Book Groups at the Library
Virtual, International Murder Mystery—we have something for everyone. Interested in starting a new book group? Let us know!
Virtual Book Club
This online book club meets on the third Saturday of the month at 4:00 p.m.
May 16: How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.
In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them.
How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.
2026 Book Club Selections
May 16: How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
June 20: Hard Times, You Say? Smile, This is the Great Depression by R. Leslie Howe (local author who will join in the book club discussion in person at the Olive Free Library)
July 18: Tell me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
August 15: Home Inside the Globe by Gail Straub (local author who will join in the book club discussion)
Sept 19: The Boy From the North Country by Susan Sussamn
Oct 17: Confessions of A Bar Brat: Growing Up In Rosendale NY by Judith A. Boggess (local author who will join in the book club discussion)
Nov 21: Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Dec 19: The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
You can request a book, or ebook from the Mid-Hudson library system. Please call the library with any questions: 845-657-2482
International Murder Mystery Book Club
This book club meets in person at the library on the 3rd Monday of each month at 2 p.m., led by Henrietta Shannon.
May 18: The Museum Detective by Maha Khan Phillips - Pakistan
When Dr. Gul Delani receives a call in the middle of the night from the Sindh police, she thinks they may have finally found her niece, Mahnaz—a precocious, politically conscious teenage girl who went missing three years prior. Gul has been racked with grief since Mahnaz’s disappearance and distracts herself through a talented curator at the Museum of Heritage and History in Karachi, she is one of the country’s leading experts in archaeology and ancient civilizations, a hard-won position for a woman.
But there is no news of Mahnaz. Instead, Gul is summoned to a narcotics investigation in a remote desert region in western Pakistan. In her wildest dreams, Gul couldn’t have imagined what she’d find amid a drug bust gone wrong, there is a mummy—life-size, seemingly authentic, its sarcophagus decorated with symbols from Persepolis, the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. The discovery confounds everyone. It is both too good to be true, and for Gul, too precious to leave in careless or corrupt hands.
Aided by her team of unlikely misfits, Gul will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of it, even as her quest for the truth puts her in the throes of a dangerous conspiracy and threatens to collide with her ongoing search for Mahnaz. A portrait of a city fueled by corruption and a woman relentlessly in pursuit of justice, The Museum Detective is an exciting, gritty new crime thriller that announces a whip-smart and brilliant sleuth and builds to a stunning, emotional conclusion that readers won’t soon forget.
2026 International Mystery Book Club Selections
May 18: The Museum Detective by Maha Khan Phillips - Pakistan
June 15: The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer – England
July 20: – TWO BOOKS:
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind – 18th Century Paris
and
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley- #1 Flavia de Luce Series – England
August 17: Sleep Well my Lady by Kwei Quartey - #2 in Emma Djan Investigation Series -Ghana
September 28: Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story by Leonine Swann - #1 in the SheepDetective Series - England
October 19: Red Wolf by Liza Marklund - #5 Annika Bengtzon Series – Sweden
November 16: The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell - #1 Cutter and Bliss Series - Victorian England
December 21: An Enemy in the Village the Woods by Martin Walker - #18 Bruno, Chief of Police – Rural France
Defending Democracy Book Club
In-person book club meeting the first Tuesday of each month at 5:30 p.m., led by author David Corbett.
May 26: On Freedom by Timothy Snyder (note special meeting date)
On Freedom takes us on a thrilling intellectual journey. Drawing on the work of philosophers and political dissidents, conversations with contemporary thinkers, and his own experiences coming of age in a time of American exceptionalism, Snyder identifies the practices and attitudes—the habits of mind—that will allow us to design a government in which we and future generations can flourish. We come to appreciate the importance of traditions (championed by the right) but also the role of institutions (the purview of the left). Intimate yet ambitious, this book helps forge a new consensus rooted in a politics of abundance, generosity, and grace.
2026
May 26: On Freedom by Timothy Snyder (note special meeting date)
July 7: Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade
July 28: A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit (note special meeting date)
September 1: America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present, by John Ghazvinian
October 6: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild)
November 3: The Price of Democracy by Vanessa Williamson
December 1: The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America, by Michael Waldman
Reading Away Our Teens
This new in-person teen book club will meet monthly on Thursdays from 5:00 - 6:00 pm at the Olive Free Library. It’s led by Jenny Albright, for teens ages 13 - 19.
May 28: Dig by A.S. King
Five estranged cousins are lost in a maze of their family’s tangled secrets. Their grandparents, former potato farmers Gottfried and Marla Hemmings, managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions and now they sit atop a million-dollar bank account—wealth they’ve refused to pass on to their adult children or their five teenage grandchildren. “Because we want them to thrive,” Marla always says.
But for the Hemmings cousins, “thriving” feels a lot like slowly dying of a poison they started taking the moment they were born. As the rot beneath the surface of the Hemmings’ white suburban respectability destroys the family from within, the cousins find their ways back to one another, just in time to uncover the terrible cost of maintaining the family name.
With her inimitable surrealism, award winner A.S. King exposes how a toxic culture of polite white supremacy tears a family apart and how one determined generation can dig its way out.
2026 (Forth Thursday)
May 28: Dig by A.S. King
June 25: Girl Dinner