Author: Jennifer Graham

These Precious Days, by Ann Patchett (Harper, 320 pages)

The Ann Patchett craze somehow eluded me, although I know people who wait breathlessly for her next book. She is not as famous as Stephen King nor as prolific as Jodi Picoult, having “just” eight novels and two children’s books to her name, but she enjoys those writers’ commercial success, and has developed an auxiliary fame as co-owner of a Nashville bookstore and as an advocate for independent booksellers.

As such, there’s been breathless anticipation all year for Patchett’s fourth book of nonfiction, These Precious Days, which is a pandemic book — not a book about a pandemic, but a book set in the pandemic. In fact, some of what occurs in the essays here pre-dates Covid-19 and has been published before, in The New Yorker and elsewhere. That, it turns out, matters not one whit.

The essays are finely strung, like a strand of Mikimoto pearls, and are so well-crafted as to have sprung fully formed from Zeus’s head. Patchett identifies as a novelist but says she’s always writing essays to fill in the gaps, to remind her that she’s still a writer when she’s not consumed by a work of fiction. Amusingly, she says that when working on a novel, she’s stalked by the idea of death, thinking that she could die at any time and the undertaker would bury all her beloved characters with her. The pandemic made that worse. “What was the point of starting [a novel] if I wasn’t going to be around to finish? This didn’t necessarily mean I believed I was going to die of the coronavirus, any more than I believed I was going to drown in the Atlantic or be eaten by a bear, but all those scenarios were possible. The year 2020 didn’t seem like a great time to start a family, or a business, or a novel.” And so she spent the time working on essays, which Patchett says death didn’t seem all that interested in.

The collection starts with a remembrance published in The New Yorker on Patchett’s “three fathers,” her biological dad and two stepfathers. (“Marriage has always proved irresistible to my family. We try and fail and try again, somehow maintaining our belief in an institution that has made fools of us all.”) The next essay, “The First Thanksgiving,” is a pithier reflection on Patchett’s experience as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, when she couldn’t go home for the holiday and instead decided to cook a traditional dinner in her dorm for other stranded friends. Having never cooked a turkey or any other Thanksgiving dish before. “I made yeast rolls, for heaven’s sake! I cooked down fresh cranberries into sauce!”

Only having enough quarters to call her mother from the pay phone when she was finished (we’re talking about a woman who is now 60), she used recipes from The Joy of Cooking and writes that “even now, when someone claims they don’t know how to cook, I find myself snapping, ‘Do you know how to read?’”

Not to take away from Patchett’s talents, but part of the appeal of her essays is simply that she lives such an interesting life. Take, for example, the beginning of her essay, “Flight Plan,” in which she writes: “Three of us were in a 1947 de Havilland Beaver, floating in the middle of a crater lake in the southwest quadrant of Alaska.”

What?

It is a declarative statement, simply crafted, but dares the reader not to read on to learn more. It turns out that the essay is not about this particular excursion that Patchett took with her physician husband, Karl, but about his lifelong obsession with aviation (and by extension, every other amateur pilot), and her coming to grips with it, with reactions that range from bewilderment to fear.

We learn much from this essay about aviation culture, such as that a certain model of small plane is known as a doctor killer. (“Doctors have enough money to buy them,” Karl said, “but they aren’t good enough pilots to fly them.”) But we also go deep inside Patchett’s marriage, her terror about the possibility of Karl dying in a plane crash, her struggle to understand why dangerous pastimes were so important to him. “I understood he wasn’t interested in baking bread, that there would be no Scrabble or yoga in our future as a couple, but couldn’t there be a hobby in which death was not a likely outcome?”

But death is, of course, a likely outcome for us all, and despite Patchett’s insistence that death had no interest in essays, it enshrouds the titular essay, which is about her relationship with a woman named Sooki, who was the actor Tom Hanks’ personal assistant for nearly 20 years.

Patchett had come to know Hanks after writing a jacket blurb for his book of short stories, Uncommon Type, and came to know Sooki when Hanks later agreed to narrate the audio book of her novel The Dutch House. Through increasingly intimate emails, the women evolved from “affectionate strangers” to housemates while Sooki was in an experimental treatment for pancreatic cancer.

No spoilers here, but it is a deeply moving story about friendship, and utterly riveting. As is the collection in its entirety. A

Book Notes

As the end of 2021 mercifully approaches, here’s a look back at the books that made our A list. Some won critical acclaim nationwide; others, not much more than here, but they’re worth your attention if you haven’t read them already.

Bewilderment, by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton, 278 pages), novel: A widowed dad struggles with raising his neurologically untypical son while pondering possible other worlds beyond our universe.

The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green(Dutton, 274 pages), nonfiction, essays: The author of The Fault in Our Stars gives 1- to 5-star reviews of everything from Canada geese to Diet Dr Pepper to the “wintry mix.”

Love Like That, by Emma Duffy-Comparone(Henry Holt and Co., 211 pages), short stories: Nine stories about love, both brittle and vibrant, all set in New England, two on the Granite State coast.

The Audacity of Sara Grayson, by Joani Elliott (Post Hill Press, 400 pages), novel: Part of the genre often dismissed as “chick lit,” this is a fun, original and New Englandish story of a daughter tasked with writing the ending to a best-selling series after the author, her mother, dies.

The Five Wounds, by Kirstin Valdez Quade (W.W. Norton, 416 pages), novel: A troubled Catholic family in New Mexico grapples with an unwed pregnancy, poverty and illness in this moving portrait of real life, the kind that doesn’t show up on Twitter.

The Blizzard Party, by Jack Livings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages), novel: Engrossing fiction set during the very real blizzard of 1978.

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf, 303 pages), novel: This Booker Prize-winning story of a young girl and her “artificial friend” asks us to think seriously about the costs of companion robots, both to us and to them.

Chasing Eden, A Book of Seekersby Howard Mansfield (Bauhan Publishing, 216 pages), nonfiction: An intelligent and contemplative book by a New Hampshire author about an unusual cast of Americans who bid the founders’ call to pursue happiness in their own unique ways.

Book Events

Author events

• JAMES ROLLINS Author presents The Starless Crown, in conversation with Terry Brooks. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., Jan. 10, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• CHAD ORZEL Author presents A Brief History of Timekeeping. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 27, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• ISABEL ALLENDE Author presents Violeta. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., Jan. 29, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration and tickets required, to include the purchase of the book. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• JOHN NICHOLS Author presents Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiters. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., Feb. 1, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• TIMOTHY BOUDREAU Author presents on the craft of writing short stories. Sat., Jan. 15, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• CAROL WESTBURG AND SUE BURTON Virtual poetry reading hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 20, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

You Can’t Be Serious, by Kal Penn (Gallery, 367 pages)

You may know Kal Penn as a resident on the TV series House M.D. Or the stoner from the Harold & Kumar movie franchise. Or the Hollywood actor who took a break from all that to work in the Obama White House.

Or, like me, you know nothing about Kal Penn at all. In that case, you may have zero interest in the actor’s memoir You Can’t Be Serious, and I’m here to change your mind about that. As Hollywood memoirs go, this one is surprisingly engrossing, in part because of Penn’s intelligence and his willingness to be vulnerable and open up about discrimination he encountered as the son of Indian immigrants.

Penn, whose real name is Kaplen Modi, does his best writing in the first chapter, in which he describes assorted indignities of growing up in New Jersey, where he wore clothes from Sears (that descriptive says so much) and was called a racial slur by a “devil child [who] resembled a splintered toothpick — skinny with tiny arms.”

Early on, Penn realized that his brain worked better than those of some of his classmates, and that it preferred imagination to analytics. By middle school he had aligned with other misfits in the drama club, and he had a breakout performance as the Tin Man in the school’s performance of “The Wiz.”

By high school, however, his parents, who saw theater as impractical, intervened, insisting that he decline when offered a role in the ensemble of Godspell. It says a lot about his character, all good, that he writes, “I was more heartbroken than angry.” Penn had great respect for his family, even though, early on, they were not thrilled about his career path. (In one of his recurring jokes, his family members say, “We don’t do that. We’re Indian.”) He lovingly recounts the history of his father, who arrived in the U.S. with $8 and little else but ambition, and his grandfathers, who told him moving stories about marching with Gandhi.

In writing about his early life, Penn reveals the challenges and even violence confronting immigrants from India. Unfortunately, even when he moved to California to study acting at UCLA, and then began to audition for work, the discriminatory insults continued. He was only considered for parts that were cartoonish portrayals of Asian American, always with a thick, cheesy accent. And while Penn could do a wide range of accents, he had none naturally, leading to many instances when people expressed surprise that he was so “articulate.”

At one point he considered quitting acting altogether, but he came to accept, “I’m brown, period, and this is a white boys’ game. If the best characters that writers, producers, directors and casting teams can come up with are tired, unfunny stereotypes that we’ve seen a million times, it’s a reliable sign that the individuals I’m dealing with are seriously short on talent themselves. This reflects badly on them, not me.’

When he got work, he began to push back, suggesting script changes to writers and trying to dodge directors’ requests to make an accent more pronounced. All the while, he was being told how good an actor he was, and Penn explains how some of his early, unsatisfying work led to bigger opportunities later. In addition to House and Harold & Kumar, some of his other notable credits are the film The Namesake and the recent CBS series Clarice.

In the middle of all this, however, Penn diverts into a sort of shadow career as a White House aide to Barack Obama. This wasn’t a shocking development; in high school, he’d taken a test that was supposed to help him narrow down a career, and the results said, “Inconclusive. This student’s interests are too varied for us to provide tangible recommendations.” His guidance counselor said she’d never had a student get that result.

But Penn had seen Obama speak when he was still a senator and had been impressed enough to volunteer. And he was such an effective volunteer that Obama himself asked him to take a paid job with the campaign, and then to work in the White House. (All of which explains why Penn’s character on House was written out of the show.)

At this point, the memoir stumbles slightly, revealing its central weakness: This is a book that doesn’t know exactly what it’s about. Memoirs, of course, are recollections, but often they have a theme, a sort of overarching wisdom under which the anecdotes collect. Penn’s memories don’t stand still long enough for that; they dart about like squirrels. They are funny squirrels, so there’s that. As skillful as Penn is as an actor, he’s also a first-rate comedian, and the one-liners come fast and furious. That said, after a spate of extraordinarily thoughtful writing in the first few chapters, the book does tend to devolve into a more typical recounting of stories. By the time he wraps things up by introducing his now-fiance, a Southern man with a penchant for NASCAR, the book is feeling a bit long, like you know 100 pages more than you needed to know about this particular actor.

Whatever its blemishes, being overly partisan is not one of them. Yes, more than a third of the book contains anecdotes about his work with President Obama, and obviously he’s a fan and a Democrat (he even spoke at the party’s 2012 convention), but there’s little here that would be offensive to Republicans. At heart, You Can’t Be Serious is a quintessential story along the lines of local-boy-makes-good, with the local boy being of Indian descent, smart and funny. There may be better memoirs about Hollywood or politics, or even growing up Indian in New Jersey, but it’s safe to say this is the best one about all three. B

Book Notes

Every year I look forward to a new Christmas book, one that can join my collection of perennial holiday reads. Most years I am disappointed.

The last book to qualify for a lasting place on the holiday bookshelf was the late Stuart McLean’s Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe (Viking, 272 pages), which came out in 2017. In fact, there just don’t seem to be that many Christmas-themed books other than cookbooks. This year I could only find a collection of remembrances by Fox News personalities — All American Christmas (Broadside, 272 pages) — and a historical novel that I missed in 2017, Samantha Silva’s Mr. Dickens and His Carol (Flatiron, 288 pages).

But then I realized I’d been looking in the wrong genre.

There are plenty of Christmas books available to readers if they’re interested in romance novels, with the occasional dog book thrown into the mix. They’re not my cup of holiday tea, but apparently are quite popular, given their prevalence (and also the popularity of Hallmark Christmas movies).

A sampling: Sleigh Bells Ring (HQN, 336 pages) by RaeAnne Thayne, billed as a “sparkling and heartwarming holiday romance,” released in both hardback and paperback on Halloween, and Christmas in the Scottish Highlands (Bookouture, 294 pages) by Donna Ashcroft, which looks to be a fairly predictable romance novel embellished with holly, mulled wine and mince pies.

Other new holiday romances this year include The Holiday Swap (Viking, 352 pages) by Maggie Knox, in which two young women who are identical twins trade places at Christmas, and Dear Santa (Ballantine, 272 pages) by Debbie Macomber, in which a recently jilted young woman returns home for Christmas and writes a letter to Santa that changes her life. (In a bit of brilliant marketing, the illustration on this one shows a Santa-hat-wearing golden retriever holding a letter in its mouth.)

There’s also A Season for Second Chances (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 448 pages) by Jenny Bayliss, the author of last year’sThe Twelve Dates of Christmas (also Putnam, 368 pages), and Santa’s Sweetheart (Kensington Publishing, 233 pages) by Janet Dailey. I could go on, but you get the picture, and my keyboard is getting gritty with all the sugar.

But I did promise dogs, so check out Best in Snow (Minotaur, 320 pages) by David Rosenfelt if only to get a rush of serotonin from the cover, and It’s a Wonderful Woof (Forge, 272 pages) by Spencer Quinn.

Book Events

Author events

• BRENE BROWN Author presents Atlas of the Heart. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Dec. 2, 8 p.m. Via Zoom. Tickets cost $30. Ticket sales end Dec. 2, at noon. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• ERNESTO BURDEN Author presents Slate. The Bookery (844 Elm St., Manchester). Thurs., Dec. 2, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• JACK DALTON Kid conservationist presents his book, Kawan the Orangutan: Lost in the Rainforest. Toadstool Bookshop, 375 Amherst St., Nashua. Sat., Dec. 4, noon. Visit toadbooks.com.

• DAMIEN KANE RIDGEN Author presents Bell’s Codex and My Magnum Opus. Toadstool Bookshop, 375 Amherst St., Nashua. Sun., Dec. 5, noon. Visit toadbooks.com.

• MICHAEL J. FOX Author presents No Time Like the Future. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., Dec. 7, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Tickets cost $17.99, and include a copy of the book. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Once Upon a Wardrobe, by Patti Callahan (Harper Muse, 320 pages)

His good friend J.R.R. Tolkien might be more popular in Hollywood, but Clive Staples Lewis — you know him as “C.S.” — continues to sell books nearly 60 years after his death.

The Oxford scholar and Christian apologist not only wrote books but inspired them. The Lewis-related catalog includes more than a dozen biographies, memoirs by people who knew him (among them A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken) and collections of Lewis quotes.

And now Southern writer Patti Callahan is capitalizing on Lewis’s enduring popularity by writing novels in the Lewisverse. They’re not quite historical novels, not quite fan fiction, but a blending of two disparate genres.

Callahan’s first was Becoming Mrs. Lewis, the 2018 account of the relationship between Lewis and his wife, New Yorker Joy Davidman. Written in first person, the book is Callahan’s imagining of how the relationship transpired, but apparently quite factual. Davidman’s son called it “extraordinarily accurate” and said the novel was more truthful than many nonfiction accounts about his mother.

Callahan’s latest, Once Upon a Wardrobe, again takes first person, this time the voice of a 17-year-old college student, Megs Devonshire, who befriends Lewis and his older brother, Warnie, in order to answer a question for her little brother.

Megs’ brother, George, is 8 and not expected to live until 9 because of a heart condition. He spends most of his time in bed and has become enthralled with a recently published children’s book, Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A deep thinker for his age, George is obsessed with learning where the idea for Narnia arose, if the place is real. Since Megs takes classes near Magdalen College, where Lewis teaches, he begs her to find out.

Megs agrees; she adores her brother and wants to provide whatever happiness she can in his limited life. “I loved Dad with a fierce love, but I loved George more,” she says. “Maybe when we know we will lose someone, we love fiercer and wilder. Of course there will always be loss, but with George the end lingered in every room, in every breath, in every holiday.”

Although she often sees Lewis walking around the Oxford campus, she’s too shy to approach him directly and instead follows him home one night and takes to hanging out in the shrubbery, trying to summon the nerve to knock on the door. It’s there that the kindly Warnie discovers her one day, and, this being before stalking was a thing, he invites her inside for tea.

From there, a relationship evolves between the Lewis brothers and Megs, who is a math whiz studying physics and was initially dismissive of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, until she read it with her brother and became equally entranced by the story. C.S. Lewis, who went by Jack, is reluctant to answer Megs’ question outright, and instead offers her a series of stories about his life, told over a number of visits, which she goes home and relays to her brother.

In this way, Once Upon a Wardrobe is yet another Lewis biography, told in a fresh way, and like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it’s told in deceptively simple language. The narrator, after all, is a 17-year-old girl, although she delves into mature themes, such as illness and death. She’s a bit heavy-handed with the book’s theme, which is that life, and our experience of it, is the sum of the stories we tell ourselves, or that others tell us.

Even 8-year-old George grasps that, telling his sister, “I know you think the whole world is held together by some math formula. But I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think the world is held together by stories, not all those equations you stare at.”

The book at times feels somewhat formulaic (all protagonists must be earnest outsiders who don’t quite fit in; children are dispensers of wisdom) but Callahan has a deft touch and is beautifully descriptive. She goes to the source — Lewis’s memoirs and letters — to try to craft an answer to George’s question. When it comes, it might not be what you think. In fact, Lewis’s first imagining of a faun carrying an umbrella more resembles Stephenie Myers’ dream of a human and a vampire in a field than a theologian trying to create an allegory that represents Christianity. And Narnia, the name, didn’t come from a dream, but from a map: It’s derived from the name of a town in Italy.

Ultimately, this is a book for the diehard Narnia fan; people with little interest in those stories would have zero interest in this novel. But the prolific Callahan has 15 other novels worth checking out, including one published earlier this year. Surviving Savannah is historical fiction about an 1838 shipwreck that was called “The Titanic of the South.” B

Book Notes

The best-selling Hollywood memoir this month looks to be Will, a memoir by actor Will Smith, co-written with Mark Manson (Penguin, 432 pages), and this probably would have been true even before Oprah Winfrey deemed it the best memoir she’s ever read.

The Manson-Smith collaboration is an interesting one. Usually celebrity authors get writing help from relative unknowns. Manson is an author who may not be a household name but has serious publishing cred by virtue of his own books, 2016’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** (Harper, 224 pages) and its followup Everything is F***ed, a Book about Hope (Harper, 288 pages).

We can safely assume there will be expletives in Will, but from the opening, it looks like a powerful, poignant read with no gratuitous cursing. An excerpt: “What you have come to understand as ‘Will Smith,’ the alien-annihilating MC, the bigger-than-life movie star, is largely a construction — a carefully crafted and honed character — designed to protect myself. To hide myself from the world. To hide the coward.”

Also in the entertainment category comes two “oral histories” of popular shows: The Office and The Sopranos. Setting aside how it can be an oral history on a printed page, these books promise to tell the most ardent fans stuff they don’t already know.

Welcome to Dunder Mifflin: The Ultimate Oral History of The Office (Custom House, 464 pages) is written by Brian Baumgartner, who played Kevin on the show, with Ben Silverman and Greg Daniels, the producer and original showrunner, respectively.

The other, also published this month, is Woke Up This Morning, the Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos (William Morrow, 528 pages). It’s by Michael Imperioli, who played Christopher in the HBO series, and Steve Schirripa, who played Bobby Baccalieri.

For the record, if it doesn’t explain the series’ infamous ending, they need to stop calling the book “definitive.”

Book Events

Author events

• BRENE BROWN Author presents Atlas of the Heart. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Dec. 2, 8 p.m. Via Zoom. Tickets cost $30. Ticket sales end Dec. 2, at noon. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• ERNESTO BURDEN Author presents Slate. The Bookery (844 Elm St., Manchester). Thurs., Dec. 2, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• JACK DALTON Kid conservationist presents his book, Kawan the Orangutan: Lost in the Rainforest. Toadstool Bookshop, 375 Amherst St., Nashua. Sat., Dec. 4, noon. Visit toadbooks.com.

• DAMIEN KANE RIDGEN Author presents Bell’s Codex and My Magnum Opus. Toadstool Bookshop, 375 Amherst St., Nashua. Sun., Dec. 5, noon. Visit toadbooks.com.

• MICHAEL J. FOX Author presents No Time Like the Future. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., Dec. 7, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Tickets cost $17.99, and include a copy of the book. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• JEN SINCERO Author presents Badass Habits. Virtual event hosted by The Music Hall in Portsmouth as part of its “Innovation and Leadership” series. Tues., Dec. 7, 7:30 p.m. Includes author presentation, coaching session and audience Q&A. Tickets cost $22. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.

• KATHRYN HULICKAuthor presents Welcome to the Future. Sat., Dec. 11, 2 p.m. Toadstool Bookshop, 12 Depot Square, Peterborough. Visit toadbooks.com.

Poetry

• NH POET LAUREATE ALEXANDRIA PEARY Poet presents a new collection of poetry, Battle of Silicon Valley at Dawn. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., Dec. 14, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.