Book Club: On Wednesday, November 17, the book club will meet at 7 PM at the Bachelder Library to discuss Martin Walker’s Bruno, Chief of Police, which is the first title in a series of murder mysteries involving Benoit Courreges, aka Bruno.
These wonderfully escapist stories involve Bruno, a policeman in a small town in the Perigord region in the South of France. Intertwined with the mystery are aspects of French culture, history, and, most importantly, the food and wine of this region, regarded as the quintessential culinary region of France.
Bruno is a former soldier who has embraced country living. His home is a restored
shepherd’s cottage, he patronizes the weekly markets, and he has breakfast at a cafe every day.
He never uses his gun, he is loath to arrest the citizens of his town, he coaches much of the youth of the town in tennis or rugby, and he often spars with and basically ignores EU bureaucrats trying to enforce new laws that threaten to change the way things have always been done in the village. He gardens, hunts, and is a superb cook.
The murder of an elderly North African who fought in the French army changes everything. A beautiful young policewoman from Paris is sent to help Bruno with his investigation. They are drawn into one of the darkest chapters of French history: World War II, with a divided and occupied France, a time of terror and betrayal. They discover that this idyllic corner of France did not escape this dark period of France’s history.
Please swing by either library to pick up a copy. The club will meet on Wednesday, November 17 at 7 PM at the Bachelder Library. If you would like to attend via Zoom, please let Lee or Priscilla know and we’ll send you the link.
Magazines: As we look at our budget for next year, we look to see how we can best allocate the funds that we have. Very few magazines are being checked out and very few, if any, patrons are coming in to settle down and read magazines.
We are thinking that we will slowly allow many of our magazine subscriptions to lapse. If there are magazines that you strongly feel should be part of our collection, please let us know and we will take that into consideration.
If you subscribe to magazines and are looking for something to do with them when you are done with them, feel free to bring them to the library, and we’ll put them out for other patrons to enjoy.
Please keep in mind that you can download magazines from the State Library. They have a wide range of choices, including most of the magazines that the two Andover libraries currently subscribe to. To see what they have available, visit NH.Overdrive.com/collection/157644. If you would like to borrow any of these magazines, click on the button below the magazine, select Andover Library as your library, and enter your card number for the State Library.
Please remember that your State Library card number is your Andover Library card number preceded by 4300. You can also find magazines through Libby, an app that you can download onto your phone or tablet. On Libby, you can request a magazine by title. Please let us know if you need help with this.
Website: Our current website host is Weebly, which has been bought out by Square. With the future of our website uncertain, we are hoping to redesign and bring our website up-to-date. Please let us know if you have any website design skills or if you know of anyone who does!
State Park Passes: Don’t forget that we have passes to most of the New Hampshire State Parks. You do need to plan ahead and request the pass at least one day before you plan to go to the park. The fall is a perfect time to hike, please take advantage of our Pass Program.
Hoopla: We are happy to report that our patrons are making good use of Hoopla. We wanted to give you a heads-up that November will be a Bonus Borrow month. This means that there will be e-books, audio books, movies, and TV shows in various categories that you may borrow without the libraries being charged, and they will not count towards your four borrows a month.
The categories (tentatively) will be: Heroes and Villains, Holiday Family, Holiday Romance, Learn with Hoopla for kids, Life Long Learning for adults, Sci-Fi, Series You’ll Love, and Thrills and Chills. We will have more details in November.
Story Time: We are thrilled that Story Time has started up again at the Bachelder Library. For now, we are reading to the East Andover Village Preschool children outdoors, and the weather has cooperated. If the weather is bad and once the weather turns too cold to read outdoors, we will read indoors to a small group of children (only six kids – to help us keep the kids safe.)
Story Time happens every Tuesday at 10 AM. We currently have three regular readers who read once a month. There are usually four Tuesdays a month, and four times a year there are five Tuesdays a month! If you’d like to be a regular monthly reader, or if you’d be interested in reading every once in a while, please let us know.