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At Library AF, we want to meet adult readers where they are now! Whether that be in our local libraries, out in the community, or from the comfort of home (👋🏻 virtual programs! 👋🏻).
For the young adult readers (and those still young at heart), join us for monthly book group discussions, lively pop culture banter, and other enjoyable non-traditional programs.
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Upcoming events (2)
See all- Book Group: HomegoingLink visible for attendees
New registration link - Library AF Book Group - Sacramento Public Library (saclibrary.org)
Let's hope #BookTok is right with this selection. Check out Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi for this month's discussion.
"A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer."
Synopsis from Goodreads.
- Book Group: What If?Link visible for attendees
New registration link - Library AF Book Group - Sacramento Public Library (saclibrary.org)
We're going to finish out our 2024 reading year strong with What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe. I'm torn on the reading experience though ... I listened to the audiobook so I missed out on the illustrations that Munroe included in his explanations. Or did readers miss out on the highly engaging and joyful narrative performance of the incomparable Wil Wheaton??
The choice is yours! Both eBook and eAudio are available through Hoopla.
"Randall Munroe left NASA in 2005 to start up his hugely popular site XKCD 'a web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language' which offers a witty take on the world of science and geeks. It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. Every now and then, Munroe would get emails asking him to arbitrate a science debate. 'My friend and I were arguing about what would happen if a bullet got struck by lightning, and we agreed that you should resolve it . . . ' He liked these questions so much that he started up What If.
- If your cells suddenly lost the power to divide, how long would you survive?
- How dangerous is it, really, to be in a swimming pool in a thunderstorm?
- If we hooked turbines to people exercising in gyms, how much power could we produce?
- What if everyone only had one soulmate?
- When (if ever) did the sun go down on the British empire?
- How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live?
- What would happen if the moon went away?
In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion. Far more than a book for geeks, WHAT IF: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions explains the laws of science in operation in a way that every intelligent reader will enjoy and feel much the smarter for having read."
Synopsis from Goodreads.
