JMRL's blog.

The How-To Festival is BACK for its 4th annual library takeover event this Saturday, May 14th, from 10-1. Join us at Central Library in downtown Charlottesville (201 E Market St, Charlottesville, VA 22902) for a fun, free, fast-paced learning event. You do not need to sign up or register to attend; stop by for one … Continue reading →

Brown Baggers met in person on Thursday, April 21 to discuss The Last Castle by Denise Kiernan. The book is a work of nonfiction about the Biltmore mansion located in Asheville, North Carolina – “the largest, grandest residence ever built in the United States.” Having recently read The Yellow House and The Dutch House, our … Continue reading →

The Brown Baggers book club is preparing for a new “season” of reading, which will begin in June! Each December we host a potluck party to celebrate a year of reading and to recommend and choose new titles for our next batch of books (June-May). We enjoy reading a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction, … Continue reading →

Books on Tap met on Thursday, April 7 at Champion Brewing Company to discuss My Monticello by Jocelyn Johnson. Johnson is a local teacher and writer, so we were all excited to dive into this fictional debut, which is a collection of short stories plus one novella, all revolving in some way around survival in … Continue reading →

Jefferson-Madison Regional Library Same Page Community Read is a reading initiative that “provides opportunities for book groups, classrooms, and individuals to explore the themes of a single book by an author appearing at the Virginia Festival of the Book.” This year our title was We Are Not Free by Traci Chee, a historical fiction young … Continue reading →

Brown Baggers met virtually on Thursday, February 17 to discuss The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides. A psychological suspense filled with unreliable, flawed characters, the plot premise is this: a criminal psychologist becomes obsessed with being the one to coax a convicted murderer – a young woman who shot her husband six times in the … Continue reading →

Books on Tap held a hybrid meeting on Thursday, February 3 to discuss Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved (she won the Pulitzer Prize the following year). Virginia has reckoned recently with how literature is and should be presented in schools (see this article for an example featuring Beloved – a book challenge dating back to … Continue reading →

Brown Baggers book club met virtually on Thursday, January 20, to discuss The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. It is the group’s tradition to read the longest book of the year in January, and this year was no exception. Coming in at around 622 pages, this nonfiction book about the Great Migration is … Continue reading →

JMRL’s Books on Tap met virtually on January 6th to discuss Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy. Published in 2020, Migrations is the author’s first book of literary fiction, set in a near future where the impact of climate change has drastically reduced the global wildlife population. Part nautical adventure, part mystery, the reader is led to … Continue reading →