What we’re about
Life is short. Read voraciously!
The Shared Shelf is a group for avid readers who not only love books, but also enjoy sharing their ideas, feelings, and opinions about them. If you're looking for thoughtful yet casual conversations about books, this is the place. All are welcome. (Even those who don’t manage to finish the book! Just be prepared for spoilers!)
Meetings are monthly. We are getting back to meeting in person after a year of meeting online. Our previous meeting place was in Woburn, so we’re likely to stick to the same general area as we shop around for a new home.
We have an eclectic taste in books, spanning a variety of genres. We keep an open and ever-expanding list of books for consideration suggested by members. We vote among a random selection taken from this list to determine the selection for upcoming months. Examples include:
- The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
- Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
Dues are not required at this time.
Upcoming events
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The Stupidest Angel by Christopher Moore
Burlington Public Library, 22 Sears St, Burlington, MA, US'Twas the night (okay, more like the week) before Christmas, and all through the tiny community of Pine Cove, California, people are busy buying, wrapping, packing, and generally getting into the holiday spirit.
But not everybody is feeling the joy. Little Joshua Barker is in desperate need of a holiday miracle. No, he's not on his deathbed; no, his dog hasn't run away from home. But Josh is sure that he saw Santa take a shovel to the head, and now the seven-year-old has only one prayer: Please, Santa, come back from the dead.
But hold on! There's an angel waiting in the wings. (Wings, get it?) It's none other than the Archangel Raziel come to Earth seeking a small child with a wish that needs granting. Unfortunately, our angel's not sporting the brightest halo in the bunch, and before you can say "Kris Kringle," he's botched his sacred mission and sent the residents of Pine Cove headlong into Christmas chaos, culminating in the most hilarious and horrifying holiday party the town has ever seen.
Move over, Charles Dickens—it's Christopher Moore time.
GoodReads12 attendees
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Burlington Public Library, 22 Sears St, Burlington, MA, USFrom the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.
GoodReads12 attendees
The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
Burlington Public Library, 22 Sears St, Burlington, MA, USA bold, bitingly satirical near-future mosaic novel about a city run along 'meritocratic' lines, the injustice it creates, and the revolution that will destroy it.
We are the future of the human race.
Welcome to Apex City, formerly Bangalore. Here, technology is the key to survival, productivity is power, and even the self must be engineered, for the only noble goal in life: success.
Everything is decided by the mathematically perfect Bell Curve. With the right image, values and opinions, you can ascend to the glittering heights of the Ten Percent – the Virtual elite – and have the world at your feet. The less-fortunate struggle among the workaday Seventy Percent, or fall to the precarious Twenty Percent; and below that lies deportation to the ranks of the Analogs, with no access to electricity, running water or even humanity.
The system has no flaws, and cannot be questioned. Until a single daring theft sets events in motion that will change the city forever...
GoodReads12 attendees
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Burlington Public Library, 22 Sears St, Burlington, MA, USPiranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
GoodReads10 attendees
Past events
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