Book Circle: Books Binding Us Together

A community literacy initiative offering curated book circles. Through shared reading and dialogue, participants engage in meaningful discussions that deepen understanding, build connection, and expand perspectives towards both individual and social change. It’s a fun way to be in community and share in the many ways literature transforms us!

June 20 - For International Book Month, we read and explore, Mona's Eyes by Thomas Schlesser.  Ten-year-old Mona and her beloved grandfather have only fifty-two Wednesdays to visit fifty-two works of art and commit to memory "all that is beautiful in the world" before Mona loses her sight forever.
Fifty-two that’s all the time Mona has left to learn about beauty. Every Wednesday, Mona’s grandfather picks her up after school and takes her to see a great work of art. Just one. A different masterpiece every Wednesday for a year. Fifty-two weeks of consummate beauty. Fifty-two weeks of visits to the museum before Mona loses her sight forever.  Together, Mona and her grandfather will experience a full range of emotions; their enchantment as well as their sadness will be complete. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona will discover not only the power of art but also the meaning of generosity, doubt, melancholy, loss, and revolt.

August 15- We read, The Beginning Comes After the End Notes on A World of Change by Rebecca Solnit.  Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century. In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability. The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized. While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world