Beaman, Green Hills libraries start book club for campus, community
Grace Mestad |
Who Picked This Book? Club launched this fall for Lipscomb, Green Hills community
This year a unique partnership between the Nashville Public Library and Lipscomb University was formed in hopes of bringing the Lipscomb community closer to the greater Nashville area through reading.
Chad L’eplattenier, a librarian at the Nashville Public Library’s Green Hills branch, extended an offer to Lipscomb’s Beaman Library this fall.
“I was looking for ways to reach out to Lipscomb students and Elizabeth Heffington, assistant librarian at Beaman Library, suggested starting a book club as one way to do that,” said L’eplattenier.
Heffington has several years’ experience moderating book clubs for Nashville Public Library branches and had even helped L’eplattenier when he first began working for NPL, so it seemed only fitting that the two develop a book club together. The first meeting of the Who Picked This Book? Club was held in September.
The next meeting will be Nov. 3 at 3:30 p.m. in Beaman Library. The selection, A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki, can be picked up at Beaman Library as well as all NPL branches.
Who Picked This Book? Club was created to bring people from the broader community and from Lipscomb’s community together to discuss great books in a casual, open setting, as well as to learn about the resources and services available at both libraries.
“We want to promote the idea of reading for personal pleasure and enjoyment and the joy of sharing our thoughts on the book with other people who might have vastly different ideas,” said Heffington. “When you can talk about what you read with others, it helps you understand the perspective of someone younger or older and helps you accept their ideas as valid.”
Book clubs can often be difficult to keep up due to people’s varying schedules and commitments, which inspired the two librarians to schedule book club meetings at 3:30 p.m., a more neutral time that would accommodate those who work at Lipscomb during the day or have busy class schedules.
Heffington and L’eplattenier switch off picking books, using various book club resources as well as their own ideas for books they want to read and believe would spark great conversation and discussion for a book club. Heffington is partial to more thematic choices whereas L’eplattenier prefers more literary choices.
The two hope to continue book club meetings throughout the semester at Beaman Library unite the community along the way.
“Everyone should attend book club. It’s a great way to get exposed to books you otherwise might not read and hear other perspectives that you didn’t consider. Plus, it’s a social, laid-back atmosphere where you can speak your mind. We also have snacks!” said L’eplattenier.
For more information regarding Who Picked this Book? Club, visit http://www.lipscomb.edu/news/event/detail/5753
About A Tale for the Time Being
In Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who has lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.