Library Book Club

All experience levels are welcome to a monthly book group moderated by library staff. In 2013, the library will ask individuals from varied backgrounds to select a title that has been meaningful to them. Space is limited to 15 participants. Please register in advance by emailing [email protected].

June’s curator, Sam Parton, selected Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie for the following reasons:

“This book has personal meaning for me - as a child of immigrants to Canada, and as a descendant of Susanna Moodie. In these poems, Atwood responds to Moodie's writings about life as a settler in 19th century Canada ("Roughing It in the Bush" and "Life in the Clearings") with poems that articulate her sense of Moodie's "other" voice: the unspoken words that hum between the lines of written text, which Moodie could not articulate as a member of polite colonial society. The book is a powerful meditation on dislocation, identity, wilderness, and survival.”

Sam Parton is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and co-founder of acclaimed Canadian band The Be Good Tanyas. In addition to performing internationally with her band, she has worked as a treeplanter in British Columbia, a researcher of folklore in Brooklyn, and a street musician in New Orleans. She is related to Susanna Moodie on her father's side.