, 7:30 p.m.
Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he’s achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted.

The school’s mystique is rooted in literature, and for many boys this becomes an obsession, editing the review and competing for the attention of visiting writers whose fame helps to perpetuate the tradition. Robert Frost, soon to appear at JFK’s inauguration, is far less controversial than the next visitor, Ayn Rand. But the final guest is one whose blessing a young writer would do almost anything to gain. No one writes more astutely than Wolff about the process by which character is formed, and here he illuminates the irresistible power, even the violence, of the self-creative urge. Resonant in ways at once contemporary and timeless, Old School is a masterful achievement by one of the finest writers of our time.
—Amazon.com

Intruders in the Dust by William Faulkner
Tuesday, February 22, 7:30 p.m.
Published in 1948 and set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the novel combines the solution of a murder mystery with an exploration of race relations in the South. Charles ("Chick") Mallison, a 16-year-old white boy, feels that he must repay a debt of honor to Lucas Beauchamp, an elderly black man who has helped him but spurns his offers of payment. When Beauchamp is arrested for the murder of a white man, Chick searches for the real killer to save Beauchamp from being lynched.

Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Tuesday, March 29, 7:30 p.m.
"I am amazed that this moving, original, and accomplished book is a first novel. It is wonderfully written, powerful, poignant, and humorous, and takes a line which is—refreshingly—strongly female without being cliché-feminist. It is also deliciously eccentric, which lifts it out of the usual category of a rite-of-passage novel into the realms of real distinction. DO read it."
—Joanna Trollope

The Five People you Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
Tuesday, April 26, 7:30 p.m.
"There's much wisdom here . . . An earnest meditation on the intrinsic value of human life."
—From the Los Angeles Times

Read previous columns from the Library