Busy People Book Club
Welcome Busy People!!!
This book club is designed for busy people who don't have time to attend regular book club meetings. The online book club will be run through Strathmore Municipal Library Facebook Group, Busy People Book Club, and moderated by staff member Jennifer.
Breaking news: the Busy People Book Club will now meet in person at the library the third Tuesday of the month beginning March 19, 2024 form 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm! Join the book club for discussion of the current book while meeting new people. Refreshments will also be provided. Everyone is welcome to attend!
*The book club will NOT meet in person over the summer (July and August) but will resume in-person meetings in September.*
July 2024 book is: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.
Over time, Esme realizes that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.
Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.
August 2024 book is: The Last Heir to Blackwood Library by Hester Fox
World War I England, a young woman inherits a mysterious library and must untangle its powerful secrets.
With the stroke of a pen, twenty-three-year-old Ivy Radcliffe becomes Lady Hayworth, owner of a sprawling estate on the Yorkshire moors. Ivy has never heard of Blackwood Abbey, or of the ancient bloodline from which she’s descended. With nothing to keep her in London since losing her brother in the Great War, she warily makes her way to her new home.
The abbey is foreboding, the servants reserved and suspicious. But there is a treasure waiting behind locked doors: a magnificent library. Despite cryptic warnings from the staff, Ivy feels irresistibly drawn to its dusty shelves, where familiar works mingle with strange, esoteric texts. And she senses something else in the library too, a presence that seems to have a will of its own.
Rumors swirl in the village about the abbey’s previous owners, about ghosts and curses, and an enigmatic manuscript at the center of it all. And as events grow more sinister, it will be up to Ivy to uncover the library’s mysteries in order to reclaim her own story—before it vanishes forever.
The library strives to provide as many print copies of our monthly book club pick for our members. If you are unable to pick up a copy in the library, you can access you book club pick several ways.