Let’s get down to the facts!
This discussion will be a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Meet in January – October.
To catch a Florida Man, you have to become one, and that’s what Officer Jeff Babauta did. As his ponytailed, whiskey-soaked alter ego, he established Sunshine Alligator Farm. His goal? Infiltrate the shady world of illegal poachers in the Florida Everglades in order to protect the natural world.
A head-spinning adventure soon unfolds. Jeff deals with glow-in-the-dark alligators and high-speed airboat rides, but quickly learns that not all poachers are villains. They’re simply people trying to survive, fighting against the poverty and greed holding them down. Jeff wants to solve the mystery of alligator poachers, and in doing so he must venture deeper into a strange ecosystem where right is wrong, and justice comes at the cost of those who’ve welcomed him into their world.
Gator Country is the twisting true story of the impossible choices individuals must make to stay afloat in this world. Through its wholly unique blend of reporting, nature writing, and personal narrative, this book transports readers to vibrant and dangerous Florida landscapes and offers intimate portraits of those who call the region home. Broad in scope and vivid in detail, Gator Country is a fast paced tale of the risks people will take to survive in one of the world’s most beautiful yet formidable landscapes and the undercover investigation that threatens to topple the whole scheme. – Amazon
June 26 – The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder by Douglas Preston
Do you enjoy a light and entertaining read? We do too!
We usually meet on the first Wednesday of every month.
This discussion will be a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Hayley Snow’s life always revolved around food. But when she applies to be a food critic for a Key West style magazine, she discovers that her new boss would be Kristen Faulkner, the woman Hayley caught in bed with her boyfriend.
Hayley thinks things are as bad as they can get, until the police pull her in as a suspect in Kristen’s murder. Kristen was killed by a poisoned key lime pie. Now Hayley must find out who used meringue to murder before she takes all the blame. – Amazon
July 2– The Plot is Murder by V.M. Burns
This discussion will be in-person at the library.
On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter.
Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between them. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous secretary of state, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.
Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late. – Amazon
July 3 – James by Percival Everett
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email kkerckhove@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Mystery, suspense, thriller – fiction and nonfiction! No cozy titles here!
1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Muhammad Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the smalltown of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing.
When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake.
Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.
A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession and the blinding light of hope. – Amazon
July 14 – Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
What have you been reading? There are so many books out there! It’s time to share. You’ll have a chance to talk about your recent read…good, bad, or mediocre.
Creative Soul Gallery (208 N Second St) in Dunlap and the library are joining together to discuss “arty” reads. *Registration required.
Email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org to receive the Zoom registration meeting invite to attend virtually or you may attend in-person at Creative Soul Gallery. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Please indicate how you wish to attend. If you would like to attend in person, please include your phone number in your response.
Lilian Girvan has been a single mother for three years—ever since her husband died in a car accident. One mental breakdown and some random suicidal thoughts later, she’s just starting to get the hang of this widow thing. She can now get her two girls to school, show up to work, and watch TV like a pro. The only problem is she’s becoming overwhelmed with being underwhelmed.
At least her textbook illustrating job has some perks—like actually being called upon to draw whale genitalia. Oh, and there’s that vegetable-gardening class her boss signed her up for. Apparently, being the chosen illustrator for a series of boutique vegetable guides means getting your hands dirty, literally. Wallowing around in compost on a Saturday morning can’t be much worse than wallowing around in pajamas and self-pity.
After recruiting her kids and insanely supportive sister to join her, Lilian shows up at the Los Angeles botanical garden feeling out of her element. But what she’ll soon discover—with the help of a patient instructor and a quirky group of gardeners—is that into every life a little sun must shine, whether you want it to or not… – Amazon
July 9 – Stars in an Italian Sky by Jill Santopolo
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Raised by a group of eccentric enigmatologists, 20-something Clayton Summer, when the esteemed crossword compiler and main maternal presence in his life passes away, bestowing her final puzzle on him, embarks on a quest to uncover the secrets surrounding his birth, which will change him, and the Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, forever. – Baker & Taylor
July 15 – The Twilight Garden by Sara Nisha Adams
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
For Samantha Gale, a summer on Martha’s Vineyard at her family’s tiny cottage was supposed to be about resurrecting her career as a chef, until she’s tasked with chaperoning her half-brother, Tyler. The teenage brainiac is spending his summer at the local library in a robotics competition, and there’s no place Sam, who has dyslexia, likes less than the library. And because the universe hates her, the library’s interim director turns out to be the hot-reader guy whose book she accidentally destroyed on the ferry ride to the island.
Bennett Reynolds is on a quest to find his father, whose identity he’s never known. He’s taken the temporary job on the island to research the summer his mother spent there when she got pregnant with him. Ben tells himself he isn’t interested in a relationship right now. Yet as soon as Sam knocks his book into the ocean, he can’t stop thinking about her.
An irresistible attraction blossoms when Ben inspires Sam to create the cookbook she’s always dreamed about and she jumps all in on helping him find his father, and soon they realize their summer fling may heat up into a happily ever after. – Amazon
July 16 – Love in Bloom by Jenny Proctor
This discussion will be in-person at the library.
We will gather in the library parking lot and then walk the *trail while we talk about what we’ve been reading, listening to, or watching…whatever comes to mind!
Meets in June and July.
*Weather permitting.
Meets next on July 22
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Meets in January, May, and September.
Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely, in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. As Melina wonders if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.
In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.
Told in intertwining timelines, By Any Other Name, a sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire centers two women who are determined to create something beautiful despite the prejudices they face. Should a writer do whatever it takes to see her story live on . . . no matter the cost? This remarkable novel, rooted in primary historical sources, ensures the name Emilia Bassano will no longer be forgotten. – Amazon
January 9 – King: A Life by Jonathan Eig