Canton Public Library

This is how: proven aid in overcoming shyness, molestation, fatness, spinsterhood, grief, disease, lushery, decrepitude & more — for young and old alike by Augusten Burroughs — According to Amazon.com reviewer Mari Malcolm: In writing and in life, Augusten Burroughs has repeatedly summoned the courage to grab the wolves of his past by their foaming muzzles and peer into their wild eyes until he owns them — and because of this, he's survived nearly every horrific experience a person in a modern-day, first-world country could face and emerged as an astonishingly well-adjusted person. After turning his profoundly messed-up early life and its alcoholic aftermath into six harrowing, uplifting memoirs — including Running with Scissors and Dry — Burroughs lost interest in writing about himself. He kept meeting people who were locked in the same struggles he’d overcome and decided they needed to know they had options for fixing their lives. In This Is How, Burroughs delivers prescriptions for handling life's most pernicious problems. Don't let the snake-oil-salesmannish title put you off: this is raw, hard-knock-life advice, veering from brutal to hilarious to deeply compassionate.

The sense of an ending by Julian Barnes — According to Heller McAlpin, "Julian Barnes has finally won a Man Booker Prize, and I'm glad it's for The Sense of an Ending, his elegant, deceptively simple, quietly devastating moral tale about the self-serving vagaries of memory over time. Taking its title from Frank Kermode's 1967 critical study of the relationship of endings in fiction to apocalypse and death, this compact, multilayered story is the kind of book that bears re-reading. Barnes' unreliable narrator is a man in his 60s who comes into a small inheritance that causes him to reconsider the bitter aftermath of a miserable college romance and his role in a brilliant boyhood friend's unhappy demise — which leads to a serious revision of the life story he has always told himself. Like the best of Philip Roth's late cycle of nemesis novels, this mature work tackles big ethical issues in a slim, carefully plotted, wholly absorbing narrative."

To foster a sense of community and provide an opportunity for calm conversation, the Canton Public Library will host a book discussion for two book titles whose inclusion in the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools AP curriculum was recently challenged. The second discussion will be Tuesday, March 27th at 7:00 PM and we will be discussing:

Waterland by Graham Swift — Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, England and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Waterland, like the Hardy novels, carries with all else a profound knowledge of a people, a place, and their interweaving… Swift tells his tale with wonderful contemporary verve and verbal felicity… A fine and original work."