January Monday night Book club Book: Georgia Bottoms by Mark Childress

Georgia Bottoms may be Six Points, Alabama's finest feature--beautiful, worldly, a splendid cook and faithful churchgoer who cares for her aged mother and sells handmade quilts to her grateful neighbors. 

Georgia also has a discreet side business, "entertaining" six local gentlemen at night.  Judge Barnett on Sunday, Sheriff Allred on Friday, the doctor on Wednesday (Monday's are Georgia's own).  Each gentleman gets a night tailored to his particular tastes; each has been trained to leave a "gift" to help Georgia get by, and each one thinks he is Georgia's only secret lover.

When Preacher Eugene Hendrix (Saturdays) decides he must confess their affair in front of his wife and the entire congregation, Georgia may be able to stop him in time.  But one pin pulled out of her elaborately protected life may be all it takes to send the whole structure to hell in a hurry.  Chin high, posture perfect, her Chanel handbag firmly clasped in her hand, Georgia sets out to save herself, her mama, and her particular notion of virtue from total ruin.  Nothing in Six Points will ever be the same.

Written with hilarity, insight, and affection for the many failings of man - and womankind, Georgia Bottoms plumbs the irrepressible workings of the rebellious human heart.  It is proof anew of why Stephen King called Childress's previous novel, One Mississippi, "the funniest novel I have read in ten years!"

October Monday Night Bookclub book: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. 

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

September Monday Night book club book :Sarah's Keys by Tatiana De Rosnay

Book Description

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.

August Monday night book club book: 9 Dragons by Michael Connelly

Book Description

Harry Bosch is assigned a homicide call in South L.A. that takes him to Fortune Liquors, where the Chinese owner has been shot to death behind the counter in an apparent robbery.

Joined by members of the department's Asian Crime Unit, Bosch relentlessly investigates the killing and soon identifies a suspect, a Los Angeles member of a Hong Kong triad. But before Harry can close in, he gets the word that his young daughter Maddie, who lives in Hong Kong with her mother, is missing.

Bosch drops everything to journey across the Pacific to find his daughter. Could her disappearance and the case be connected? With the stakes of the investigation so high and so personal, Bosch is up against the clock in a new city, where nothing is at it seems.

July Monday Night Book Club Book Darkness, My Old Friend

Novelist Bethany Graves is recovering from a bitter divorce when she decides to move back to her small Northeastern hometown, The Hollows. There, she plans to write her next book and repair her relationship with her teenage daughter, Willow. But when Willow spots a caver digging what looks like a grave in the nearby woods, they becomes tangled up in an investigation that goes back over twenty-five years. Soon more townspeople are involved, from semi-retired cop Jones Cooper to local psychic Eloise Montgomery, whose dire visions warn that pursuing this case may just be the last thing they do.

June Monday Night Book Club Book: Guilty by Karen Robards

 

In the newest novel from New York Times-bestselling author Karen Robards, a feisty female attorney's past comes back to haunt her. One cold November night when Kat White was fifteen years old, she and some friends held up a convenience store. In the heat of the moment, one of the others shot and killed an off-duty cop moonlighting as a security guard. Kat and her pals fled the scene in a panic, and no one was caught. Sixteen years later, Kat-now Kate-has built a new life for herself. Now a single mom with an eight-year-old son, she works as a prosecutor in the Philadelphia DA's office. But her dark past rears its head when she walks into court one day and discovers that she is to prosecute Mario Castellanos, one of her friends from that terrible night. Kate is in a bind: even though Mario was the one who probably did commit the crime, he's counting on Kate to make sure he's not convicted. If she convinces the judge of his guilt, he'll claim that she was the one who killed the off-duty cop. Before real despair sets in, Mario is found dead-in her apartment, and with her pistol. When homicide detective Tom Braga shows up to investigate the murder, Kate is far from relieved; the two have clashed since she started working for the prosecutor's office. But when another man who knows the secret of Kate's past gets involved in the investigation, she learns that her life-and her son's-are in danger. Frantic, she realizes that she has nowhere to turn. Except, maybe, to Tom . . .

May Monday Night Book Club book: Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson

Rose Mae Lolley's mother disappeared when she was eight, leaving Rose with a heap of old novels and a taste for dangerous men. Now, as demure Mrs. Ro Grandee, she's living the very life her mother abandoned. She's all but forgotten the girl she used to be-teenaged spitfire, Alabama heartbreaker, and a crack shot with a pistol-until an airport gypsy warns Rose it's time to find her way back to that brave, tough girl . . . or else. Armed with only her wit, her pawpy's ancient .45, and her dog Fat Gretel, Rose Mae hightails it out of Texas, running from a man who will never let her go, on a mission to find the mother who did.

Starring a minor character from Jackson's bestselling gods in Alabama, BACKSEAT SAINTS will dazzle readers with its stunning portrayal of the measures a mother will take to right the wrongs she's created, and how far a daughter will travel to satisfy the demands of forgiveness.

Getting the Most from Social Security

Getting the Most from Social Security

Social Security can be a confusing decision making process. Come to the library Tuesday April 24th from 6:30-7:30 p.m. to hear Ricky Bruni, Financial Advisor talk on various Social Security topics. He'll also be available to answer any questions you might have. This is a great opportunity so make sure to join us for this free advice!

Some topics to be covered:

• What are the right questions to ask during enrollment
• How to take advantage of little known special provisions that can have a big impact on your benefits received
• How to become better prepared to fully understand your financial situation and planning needs going forward
• How to avoid common mistakes regarding SS benefits

No registration required.
Adult Services Meeting Room, Gardendale Public Library
Tuesday April 24th, 6:30-7:30 pm
631-6639

National Library Week Mini Book Sale

This week is National Library week and so to celebrate we are having a week long book sale. Stop by our meeting room and take a look.  We have westerns, romances, cookbooks, biographies, children's books, movies, magazines and much, much more.

Adult Hardback Books - $2

Adult Paperback Books - $1

Children's and Young Adult Books - $1

Videos/DVDs/Audiobooks/CDs -  $1

Magazines  - Free!

Or fill a bag for $10

Household Money Management

Do you want to participate in a FREE financial class? Would you like to learn more about how to organize your finances, build an emergency fund, create budgets, how to get out of debt and more? If so then sign up today for our 5 week class!

This is a wonderful opportunity to learn under the tutelage of Mr. Jim Sweatt, who has taught a variety of financial classes in our community since 2002. Materials for the class and refreshments will be provided. Participants must commit to attend all 5 weeks. Classes will be held Thursdays starting April 5th - May 3rd from 6-7:30 p.m. at the Gardendale Library. A minimum of 10 participants are required for classes to be held. Mr. Sweatt will also be providing financial counseling privately before class for those who request it.

Don't hesitate to call with any questions you might have about the class. We hope you will call today to reserve your seat- 631-6639 (ask for Gina.)

April Monday Night Book Club Book: I Still Dream About You by Fannie Flagg

Book Description

The beloved Fannie Flagg is back and at her irresistible and hilarious best in I Still Dream About You, a comic mystery romp through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, past, present, and future.

Meet Maggie Fortenberry, a still beautiful former Miss Alabama. To others, Maggie’s life seems practically perfect—she’s lovely, charming, and a successful real estate agent at Red Mountain Realty. Still, Maggie can’t help but wonder how she wound up in her present condition. She had been on her hopeful way to becoming Miss America and realizing her childhood dream of someday living in one of the elegant old homes on top of Red Mountain, with the adoring husband and the 2.5 children, but then something unexpected happened and changed everything.

Maggie graduated at the top of her class at charm school, can fold a napkin in more than forty-eight different ways, and can enter and exit a car gracefully, but all the finesse in the world cannot help her now. Since the legendary real estate dynamo Hazel Whisenknott, beloved founder of Red Mountain Realty, died five years ago, business has gone from bad to worse—and the future isn’t looking much better. But just when things seem completely hopeless, Maggie suddenly comes up with the perfect plan to solve it all.

As Maggie prepares to put her plan into action, we meet the cast of high-spirited characters around her. To Brenda Peoples, Maggie’s best friend and real estate partner, Maggie’s life seems easy as pie. Slender Maggie doesn’t have to worry about her figure, or about her Weight Watchers sponsor catching her at the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop. And Ethel Clipp, Red Mountain’s ancient and grumpy office manager with the bright purple hair, thinks the world of Maggie but has absolutely nothing nice to say about their rival Babs “The Beast of Birmingham” Bingington, the unscrupulous estate agent who hates Maggie and is determined to put her out of business.

Maggie has heartbreaking secrets in her past, but through a strange turn of events, she soon discovers, quite by accident, that everybody, it seems—dead or alive—has at least one little secret.

I Still Dream About You is a wonderful novel that is equal parts Southern charm, murder mystery, and that perfect combination of comedy and old-fashioned wisdom that can be served up only by America’s own remarkable Fannie Flagg.

March Monday Night Book Club Book: Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

Book Description

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.

Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles--and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

February Monday Night Book Club Book The Things We do for Love by Kristin Hannah

Book Description:

Years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive a child have broken more than Angie DeSaria’s heart. Following a painful divorce, she moves back to her small Pacific Northwest hometown and takes over management of her family’s restaurant. In West End, where life rises and falls like the tides, Angie’s fortunes will drastically change yet again when she meets and befriends a troubled young woman.

Angie hires Lauren Ribido because she sees something special in the seventeen-year-old. They quickly form a deep bond, and when Lauren is abandoned by her mother, Angie offers the girl a place to stay. But nothing could have prepared Angie for the far-reaching repercussions of this act of kindness. Together, these two women—one who longs for a child and the other who longs for a mother’s love—will be tested in ways that neither could have imagined.