About us
Suggest new books or locations using this link: Baltimore Books and Brews Suggestions
It's hard to make friends as an adult. Come join a low-stakes kind of book club where we hang out, chat about our monthly book, and build community.
Didn't finish the book? Only watched the movie? Hated it? Just want to listen to other people talk about a book you've never read? Everyone is welcome!
We'll rotate breweries or coffee shops for meet ups once a month (usually the 3rd Saturday of the month).
What to expect:
- To encourage and spark conversations we'd like to open meet ups by going around the room, introducing ourselves by rating the book 1-5 stars and a couple sentences about what you thought about the book.
- At the end of the meeting we’ll spin a wheel full of genres for a random genre and then use that to select a book from out Suggestion list at random for future events.
- Events planned a few months in advance to give everyone more time to find, place on hold, and read the book.
- We want your suggestions! - we really value the input from the group and wanted to keep all those great book and location suggestions in one spot where they won't get lost for future meetups.
Featured event
April Book Club: The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson
April Genre: True Crime
April Book: The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson
Location: Wet City
On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness.
Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.
Where to find:
Libby (Baltimore County Public Library)
Libby (Maryland Digital Library)
Baltimore County Public Library
Enoch Pratt
BookShip Dot Org
GoodReads
StoryGraph
Upcoming events
2
April Book Club: The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson
Wet City, 223 W. Chase St., Baltimore, MD, USApril Genre: True Crime
April Book: The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson
Location: Wet CityOn a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness.
Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.Where to find:
Libby (Baltimore County Public Library)
Libby (Maryland Digital Library)
Baltimore County Public Library
Enoch Pratt
BookShip Dot Org
GoodReads
StoryGraph16 attendeesMay Book Club: Heaven is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
Heavy Seas Beer, 4615 Hollins Ferry Road, Halethorpe, MD, USMay Genre: Journalism/Essays
May Book: Heaven is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
Location: Heavy Seas BreweryAn exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one millennial's quest to live a more communal life under late-stage capitalism
Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments—from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement—through the lens of one woman’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity.
When Adrian Shirk’s father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husband—both adjuncts in their midtwenties—become his primary caretakers. The stress of these new responsibilities, coupled with navigating America’s broken health-care system and ordinary twenty-first-century financial insecurity, propels Shirk into an odyssey through the history and present of American utopian experiments in the hope that they might offer a way forward.
Along the way, Shirk seeks solace in her own community of friends, artists, and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life, examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making, and what might be doomed. Rather than “no place,” Shirk reframes utopia as something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn’t be able to exist—but does anyway, if only for a moment.
Where to find:
Libby (Baltimore County Public Library)
Libby (Maryland Digital Library)
Baltimore County Public Library
Enoch Pratt
BookShip Dot Org
GoodReads
StoryGraph4 attendees
Past events
13
Group links
Organizers
Members
666
