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!

April 25 -  To help celebrate Spring and Earth Day, we will discuss, The Book of Hope: a Survival Guide for Trying Times, by Jane Goodall.  "Jane Goodall, the world's most famous living naturalist, and Doug Abrams, internationally bestselling author, explore one of the most sought after and least understood elements of human nature: hope. Told through stories from a remarkable career and fascinating research, The Book of Hope is a deeply personal conversation. For the first time, Jane tells the story of how she became a messenger of hope: from living through World War II, to her years in Gombe, to realizing she had to leave the forest to travel the world as an advocate for environmental justice. There is still hope, and this book will help guide us to it." -Back cover

May 23 - It is both AAPI and Mental Health Month and we meet to talk about, Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li. "Yiyun Li's remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James"--
"There is no good way to say this," Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. "There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home." There is no good way to say this--because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, "a single point in a timeline." Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she "doing the things that work," including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, "The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now." Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li's indomitable spirit.

June 24 - 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.