Dorset Library Book Clubs
The Dorset Library offers two options for book clubs. One, called the Book Club, will focus on fiction with an occasional non-fiction selection. It meets on the fourth Thursday of every month at 5pm. The second, called the Non-Fiction Book Club will focus on modern history and other nonfiction books chosen by participants. It meets on the second Tuesday of each month at 5pm.You will find good conversation and refreshments at each meeting! We will add the list of upcoming books soon so you can get a head start! Call or email the Library to reserve any of the upcoming books.
The current non-fiction book is The Fire and the Darkness by Sinclair McKay.
The current fiction book is Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner.
The upcoming fiction books for 2025:
January – Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner –
February-
March-
April-
May-
June-
July-
August-
September-
October-
November-
December-
(the list is coming soon)
Past books in 2025:
January – Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner –
February-
March-
April-
May-
June-
July-
August-
September-
October-
November-
December-
January 14 @5pm
The Fire and the Darkness by Sinclair McKay
On February 13th, 1945 at 10:03 PM, British bombers began one of the most devastating attacks of WWII: the bombing of Dresden. The first contingent killed people and destroyed buildings, roads, and other structures. The second rained down fire, turning the streets into a blast furnace, the shelters into ovens, and whipping up a molten hurricane in which the citizens of Dresden were burned, baked, or suffocated to death.
Early the next day, American bombers finished off what was left. Sinclair McKay’s The Fire and the Darkness is a pulse-pounding work of history that looks at the life of the city in the days before the attack, tracks each moment of the bombing, and considers the long period of reconstruction and recovery. The Fire and the Darkness is powered by McKay’s reconstruction of this unthinkable terror from the points of view of the ordinary civilians: Margot Hille, an apprentice brewery worker; Gisela Reichelt, a ten-year-old schoolgirl; boys conscripted into the Hitler Youth; choristers of the Kreuzkirche choir; artists, shop assistants, and classical musicians, as well as the Nazi officials stationed there.
What happened that night in Dresden was calculated annihilation in a war that was almost over. Sinclair McKay’s brilliant work takes a complex, human, view of this terrible night and its aftermath in a gripping book that will be remembered long after the last page is turned.
January 23 @5pm
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
Called a “magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom” by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.