Brandon library launches Morning Edition Book Club
By:
Jamie Hult, Staff writer
The Morning Edition Book Club will tackle a variety of fiction and nonfiction in its first several months.
Oh, the places you’ll go in a book club discussion.
That’s the fun part for Sharon Hall and her reason for starting the Morning Edition Book Club.
Branch manager at the Brandon Community Library, Hall is planning a variety of fiction and nonfiction for bibliophiles to check out and, hopefully, join up.
“I love book clubs,” she confessed. “It’s really interesting when you have people who have lived during different time periods offering their perspectives showing how culture has changed. That often comes out in book clubs.”
The Morning Edition Book Club will dive into topics as varied as raising buffalo on the South Dakota prairie to U.S. involvement in World War II, from the suspense of a doomed airline flight to the whimsy, wonder and sadness of a blind girl growing up in France during German occupation.
Hall said rules are loose for this book club – come and listen, even if you haven’t read the book – and conversation needn’t stick to a discussion guide.
“You can get off on a tangent, but it all wraps back around – the relationships between characters, making us think a little more,” she said. “Can we relate to the characters, the circumstances, and how they relate to the world today? It’s fun to see where the discussion can go.”
And she’s adamant about one thing: Read what you like.
“I buy into the philosophy that there are too many books in the world to be reading something you hate,” Hall said.
So put the book down and come to the discussion, she suggests.
“Even if you didn’t like it, you can still contribute, as long as you don’t mind spoilers.”
Morning Edition meets Jan. 4 to discuss Danielle Sosin’s The Long-Shining Waters. In the book club’s infancy, only a handful of people stopped by the library to check out the first title, but Hall is confident interest will grow, especially with a potentially tantalizing title for February – Killing the Rising Sun, the latest in Bill O’Reilly’s bestselling Killing series.
“His books are quite good, quite conversational,” she said. “Listening to Lincoln, I couldn’t get out of the car, even though I knew what happened.”
Monthly reads will be selected from the library’s Book Club to Go program – 12 books in a bag, ready-made for anyone with a library card.
“There are whole binders full of book-club-to-go titles you can request – kind of a varied group of titles on different subjects,” Hall said. “It kind of takes the guess work out of it.”
She’s chosen the first several as Morning Edition gets going and growing, but members will help dictate what the club reads.
The lineup through June begins with Dan O’Brien’s Buffalo for the Broken Heart in March, The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein in April, Before the Fall by Noah Hawley in May and All the Light You Cannot See by Anthony Doerr in June.
The Morning Edition Book Club meets the first Thursday of every month at 10:30 a.m. at the Brandon Community Library, 305 S. Splitrock Blvd. Its next meeting is Thursday, Feb. 1.
Reserve a book during library hours – 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays – or by calling the library at 582-2390.
Sharon Hall, Brandon Community Library director
In 1994, three days after graduating with a B.A. in English, Sharon Hall was hired as branch librarian at the Wisconsin Township Library. While there, the Wisconsin native worked toward her Master’s degree in Continuing and Vocational Education. As a child Hall owned and showed a flock of sheep and dreamed of growing up to be a 4-H and youth development agent.
She joined the 4-H and extension agency office at the University of Wisconsin in 1999. By 2006, she said, “I was burned out.”
Her hometown library in Montello, Wis., needed a library director, so Hall took the job and moved back to the family farm. When her mother passed away, she sold the house and bought a flock of sheep.
Hall met her husband online, a Colorado cattle rancher, and they married in 2009. She moved to the small cattle community of Simla, Colo., and went to work for Anythink Libraries.
“The philosophy is anything you can think of, you can do and find in a library,” she said.
Hall’s experience at Anythink led Siouxland Libraries to hire her in January 2017 to manage Brandon’s branch.
Just before Christmas, her husband and 4-year-old son joined her at their new home, a small country farm in Brandon.
“We’re farmers by heart,” Hall said.
