Library Book Club Reviews

Director of programs and education Martha Williams recommends The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey.

I have found this little memoir to be the perfect companion on days that keep me indoors. It’s a quiet book that invites us to observe what’s right around us, even as we dream about the wide world beyond our window.

In her mid-thirties, Elisabeth Tova Bailey finds herself struck with a mysterious illness that damages her nervous system, sending her into years of horizontal inactivity. Harsh sounds and lights are too much for her body, and her once-active life becomes one of solitude and quiet. She spends countless days lying in a studio with short visits from caretakers and friends to sustain her still-active mind.

One day, a friend brings her a pot of wild violets, and with them, a small snail. With little else to do, Bailey begins observing the snail as it surveys its own new, strange, and unasked-for surroundings. As she watches the snail’s movements around the pot, and later within a terrarium another friend creates for her, Bailey brings us into the calm and miniscule world of this tiny creature.

She finds comfort and companionship in its serene world full of wonder and possibility.

Bailey pours what energy she has into reading about snails – from 19th century naturalists, to poets Elizabeth Bishop and Rainer Maria Rilke, and writers like E.O. Wilson and Patricia Highsmith. (Some of my favorite poems that she includes in the book are haikus by the 18th century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa: sleeping and rising / always with your shell! / oh snail).

Remarkably, Bailey resists anthropomorphizing her new friend. Rather, she often imagines what humans might learn from snails, or what we would be capable of with their skills and adaptations. Sometimes, she is envious of the snail, especially as her own body threatens to fail her.

What if she, too, could go dormant for months at a time, closed up from the world’s challenges for a little rest?

What Bailey shows us most is how observing, learning about, and imagining the life of another creature (big or small) opens our own world and helps us to better understand ourselves and our place on this planet that we all share.

In a post-COVID world, I think we all may have greater appreciation for Bailey’s story about diseases beyond our knowledge and control. In a world rife with division and fear, stories such as this remind us where curiosity and wonder can lead us, when we let it. And in a world moving ever faster, Bailey’s words are a reminder to slow down, to observe the beauty and mystery right around us.

Find it in our collection here.

Note: Martha Williams will host The Community Library Book Club at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 5, with a discussion of The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. More/register here.

Communications Manager Kyla Merwin recommends Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Sooner or later, anyone who spends much time with me will see a Diet Coke in my hand. I’m a self-confessed “Coke” addict. I love the stuff. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks.

According to James Clear in his best-selling book, Atomic Habits, the first question I need to ask myself is this: Do I want to be the type of person who drinks Diet Coke all day every day? Answer: Yes. Yes, I do.

Ergo, I will fail at any attempts to stop drinking Diet Coke – even though I know it’s bad for me – because I cannot see myself as a non-Diet Coke drinker (yet).

At the core of Clear’s strategy is the notion that your habits shape your identity and visa versa. Put another way, to break an old habit or create a new one, you must focus on who you want to be rather that what you want to achieve.

Behavior that isn’t consistent with the self will not last, says Clear. The pull to act in a manner consistent with the person you see yourself as is very strong—stronger than the mere act of goal setting.

Once your pride gets involved, you’ll fight “tooth and nail to maintain your habits,” says Clear.

At this point, Clear gives you concrete tools to build good habits and break undesirable ones (like, say, four-five Diet Cokes a day). Such tools include:

Four Laws of Behavior Change: Habits are created from a feedback loop that involves a cue, followed by a craving, then a response, and finally the reward. Clear’s laws are to make the habit obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.

Habit Stacking: By tagging a new habit to an existing habit, you create a natural momentum that will help you build a desirable habit. If you want to build a daily habit of gratitude, for example, you can link a gratitude statement to your morning cup of coffee.

The Goldilocks Zone: To help you maintain good habits, Clear points to Goldilocks and the Three Bears. If your actions are too easy, you’ll get bored. If they are too hard, you’ll give up. To stay motivated, you have to find actions that are “just right”—that is, right on the edge of your current abilities.

For me at this time, giving up Diet Coke is way too far past my current abilities; I don’t yet see myself as a non-Diet-Coke-drinker. In the meantime, though, I’m building a new good habit of gratitude every morning when I hear the crack-fizz of the pop can opening.

Find it in our collection in print, ebook, eaudiobook, and on CD here.

Librarian Andrea Nelson recommends North Woods by Daniel Mason.

           …And now for something completely different.

~Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 1971

It’s difficult to capture the essence of Daniel Mason’s North Woods in a single book review. Never before have I read a book as impossible to pigeonhole as this brilliant, multi centennial saga inspired by the crumbling stone remains of a long-gone New England house.

When North Woods arrived at our library in 2023, the first thing that jumped out at me was its strange cover art. It is hard to look away from the over-saturated drawing of a “catamount” lounging on a hillside. There is a strangely human quality about its face, and the perspective is all wrong. It could be the cover of a children’s book on apex predators. There, half buried in a pile of intriguing new library arrivals, North Woods all but shouted, “Look at me! I am different!”

Invoking “librarian’s privilege,” I snatched it up and began flipping through the pages before it even hit the shelves. What I found was a visual Easter egg hunt. Small, archival treasures peeked out from between the chapters. Faded pencil drawings perch off-center on otherwise blank pages, grainy antique photos of long-gone forest scenes, old-fashioned poems and ballads, odd proverbs, a sheet of music, a page from a Farmer’s Almanac, a hand drawn map, news clippings…

Daniel Mason clearly liberated these little bits of history from dusty Massachusetts archival files while doing his book research. He uses them to signal the passage of time and transition between his storylines. It is refreshing, to say the least– this use of multimedia. It draws the eye to the book like beads woven between the scenes of a pictorial tapestry, adding texture to the book’s astonishing, genre-defying originality.

Without a doubt, North Woods is something completely different.

Pulitzer Price Finalist Daniel Mason is a master of literary voice. Fittingly, the novel begins in elated, almost musical prose, capturing the spirit of two young lovers fleeing their oppressive Puritan colony to brave life together in the wilderness. Their joyful escape takes them deep into the wooded foothills in Western Massachusetts, an area now called the Berkshires. The brave couple could not have imagined that for over four hundred years to follow, the sun-dappled forest clearing they chose for their home would shelter generations of future families, adventurers, villains, artists, sheep, a cougar, and an ever-growing cast of resident ghosts.

As in life, the book begins with beauty and hope, but the decades march on. The house in the North Woods sees residents come and go, nurturing brand-new dreams, facing daunting challenges, and enduring a panoply of tragic losses, bitter feuds, intriguing mysteries, transcendental love and searing heartbreak.

These are the things that define humanity. Perhaps in the North Woods, these things remain after mortality ends, swirling like mist among the stone ruins that dot the New England landscape. As any New Englander can tell you, every mossy, vine-covered, stone relic has a story to tell. 

Whether the protagonist is an elderly British soldier in search of the perfect wild apple tree, or a giddy chestnut blight spore tumbling and dancing on the wind, each chapter of North Woods perfectly reflects the tone of its human or non-human protagonists’ personality. Daniel Mason catapults his readers from a poetic, whimsical story of young love to the violent realism of historical fiction during the bloody French and Indian Wars… and that’s only in the first two chapters. Expect a little whiplash! Some chapters read like psychological thrillers, burning with jealousy, axe murders, passion, deceit, and thwarted love. Others provide comic relief. Some are deliciously spooky, full-on embracing the haunted house sub-genre, while others teach us forestry, entomology, and the pros and cons of importing Spanish sheep. One particularly steamy chapter reads like an excerpt from a romance novel hot enough to make Helen Huang blush—and its two lust-struck protagonists are none other than Scolytid beetles.

Many colorful characters pass through the house in the North Woods over time. An evil southern bounty hunter tracks an escaped slave there, a psychiatrist visits a tragic mother and her schizophrenic son, an escaped convict, a true crime journalist, and an obsessive, disgraced member of the Historical Society of Western Massachusetts all add to its mosaic. Finally, more than four hundred years after the young lovers fled their Puritan colony, a young graduate student travels to the clearing hoping to study spring ephemerals that grow near the now barely visible ruins of the old, forgotten homestead.

I won’t spoil the end for you, but I assure you, you are in for a wild ride.

Find in print, CD, ebook, and eAudiobook in our Collection here.

North Woods is the selection for The Community Library’s Book Club on Wednesday, October 2, 2024, at 5:30 p.m. More here.

by James McBride, reviewed by Director of Library Operations Pamela Parker

Another blockbuster success from author James McBride, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023) combines his passion for American musical traditions with his fascination with the hard times in our nation’s history. He tackles both race and creed in this work of historical fiction—the result is being touted as our next “Great American Novel.” 

Written in a style reminiscent of Deacon King Kong (2020) and The Good Lord Bird (2013), the reader of his other works feels on familiar ground. As in those novels, McBride relies on unique – if not unusual – characters, from a variety of backgrounds and differing abilities. In fact, McBride credits his time working at a summer camp for differently abled children for inspiring this work. 

He begins the novel as a construction crew uncovers a body holding a necklace in hand.

The story quickly flashes back to mid-1930s Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where we presumably will learn how this came to be. We meet Mosha, a recent immigrant to the United States who hopes to promote dance hall events to make a living. He marries Chona, the American-born daughter of an immigrant couple who own The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store in the rough-shod Chicken Hill neighborhood.  

The family becomes part of the patch-worked community made up Romanians, Lithuanians and other Jewish immigrants who have fled the pogroms. Chicken Hill is a gathering place for many migrant communities. Italians who compete for the club business. Black families like Nate and Addie who’ve come in search of better circumstances but become low-paid wage earners. Yet through community, they can make ends meet and even enjoy the music, faith and gossip that thrives there. McBride seems to argue that the opportunity for self-determination is what sets this America apart from the lives they’ve left behind.  

McBride crafts a story — with many twists and turns – that builds upon his theme that human connections is our saving grace. 

The Great American Dance Hall and Theatre becomes hugely successful after adding popular Black performers who bring capacity crowds. While McBride finds humor in his gritty characters, he also exposes the corruption and hypocrisy upon which the civic decisions are being made. When our protagonist, Chona, becomes ill, her failing health is something of a mystery. Yet she refuses to see Doc Roberts, who she knows to be a racist, nor to move ‘Downtown’ despite Mosha’s urgings that Jews are leaving Chicken Hill. To her, happiness is running the store and remaining connected with the people she considers their community.  

When Dodo, a 12-year-old Black boy who is deaf but able bodied, is orphaned, Chona and Mosha take him into their home above the Heaven & Earth grocery store. This saves him from a fate at Pennhurst, a state school and hospital with a horrible reputation. Not surprisingly, Doc Roberts conspires with authorities to move the boy to the institution, and the situation for Dodo looks grim. He lays for months suffering alongside another institutionalized boy, ‘Monkey Pants.’ The two form a powerful friendship by communicating with hand-gestures, and this memorable bond underscores the novel’s message of enduring hope through human connection. 

Can we work together, sharing our unique abilities, to overcome life’s hardships? McBride seems to be saying, ‘Yes, we can.” 

As with most of his work, McBride ends the story with a sense of justice done – and, ultimately, an optimism about America. He seems to be confirming a belief that good deeds do make a difference even if we do not know where or for whom they will manifest. This perfectly minted novel thus echos the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, who once said, “The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Even our antagonist, Doc Roberts, seems to have some hidden insight into why Chicken Hill is now well, and his fate is connected to a fix. 

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store won me over in the end with the tender characterizations and imperative to embrace inclusivity as the best way forward. I recommended it as a salve for tough times and to readers who appreciate the quirky characters with big hearts—and fatal flaws. We will meet to discuss the novel at the Library on Wednesday, February 7 at 5:30 p.m. Sign up to join us here: The Community Library Book Club. 

Find The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store in print, large print, ebook, eaudiobook, and on CD here.