All Booked Up

Windsor Library's Newsletter for Readers

November 2023

Join us at the Windsor Public Library for an environmentally focused book club. We'll be meeting quarterly to read and discuss an assortment of fiction and non-fiction books that are focused on sustainability and the environment. Come to talk about the book as well as get helpful tips and tricks to make your life more sustainable.

We will be discussing "The Light Pirate" by Lily Brooks-Dalton for our first meeting on Thursday, November 30. Information on hurricane preparedness will be available to coincide with this month's novel. Books will be available at the Lending Desk one month before the book club. 

"Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices.."

--Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

Coming to a bookshelf near you!

(click on the cover to place your hold today)

Book Club Corner

Bankok wakes to rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad

A house in the center of Bangkok becomes the point of confluence where lives are shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home. Witness to two centuries' flux in one of the world's most restless cities, a house plays host to longings and losses past,present, and future. Time collapses as these stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself. Bangkok Wakes to Rain is a wildly imaginative, mesmerizing reading experience from an author at the beginning of what promises to be a thrilling career

Listen Up (Audiobook recommendation)

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Narrated by Shayna Small

Length: 11 hours 30 minutes

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters story lines intersect?

Spotlight: Veterans Day

It’s been over twenty years since a new generation of Americans fought in Iraq. Some of those veteran soldiers are now seasoned authors writing about the wars they experienced and their difficulties coming home. Their works are moving and profound. This is a small sampling.

Waiting for Eden by Elliot Ackerman

Eden Malcolm lies in a hospital bed barely clinging to life after his Humvee ran over a bomb in Iraq. He is visited daily by his wife, Mary, and by the narrator, a fellow soldier who was killed in the explosion. The setting alternates between the burn center and Eden’s point of view, while the narrator recounts vignettes from his, Eden's, and Mary's past history. In the present, Eden struggles to communicate anything at all, while Mary must decide whether to release him from his suffering. This small-sized book is a sparely written but enormously touching exploration of unbearable loss.

The Long Walk by Brian Castner

The Long Walk centers around a soldier's traumatic war experiences and his heart-rending emotional and psychological anguish after returning home. This is a work of nonfiction by a soldier who served two tours of duty as commander of an Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit in Iraq. The Long Walk was what they called what a soldier had to do if robots failed to disarm a bomb. But what author Castner makes intensely clear is that for him and other soldiers, the battle against haunting memories that won't fade and survival instincts that won't switch off requires a very, very long walk that might never end for them.

All the Ruined Men by Bill Glose

This short story collection take us through soldiers' harrowing and sometimes morally questionable experiences on the front lines of the Iraq War to their homecoming, fraught with ongoing torment and anguish. All The Ruined Men by Bill Glose paint vivid pictures of the toll that war takes on the human psyches of soldiers and their families. The soldiers' recognition that they are somehow broken yet have no idea how to repair themselves is heartbreaking.