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Out of This World Book Club (NIC)
Wednesday, April 4, 7:00 pm
Program Room
"Arkwright" by Allen M. Steele
Allen Steele, creator of the Coyote series of books, has written a triumphant science fiction novel hailed as triumphantly optimistic. Nathan Arkwright is a seminal author of the twentieth century. At the end of his life he becomes reclusive and cantankerous, refusing to appear before or interact with his legion of fans. Little did anyone know, Nathan was putting into motion his true, timeless legacy. Convinced that humanity cannot survive on Earth, his Arkwright Foundation dedicates itself to creating a colony on an Earth-like planet several light years distant. Fueled by Nathan's legacy, generations of Arkwrights are drawn together, and pulled apart, by the enormity of the task and weight of their name.
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Read Aloud Book Club (95th)
Thursday, April 5, 10:00 am
Lookout Room
Reading aloud is a long-standing social tradition. Historically, families often read together as a form of entertainment, and factory workers had books read to them as a way to relieve the tedium. Naperville Public Library is reaching out in that tradition with its Read Aloud Book Club for adults who wish to enjoy and explore the written word in this historical format. The book club is open to all adult readers, especially those who are learning English. Short stories will be read at a pace determined by the group.
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Reader's Night Out (NIC)
Monday, April 9, 7:00 pm
Quigley's Irish Pub, 43 E. Jefferson St.
Socialize with other readers at Quigley's Irish Pub in downtown Naperville and share recent reads and favorite titles. Arrive at 6:15 p.m. to purchase dinner, or join the group at 7 p.m. for the discussion only. *Program requires advance registration.
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Readers' Rendezvous Daytime Book Club (NIC)
Tuesday, April 10, 11:00 am
Program Room
"Rabbit Cake" by Annie Hartnett
Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly eighteen months. But there are things Elvis doesn’t yet know—like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother's silk bathrobe around the house. Elvis investigates the strange circumstances of her mother's death and finds comfort, if not answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama. As hilarious a storyteller as she is heartbreakingly honest, Elvis is a truly original voice in this exploration of grief, family, and the endurance of humor after loss.
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Criminal Spines Book Club (NBL)
Thursday, April 12, 7:00 pm
Program Room
"Y is for Yesterday" by Sue Grafton
Sue Grafton died in December, 2017, just months after "Y is for Yesterday" was released. Please join us in reading the final installment in her wildly popular Kinsey Millhone Alphabet Series.
In 1979, four teenage boys from an elite private school sexually assault a fourteen-year-old classmate—and film the attack. Not long after, the tape goes missing and the suspected thief, a fellow classmate, is murdered. In the investigation that follows, one boy turns state’s evidence and two of his peers are convicted. But the ringleader escapes without a trace. Now, it’s 1989 and one of the perpetrators, Fritz McCabe, has been released from prison. Moody, unrepentant, and angry, he is a virtual prisoner of his ever-watchful parents—until a copy of the missing tape arrives with a ransom demand. That’s when the McCabes call Kinsey Millhone for help. As she is drawn into their family drama, she keeps a watchful eye on Fritz. But he’s not the only one being haunted by the past. A vicious sociopath with a grudge against Millhone may be leaving traces of himself for her to find...
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Great Books Reading and Discussion Group
Tuesday, April 17, 7:00 pm
LL Conf. Room
"Notes from the Underground" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.
The readers are from "The Great Books Reading and Discussion Program, Second Series, Volume 1." The book is available on a first-come, first-served basis at Naper Blvd. and Nichols Library. Book can be purchased by visiting the Great Books Foundation website, www.greatbooks.org, or try abedbook.com.
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Readers' Choice Book Club (95th)
Wednesday, April 18, 10:30 am
Lookout Room
"A Piece of the World" by Christina Baker Kline
To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family’s remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century. As she did in her beloved smash bestseller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction in a powerful novel that illuminates a little-known part of America’s history. Bringing into focus the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, she vividly imagines the life of a woman with a complicated relationship to her family and her past, and a special bond with one of our greatest modern artists. Told in evocative and lucid prose, A Piece of the World is a story about the burdens and blessings of family history, and how artist and muse can come together to forge a new and timeless legacy.
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