The Second Floor Librarians » book clubs

Check Out Our Online Book Clubs!

Lindy — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:03:29 +0000

While we have a book club group that meets every third Wednesday at the library, we understand not everyone is able to attend at that time. In an effort to expand our book club offerings, we have an online book club, offered in partnership with DearReader.com, that previews different titles each week. It has grown so popular, we have over 500 subscribers! There are many options available, satisfying almost every one’s tastes, whether you’re looking for a romance, thriller, science fiction, mystery, teen or a good new book. We offer nonfiction options as well as business and even have audio book choices available!

Here’s how it works:

Check out the options for the current month. If something sounds interesting to you, check the box next to it and then enter your email at the bottom of the page.

After that, you’ll receive a chapter a day for a week, delivered right to your email. At the end of the preview, you’ll know if you want to commit further and can check out the book through us. Read at your leisure. No fuss!

Our online book clubs offer new books every week, and include many popular authors such as James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks, Debbie Macomber and Laura Hillenbrand, just to name a few. If you’re interested in what our online book club is offering in the future, we have information available through February.

Happy Reading!

Posted by Lindy, a Second Floor Librarian

This week at the library

Alex — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 18:13:08 +0000

Ready for Fall? The Fall Festival starts this week and the library book club also meets this week.

Wednesday, September 21 the Library book club meets at 7:00 in the Library Board Room to discuss The end of overeating by David Kessler. Contact the reference desk at 541-766-6793 for more information.

Thursday through Saturday
The 10th Annual Fall Festival Fine Arts Showcase will be held in the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library’s Meeting Room and features the work of over 30 local artists who were invited to be a part of the show. Hours are: Thursday 10:00 – 5:00; Friday and Saturday 10:00 – 5:00. Click on the link to the Corvallis Fall Festival website for more information.

On Saturday, September 24, from 10:00 to 4:00, the Friends of the Library will be having a used paperback book sale on the Library’s front plaza. Cake in honor of the Friends 50th anniversary will be served at 2:00 pm.

Posted by Alex, a second floor librarian

Image credit: “The Perfect Place to Take a Book” by Brian Hathcock on Flickr

Family book clubs

Alex — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:57:40 +0000

A few years ago my 14-year old niece who lives in Ohio asked some of her aunts and uncles living in Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon, to “read a book with her”.

What she wanted was for us all to read the same book and then discuss it either on the phone, by email or in person the next time we saw each other.

Well, two and a half years later my family book club is still going strong. We’ve grown in membership though our participation depends on how busy we each are and how much we like the selection. We are rather informal, doing much of our discussion online, but our club has given us a chance to talk books with each other and another way to stay in touch. Part of the fun, of course, is to read books that we might not have chosen for ourselves.

Here’s a selection of what we’ve read:

The teenage niece whose initial enthusiasm got us started picked Sense and Sensibilty and Little Women

My brother selected Hatchet by Gary Paulsen

My sister who loves anthropology chose Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

Another niece picked Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon.

Another brother chose The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

My 84-year old mother chose Friendly Persuasion by Jessamyn West.

I chose Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

The library has books to help you with your own book club–family or otherwise:

Book club companion by Diana Loevy

Good books lately by Ellen Moore

Read it and eat : a month-by-month guide to scintillating book club selections and mouthwatering menus / Sarah Gardner

The kids' book club book : reading ideas, recipes, activities, and smart tips for organizing terrific kids' book clubs / Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp

I’ve enjoyed sharing books with my family. Happy reading!

Posted by Mary, a second floor librarian

Image credit: Family reading by Vimages on Flickr

99 Books and 10 years later…

Sharon — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 18:38:05 +0000

circa 2001

I just celebrated my 10th anniversary at the library, and I am just amazed at how quickly the time has flown. Not too long after I started here we launched the CBCPL Book Club and it has been fun to look back on all the books we have read.

And now you can do just that, thanks to the tagging feature available in our New Catalog as well as the most awesome library volunteer who patiently and quickly used this feature to tag

all 99 of of these titles.

Now if you do a search for the words cbcpl book club, you will come up with a list of all of the titles we have read. This because each of these titles has been labeled or tagged with the the phrase “cbcpl book club”.

Want to create your own tags? Here is how to do it:

1. Go to the New Catalog and do a search

4. Log in

Posted by Sharon, a Second Floor Librarian

Freshly Picked – New Books for the Library Book Club

Sharon — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 21:09:10 +0000

We have just selected the new titles for our Summer and Fall Book Club meetings. If you have ever thought of joining a book club, now is a great time to start and the CBCPL Book Club is open to everyone.

We meet to discuss various books each third Wednesday of the month at 7:30 p.m. in the Library Boardroom. Books are provided by the library and will be available for pick up four weeks preceding the monthly meeting. Scroll to get dates and title descriptions.

Title Descriptions

June 16, 2010

The Road from Coorain
By Jill Ker Conway

One women’s journey from a childhood in Australia’s outback to adulthood as a successful American career woman. The Road From Coorain is about Everywoman, for it is about childhood loneliness, anguished parent-child relationships, dawning sensibility, discovering a vocation, and finding one’s own sense of self.

July 21, 2010

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson

2009 Anthony Award Winner for Best First Novel

In this international bestseller, a crusading journalist joins forces with a 24-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker to investigate the whereabouts of a woman missing from one of the wealthiest families in Sweden.

August 18, 2010

Shanghai Girls
by Lisa See

From the author of the bestsellers “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” and “Peony in Love” comes a stunning novel about two sisters who leave Shanghai to find new lives in 1930s Los Angeles.

September 15, 2010

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz

This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today. Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd.
From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the FukA-the curse that has haunted the Oscar’s family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim. Daaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss.

October 20, 2010

Strength in What Remains
By Tracy Kidder

Deo arrives in America from Burundi in search of a new life. Having survived a civil war and genocide, plagued by horrific dreams, he lands at JFK airport with two hundred dollars, no English, and no contacts. He ekes out a precarious existence delivering groceries, living in Central Park, and learning English by reading dictionaries in bookstores. Then Deo begins to meet the strangers who will change his life, pointing him eventually in the direction of Columbia University, medical school, and a life devoted to healing.

November 17, 2010

Sarah’s Key
by Tatiana De Rosnay

A “New York Times” bestseller.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.

Book descriptions from BookLetters. You can get a variety of book lists (New York Times, Staff Picks, etc.) sent to your email or RSS feeder each month. It is a great way to keep updated with all of the new books added to our collection.

Posted by Sharon, a Second Floor Librarian

Hot and toasty! Fresh book club bags for your reading pleasure

Lisa — Sat, 08 May 2010 16:00:39 +0000

Book Club - 34/365, by static416 on Flickr

We have 6 new book bag titles for you to check out! Grab them while you can, and enjoy them with your book club.

This is also a good time to let you know that the book club bags have moved. (What hasn’t in the last few months?) They are now in the southeast corner of the second floor, where the oversize books are.

Anyway, the new titles are (drumroll please):

	The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls (links to go the book club bags, not to the individual copies of these titles)
	Honeymoon in Tehran, by Azadeh Moaveni
	The Liars’ Club, by Mary Karr
	The Mighty Queens of Freeville, by Amy Dickinson
	The Sisters Antipodes, by Jane Alison
	A Year by the Sea, by Joan Anderson

You may have noticed that all of these titles are memoirs. These book club sets were all purchased with funds from the Margaret Bell Frazier Endowment, which is to be used for (amongst other things) purchasing biographies of women for our collection. We thought using the funds for book club sets would be a great use of the money. This way, not only do people read about women’s lives, but then they discuss them as well, and hopefully learn more from that discussion.

To place holds on any of the book club bags, check out our instructions near the bottom of this previous post on book club bags. It’s just a little bit different than placing a hold on a regular book.

Posted by Lisa, a second floor librarian

Mother-daughter book clubs

Alex — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 21:14:26 +0000

Do you ever get that feeling that you’ve stumbled onto a new idea only to realize that it’s not so new after all? I first heard about mother-daughter book clubs from a friend of mine with teenage daughters. She happened to mention that this reading group had been together since late elementary school. Since I have a young daughter myself, I like the idea of starting a group that would start before the turbulent teen years and take us into high school. It seems like a great way to keep the lines of communication open.

As I started looking into the concept I was surprised at the number of resources available right here in our library. It turns out mother-daughter book clubs have been around for awhile. Are you already in a group? Tell us know it’s going. If you’re in the thinking stage, here are some library resources to get you started:

	The mother-daughter book club: how ten busy mothers and daughters came together to talk, laugh, and learn through their love of reading by Shireen Dodson
	Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Creating Mother-Daughter Book Clubs by Cindy Hudson
	100 Books for Girls to Grow On by Shireen Dodson
	Once Upon a Heroine: 450 Books for Girls to Love by Alison Cooper-Mullin and Jennifer Marmaduke Coye
	Great Books for Girls: More Than 600 Books to Inspire Today’s Girls and Tomorrow’s Women by Kathleen Odean

The library also has a great collection of book club bags (with up to 10 copies of the book) for kids and teens. If you start a club, we’d love to hear about it!

Posted by Alex, a second floor librarian

Dear Reader

Sharon — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:19:48 +0000

Feeling too swamped to read a book these days or just looking for a way to be introduced to new books and authors? Join our Online Book Clubs. Every day, Monday through Friday, you will receive in your email a five-minute selection from a chapter of a book. By the end of the week, you’ll have read 2-3 chapters. Every Monday we start new books.

Sign up and start reading.

Posted by Sharon, a Second Floor Librarian

Upcoming Book Club Books

Sharon — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:04:21 +0000

We have just selected the next round of titles for our library book club.

The next meeting will be on January 20, 2010 at 7:30 p.m. in the Library Boardroom at the Main Library in Corvallis.

Our selection is My Life in France by Julia Child

The Corvallis-Benton County Public Library Book Club is open to everyone! We meet to discuss various books each third Wednesday of the month at 7:30 p.m. in the Library Boardroom. Books are provided by the library and will be available for pick up four weeks preceding the monthly meeting. To participate, please register in person at the adult services reference desk or call 541-766-6793.

If you have any questions or need clarification, please contact Sharon Grant at 766-6965 or sharon.grant@ci.corvallis.or.us

Here are the upcoming titles:

Feb. 17 The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Society by M. Shaffer & A. Barrows
March 17 Lying Awake by Mark Salzman
April 21 Outcasts United by Warren St. John
May 19 Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
June 16 Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway

No time for a bookclub?

Try our online book club

Check out a book club set for your book club

Lisa — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:20:43 +0000

*Photo credit below

Did you know the library has book club sets available for book clubs to check out?

A book club set is a heavy-duty zippered cloth bag, with 8-12 copies of the same book inside.

You’ll find the book club sets on the second floor of the library, near the elevator. They check out for two months. (Unfortunately, Benny the Beaver is not included.)

To find out which book club sets are available, you can click on this link, or search our catalog like this:

1. From our homepage, click on Library Classic Catalog.

2. Click on the turquoise Starts With tab at the top of the search box.

3. Search using the words: book club adult

4. Click on the first link.

To place a hold on a book club bag, click on the Hold Request button. In the dialog box that opens, you’ll see two options at the top. One says “I want the first available copy,” and the other says “I want a specific copy.” Make sure you select “I want a specific copy” and then just scroll down and check the box for the book club set you want.

As always, if you have any questions, just ask.

Posted by Lisa, a second floor librarian

*The photo is thanks to our Technical Services and Acquisitions Department – the fabulous folks who, amongst other important things, make sure that you can find what you want in our library catalog.