Don’t let the winter blues get you down! This year, we’re introducing three new book clubs! Embrace the winter season with warmth, wisdom, and wonderful reads.
Our first monthly book club is Winter Wellness Book Club which will run from January to March on the 2nd Tuesday of each month to discuss books on wellness and self-care to kick off the New Year and work towards our resolutions! We’ll meet in the Main Library Classroom from 7 – 8 PM to share our thoughts. This limited-time mini book club is specially curated to embrace the winter season and promote well-being.
The two new books clubs premiering in February 2024 are both bimonthly book clubs. Rush Hour Reading Group meets on a Tuesday of every other month in the Main Library Classroom from 7 – 8:30 PM. Join us as we partner with Quincycles for a book discussion series to explore transportation equity, multimodal access, and how our built environment keeps us safe (or not) and connects us (or not). What can we change about our transportation system? Do we want to change? Transportation nerds and transportation novices can come together and learn from each other.
Banned Books Club at Wollaston Library will meet every fourth Wednesday of the month from 7 – 8 PM. This new bi-monthly book discussion will feature frequently challenged and banned books.
Click the book title links below to search our catalog for a copy or bring your own! A limited number of copies will be available for pickup at the Main Library Circulation Desk and at the Wollaston Library for Banned Books Club.
Winter Wellness Book Club: Badass Habits: Cultivate the Awareness, Boundaries, and Daily Upgrades You Need to Make Them Stick by Jen Sincero
Tuesday, January 9 | 7 – 8 PM | Main Library Classroom
Badass Habits is a eureka-sparking, easy-to-digest look at how our habits make us who we are, from the measly moments that happen in private to the resolutions we loudly broadcast (and, erm, often don’t keep) on social media. Habit busting and building goes way beyond becoming a dedicated flosser or never showing up late again–our habits reveal our unmet desires, the gaps in our boundaries, our level of self-awareness, and our unconscious beliefs and fears. The book includes enlightening interviews with people who’ve successfully strengthened their discipline backbones, new perspective on how to train our brains to become our best selves, and offers a simple, 21 day, step-by-step guide for ditching habits that don’t serve us and developing the habits we deem most important. Habits shouldn’t be impossible to reset–and with healthy boundaries, knowledge of–and permission to go after–our desires, and an easy to implement plan of action, we can make any new goal a joyful habit.
Winter Wellness Book Club: Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey, Founder of The Nap Ministry
Tuesday, February 27 | 7 – 8 PM | Main Library Classroom
What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. In this book, Tricia Hersey, aka The Nap Bishop, encourages us to connect to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice. Hersey casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted. Our worth does not reside in how much we produce, especially not for a system that exploits and dehumanizes us. Rest, in its simplest form, becomes an act of resistance and a reclaiming of power because it asserts our most basic humanity. We are enough. The systems cannot have us. Rest Is Resistance is rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism. With captivating storytelling and practical advice, all delivered in Hersey’s lyrical voice and informed by her deep experience in theology, activism, and performance art, Rest Is Resistance is a call to action, a battle cry, a field guide, and a manifesto for all of us who are sleep deprived, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of Grind Culture.
Rush Hour Reading Group with Quincycles: Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck
Tuesday, February 20 | 7 – 8:30 PM | Main Library Classroom
Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability.
The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that’s easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at. Making walkability happen is relatively easy and cheap; seeing exactly what needs to be done is the trick. In this essential new book, Speck reveals the invisible workings of the city, how simple decisions have cascading effects, and how we can all make the right choices for our communities. Bursting with sharp observations and real-world examples, giving key insight into what urban planners actually do and how places can and do change, Walkable City lays out a practical, necessary, and eminently achievable vision of how to make our normal American cities great again.
Banned Books Club at Wollaston: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Wednesday, February 28 | 7 – 8 PM | Wollaston Library
A modern classic—both poignant and funny—about a boy with autism who sets out to solve the murder of a neighbor’s dog and discovers unexpected truths about himself and the world. Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow. This improbable story of Christopher’s quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.
Winter Wellness Book Club: Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone by Brené Brown
Tuesday, March 12 | 7 – 8 PM | Main Library Classroom
“True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are. It requires us to be who we are.” Social scientist Brené Brown, PhD, MSW, has sparked a global conversation about the experiences that bring meaning to our lives—experiences of courage, vulnerability, love, belonging, shame, and empathy. In Braving the Wilderness, Brown redefines what it means to truly belong in an age of increased polarization. With her trademark mix of research, storytelling, and honesty, Brown will again change the cultural conversation while mapping a clear path to true belonging. Brown argues that we’re experiencing a spiritual crisis of disconnection, and introduces four practices of true belonging that challenge everything we believe about ourselves and each other. Brown offers us the clarity and courage we need to find our way back to ourselves and to each other. And that path cuts right through the wilderness. Brown writes, “The wilderness is an untamed, unpredictable place of solitude and searching. It is a place as dangerous as it is breathtaking, a place as sought after as it is feared. But it turns out to be the place of true belonging, and it’s the bravest and most sacred place you will ever stand.”
Banned Books Club at Wollaston: Maus (Graphic Novel) by Art Spiegelman
Wednesday, April 24 | 7 – 8 PM | Wollaston Library
A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history’s most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma.
Rush Hour Reading Group with Quincycles: Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives by Melissa & Chris Bruntlett
Tuesday, April 30 | 7 – 8:30 PM | Main Library Classroom
A limited number of copies will be available for pickup at the Main Library Circulation Desk.
In Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett chronicle their experience living in the Netherlands and the benefits that result from treating cars as visitors rather than owners of the road. They weave their personal story with research and interviews with experts and Delft locals to help readers share the experience of living in a city designed for people…the Bruntletts explain why these investments in improving the built environment are about more than just getting from place to place more easily and comfortably. The insights will help decision makers and advocates to better understand and communicate the human impacts of low-car cities: lower anxiety and stress, increased independence, social autonomy, inclusion, and improved mental and physical wellbeing.
Banned Books Club at Wollaston: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Wednesday, June 26 | 7 – 8 PM | Wollaston Library
Starr Carter is constantly switching between two worlds — the poor, mostly black neighborhood where she lives and the wealthy, mostly white prep school that she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is soon shattered when she witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend at the hands of a police officer. Facing pressure from all sides of the community, Starr must find her voice and decide to stand up for what’s right.
Rush Hour Reading Group with Quincycles: BOOK TBA
Tuesday, June 25 | 7 – 8:30 PM | Main Library Classroom
Banned Books Club at Wollaston: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Wednesday, August 28 | 7 – 8 PM | Wollaston Library
The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere – from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing – it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.
Banned Books Club at Wollaston: Fun Home (Graphic Memoir) by Alison Bechdel
Wednesday, October 23 | 7 – 8 PM | Wollaston Library
Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking, bestselling graphic memoir that charts her fraught relationship with her late father.
Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the “Fun Home.” It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve. In her hands, personal history becomes a work of amazing subtlety and power, written with controlled force and enlivened with humor, rich literary allusion, and heartbreaking detail.
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