Join us for afternoon tea on October 18 from 3 to 4:30 PM! Delicious treats and hot tea will be served, and all are welcome in the community living room at Thomaston Public Library.

We would also like to encourage folks to support their neighbors by bringing to Communi-TEA a non-perishable food, pet care, or personal care item to donate to the food pantry!

The Thomaston Public Library Silent Book Club is the new book club for introverts! Join us for a half hour of low-key socializing and light snacks, followed by an hour of reading in companionable silence. There is no required reading, so bring your own book or ask the librarians or the fellow book club members for a recommendation to borrow when you arrive. We will meet at the library on the evening of the third Monday of every month, so our first meeting will be Monday, October 21 from 5:30 to 7:00 pm. Learn more about Silent Book Clubs here!

Join us from 11 am to 1 pm in the gym of the Thomaston Academy Building for our annual Friends of the Thomaston Public Library Chili, Chowder, and Book Sale! This year, we are also excited to have a special showing of several local artists' work!

$8 per person, and kids under 10 eat free. Books will be for sale for $0.25 to $5.00. Proceeds from the chili, chowder and book sale all go to the Friends of the Thomaston Public Library. For more information, please call the library at (207) 354-2453.

Join us at 5 pm on Monday, October 28 for a fascinating talk from Jeffrey Ryan about his recently published book, Hermit: The Mysterious Life of Jim Whyte.

Based on a true story, Hermit weaves a tale almost too fantastic to be believed. When Jim Whyte settled outside the slate mining town of Monson, Maine in 1895, people hardly knew what to make of him. Almost 130 years later,  people still don’t. A world traveler that spoke six languages fluently, Whyte came to town with sacks full of money and a fierce desire to keep to himself. It was clear that Whyte was hiding from something — enough to make even the FBI eventually come looking. But even the Feds couldn’t imagine how Whyte, who lost every penny he had when WWI broke out, amassed another fortune before he died. Hermit follows one man’s quest to discover all he can about Whyte’s secret life before it’s too late.

Ryan is the author of several books, including Appalachian Odyssey: A 28-Year Hike on America’s Trail and Blazing Ahead: Benton MacKaye, Myron Avery and the Rivalry that Built the Appalachian Trail.

This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. For more information, call the library at (207) 354-2453.

Join us at Thomaston Public Library on Monday, November 4 at 5:00 pm for our Family Movie & Pizza Night! Free and open to all, and pajamas are welcome. By popular vote, we're showing How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World!

Hiccup fulfills his dreams of creating a dragon utopia and rules it alongside Astrid. When the sudden appearance of female Light Fury coincides with the darkest threat their village has ever faced, Hiccup and Toothless must leave the only home they've known and journey to find the mythical Hidden World before a hired tyrant named Grimmel finds it first. As their true destines are revealed, dragon and rider will fight together--to the very ends of the Earth--to protect everything they've grown to treasure.

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is rated PG for "adventure action and some mild rude himor" by the MPAA. The runtime is 104 minutes.

All films for Family Movie & Pizza Night are shown with closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing.

The Thomaston Public Library Mystery Book Club will meet on Thursday, November 7 at 11 am to discuss the DCI Vera Stanhope series by Ann Cleeves. The first book in the series is The Crow Trap, but book club members are welcome to pick any of the books in the series to read.

From the publisher:

"Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope may not be the first person you’d think of for a heroine: she’s overweight, a bit rough around the edges, and her staff knows when to stay out of her way. Vera’s crime-solving skills, however, are more than a match for the darkly fascinating cases that cross her path. Ann Cleeves’s flawed detective won over fans of police procedurals in both the U.S. and U.K."

From Radio Times Magazine on the fascinating origins of Vera:

"Vera [was] born on the page in 1999 in Cleeves’s novel The Crow Trap. Her arrival, as she burst through a set of church doors to interrupt the funeral of a murder victim, came out of the blue for her creator: 'I was stuck on The Crow Trap. It was never going to have a detective in it; it was just going to be about three women working on an environmental survey right up in the hills of Northumberland. It was always going to be a crime novel, but in a Minette Walters, psychological suspense way. I’d written the first three parts and couldn’t think what i was going to do with the rest of it.'

"So Cleeves, a former probation officer and bird observatory cook, fell back on the cast-iron, hard-boiled advice of the great Raymond Chandler, who said: 'If you are stuck with a book, have a guy burst through a door with a gun.' Says Cleeves; 'I don’t do guns, of course, but I was writing this funeral scene and everything had started and the door burst open and there she was, like a bag lady instead of a detective... [She] was based on the middle-aged women I knew growing up, formidable spinsters who’d lost men in the war or who had never married but became independent. They always wore dreadful clothes and didn’t care much what they looked like.'

"'Wherever I go, people...say to me, “I love Vera,” and I think they mean...they love having this strong, competent, authoritative woman they can identify with who doesn’t mind putting people down and doesn’t need a man in her life to be independent and happy.'"

The Thomaston Public Library Mystery Book Club meets the first Thursday of every month at 11 am. December's selection will be decided at November's meeting. For more information, please contact the library at (207) 354-2453.

The Let's Talk About It book group, facilitated by author and mentor Lee Heffner, will meet Tuesday, November 12, at 11 a.m. at Thomaston Public Library to continue the series entitled "So Near & So Far: An Exploration of Cuban Literature" with In the Cold of the Malecón by Antonio José Ponte.

From the publisher:

"In these renegade stories, set in Cuba during the hard times following the collapse of the Soviet Union, people go to work only to find that their jobs no longer exist. They joke and tell stories from the past, live aimlessly, uncertain about what the future holds. While living in this state of suspension, Ponte's dynamic characters create their own startling worlds.

"Departing from both the utopian-political and the romantic-baroque styles of past Cuban literature, Ponte deftly sketches a picture of a contemporary Cuba that is very different from the stereotype of Caribbean life, full of music and dance and colorful celebration. An old man and a six-year-old prodigy have a rendezvous to play chess at a forlorn railroad station. Randomly riding trains, a woman keeps company with a strange assembly of men. An unemployed historian falls in love with an enigmatic astrologer, and the two live out their tragedy in the streets of Havana as homeless vagrants. A father and son take an aimless stroll after lunch to see the whores along the Malecón, Havana's seaside promenade. A young man, one of the last Cuban students to go to the Soviet Union on a foreign-study program, returns to Havana, where he explores his identity-looking at childhood photos with his grandfather, spending time with old friends, and obsessively seeking news of a woman he had known and loved in Russia. In a style both lucid and translucent, Ponte shapes intricate stories of self-discovery and metaphysical revelation in spare and allusive prose."

These discussions are always thought-provoking and lively, and we welcome anyone to join for one book or the whole series! Light refreshments are served.

November's selection is to be announced. For more information, please contact the library at (207) 354-2453.

Join us for afternoon tea on October 18 from 3 to 4:30 PM! Delicious treats and hot tea will be served, and all are welcome in the community living room at Thomaston Public Library.

We would also like to encourage folks to support their neighbors by bringing to Communi-TEA a non-perishable food, pet care, or personal care item to donate to the food pantry!