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Talk About Something Pleasant, with B.Y.O.Book

Posted by Candice on Wednesday, Jan 17, 2018

Like books? Like bars? Like good food and drink, and lively conversation? Then you might want to join us at our next BYOBook meet-up! We're meeting on Tuesday, February 6, at Basta Pizzeria Ristorante, starting at 6:30 p.m.

We will be discussing Roz Chast's Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, which was one of the New York Times Book Review's top ten books of 2014. In it, Chast recounts the time spent caring for her ailing, elderly parents, and the NYT describes it as "a beautiful book, deeply felt...about what it feels like to love and care for a mother who has never loved you back...and achingly wistful about a gentle father who could never break free of his domineering wife and ride to his daughter's rescue." If that doesn't convince you (and it might not, I know), the reviewer goes on to say that it "veers between being laugh-out-loud funny and so devastating I had to take periodic timeouts."

Interested? We have multiple copies, both in our circulating collection and in our ebook collection, and more copies at the Info Desk on the second floor of the Library (stop in or call 319-356-5200 to check availability). You can register for the event in our calendar. If you can't make it to this one, stay tuned...We've got Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters In the End on deck for March.

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About the Author

Candice's picture

I work at the Info Desk on the second floor, and I select books for the adult nonfiction collection. I have a degree in anthropology, which really helps in selecting...well...almost anything. I also manage the Art To Go collection of framed prints and original art, and the nonfiction DVDs.
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    "In Hayley Scrivenor's Dirt Creek, a small-town debut mystery described as The Dry meets Everything I Never Told You, a girl goes missing and a community falls apart and comes together. When twelve-year-old Esther disappears on the way home from school in a small town in rural Australia, the community is thrown into a maelstrom of suspicion and grief. As Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels arrives in town during the hottest spring in decades and begins her investigation, Esther's tenacious best friend, Ronnie, is determined to find Esther and bring her home. When schoolfriend Lewis tells Ronnie that he saw Esther with a strange man at the creek the afternoon she went missing, Ronnie feels she is one step closer to finding her. But why is Lewis refusing to speak to the police? And who else is lying about how much they know about what has happened to Esther? Punctuated by a Greek chorus, which gives voice to the remaining children of the small, dying town, this novel explores the ties that bind, what we try and leave behind us, and what we can never outrun, while never losing sight of the question of what happened to Esther, and what her loss does to a whole town"--

    csmith's picture

    This was a detailed and engrossing read. I especially liked the child characters, and felt that their thoughts and actions rang very true. This book was more about the procedure and the lives of the people than the crime itself, really, and has a full resolution that both smacks of the cruel unfairness of life, and the profound consequences of peoples' actions. -Candice
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