Wilmette Reads Book Chat
Tuesday, February 6, 2-3pm, Adults, Auditorium
Come share your latest favorite books and media with a librarian and your fellow bibliophiles. Get ideas for your TBR list and chat all things bookish.
This event is part of Wilmette Reads, a new reading series for adults and teens. Learn more and take part!
Classics & Contemporary Book Discussion: Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Tuesday, February 13, 10:30-11:30am, Adults, Auditorium
In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy. David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.” With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart. (From the publisher)
Copies of the book are available here. Ebook and audiobook copies are available through Digital Library of Illinois or the Libby app.
For those who would like to purchase a copy of Giovanni's Room, please support our local independent bookstore, The Book Stall at 811 Elm Street in Winnetka.
Wilmette Reads Book Discussion: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Thursday, February 15, 7-8pm, Adults, Virtual
Wilmette Reads is spotlighting The Sentence by Louise Erdrich.
A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention", must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written. (From the publisher)
This event is part of Wilmette Reads, a new reading series for adults and teens. Learn more and take part!
Wilmette Reads is funded by the Friends of the Wilmette Public Library.
