Events

Our monthly knitting circle is every first Thursday at 10:30 am.  See Connie's blog for what we'll cover!

Curious about what your neighbors have been writing?  Join us for our monthly local author fair - it's been a great success, and we love showcasing local talent.  This month's lineup includes Nancy King, Ray Michael Baca, Robert Wasserman, Alfred Planco, and Pamela Christie.

February 7 at 3pm 

The Bookworks Book Club meets every second Wednesday at 7pm.  This month, they're reading Julie and Julia and My Life in France - come discuss these with us!

A lyrical and romantic story of love, fate and family

In the high desert of the American southwest during the summer of 1982, the Finley family is awaiting the arrival of the baby boy they're due to adopt. Oliver, just seven, is eager for another playmate to join him and his sister in their idyll of swimming pools, climbing trees, and playing tag. But one hot afternoon, Dr. Finley dies suddenly and everything changes. Mrs. Finley, newly widowed, decides she cannot proceed with the adoption alone.

After the first atomic bomb burst over the New Mexican desert in 1945 and as the Cold war developed, the American myth of the Wild West expanded to encompass atomic sheriffs saving the world for democracy.  Jon Hunner's brisk, engaging biography documents the emergence of the Atomic West and the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who came to feel at home in the American West.  Against the backdrop of the physicist's life twining with the region's history, Hunner explores the promise and peril of the atomic age.

If there was ever a 'ring-tailed roarer' of the backwoods of New Mexico, he was Quentin Hulse, who lived and worked most of his life in the Gila River country of southwestern New Mexico - but his reputation spread far and wide.  Hulse led a lion hunt, witnessed a point-blank shooting, and appeared on a tourist postcard and souvenir license plate in the 1950s.  With compassion, Nancy Coggeshall tells the compelling biography of a rural western rancher constantly adjusting to the inroads of modernity in his traditional way of life.  She brings this unique westerner, and New Mexican to life.

Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, is donating $5,000 of his books to APS libraries!  Bookworks will present his gift after a screening of Pennies for Peace, a short film about building girls' schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  We'll also offer 10% off any of Greg's books and audiobooks during this event.  Join us and help continue Greg's message: Books - not bombs.

Jon Turk has kayaked around Cape Horn and paddled across the Pacific Ocean to retrace the voyages of ancient people.  But, the strangest trip he ever took was the journey he made as a man of science into the realm of the spiritual.  In a remote Siberian village, Turk met an elderly Koryak shaman named Moolynaut, who mended his fractured pelvis.  Finding no rational explanation, Turk sought understanding in the frozen tundra.  Framed by high adventure across the vast and forbidding Siberian landscape, The Raven's Gift creates a vision of natural and spiritual realms interwoven with one man's awakening.

Billy the Kid—a.k.a. Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William Bonney—was a horse thief, cattle rustler, charismatic rogue, and cold-blooded killer. A superb shot, the Kid gunned down four men single-handedly and five others with the help of cronies.

Join us for a slide show tour of sustainable meadow gardens throughout the US and discussion about creating a meadow garden in New Mexico with garden photography Saxon Holt and New Mexico native plant expert and garden designer Judith Phillips.

Like Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than for his contribution to history.  Yet, in nineteenth-century industrial America, while Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil, Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Pulitzer ushered in the modern mass media.

James McGrath Morris traces the epic story of this Jewish Hungarian immigrant's rise through American politics and into journalism where he accumulated immense power and wealth, only to fall blind and become a lonely, tormented recluse wandering the globe - but not before Pulitzer transformed American journalism and politics forever. 

UPDATE: This event has been moved to7pm, March 2

Sid Higgins, the appealing, self-deprecating narrator of Farber's poignant, funny debut, has been receiving postcards from his old girlfriend Zoe. Unfortunately, the whimsical Zoe has disappeared, and the postmarks on the cards are more than a year old. Though he doesn't really expect to find her, Sid travels to Europe in search of Zoe. Since Sid works for a travel agency, a slick telephone operation that uses the amusingly named Randomizer to dial potential clients, the trip is easy to arrange. Sid plaintively and self-mockingly relates his interactions with his boss, Steve; his neighbor, Gerald the Post Office Guy; and, most of all, his dog, Zero, whose deftly described postures convey so much, though perhaps not quite as much as Sid reads into them. Sid's older sister, Natalie, a doctor who provides welcome perspective on Sid, is by turns affectionate, irritated, supportive, and occasionally fed up. The reader is likely to feel the same.

Join us for our monthly local author fair - the lineup is coming soon!

Mayan literature is among the oldest in the world, spanning an astonishing two millennia from deep pre-Columbian antiquity to the present day. Here, for the first time, is a fully illustrated survey, from the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions to the works of later writers using the Roman alphabet. Dennis Tedlock--ethnographer, linguist, poet, and award-winning author--draws on decades of living and working among the Maya to assemble this groundbreaking book, which is the first to treat ancient Mayan texts as literature. Tedlock considers the texts chronologically. He establishes that women were among the ancient writers and challenges the idea that Mayan rulers claimed the status of gods. 2000 Years of Mayan Literature expands our understanding and appreciation not only of Mayan literature but of indigenous American literature in its entirety.

In The Man Who Ate His Boots, Anthony Brandt tells the whole
story of the search for the Northwest Passage, from its beginnings
early in the age of exploration through its development into a British
national obsession to the final sordid, terrible descent into scurvy,
starvation, and cannibalism. Sir John Franklin is the focus of the book
but it covers all the major expeditions and a number of fascinating
characters, including Franklin’s extraordinary wife, Lady Jane, in
vivid detail.

“Tony Brandt is a superb and profound writer who leads us through a
tale of such hardship you feel as if you've been aboard ship with them.
It’s no small feat to use a bit of history to illuminate the future,
but Brandt pulls it off. This is narrative history at its absolute
gripping best.”
—Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and War

Thanks to everyone who came - it was a lot of fun!  We'll have photos soon!

Volunteers for Samaritans, a humanitarian organization, Kathryn Ferguson, Dr. Norma Price and Ted Parks, and artist Debbi McCullough discuss the book Crossing with the Virgin: Stories from the Migrant Trail, which tells the stories of migrants treated and rescued by Samaritans on desert trails near the Arizona-Mexico border.  Art to be displayed was created by Debbi McCullough from items found on the desert - using Levis, shoes, wallets, photos and tuna cans she creates cloth books, sculptures and prayer wheels.