JMRL's blog.

Books on Tap met Thursday, September 1, at Champion Brewing Company to discuss The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, a young adult novel from 2008. This book was chosen as a part of our Banned Books Week celebration. We’ll continue the fun with a free film screening of the Hunger Games movie at Central Library … Continue reading →

JMRL Brown Baggers met to discuss Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway August 18th at the Central Library.  Written in 1925, the book takes place over one day in June, 1923, London. Clarissa Dalloway is buying the flowers herself for a party she is throwing that evening. In a stream of consciousness style, readers are “put in … Continue reading →

Books on Tap met August 4th at Champion Brewery to discuss The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles.  A lengthy (575 pages) summer read, it’s an adventure and road trip story about two brothers (Emmet and Billy) on a journey to (hopefully) find their long lost mother on the West coast on the 4th of July. … Continue reading →

Central library Brown Baggers book group met in person on Thursday, July 21st to discussNews of the World by Paulette Jiles.   Set in post Civil War Texas, Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels from town to town reading the news from around the country and the world to citizens eager and willing to pay to listen.  … Continue reading →

Books on Tap met outside at Champion Brewing company on Thursday, July 7th to discuss Rocket Boys by (Va Tech graduate) Homer Hickam. This memoir, published in 1998, is the story of a boy with a dream to build rockets, which was inspired by the 1957 launch of Sputnik.  Set in Coalwood, WV, a mining … Continue reading →

Brown Baggers book club met on Thursday, June 16th to discuss Passing by Nella Larsen. This classic work was originally published in 1929. Larsen, a mixed race woman herself, was the first black woman to graduate from New York Public Library’s library school and was the first black woman to win a Guggenheim Award for … Continue reading →

On Thursday, June 2nd a group of  Books on Tap readers met at Champion Brewery (following a power outage) to discuss Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness.  Published in 2015 and a National Book Award Finalist, much of this non-fiction work takes place at the Great … Continue reading →