Category: Pop

Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, by Bob Odenkirk (Random House, 285 pages)

It’s hard to imagine now, but in its first season, the AMC drama Breaking Bad didn’t make much of a splash. In fact, when his agent first brought up a potential short-term gig playing a sleazy lawyer named Saul Goodman, Bob Odenkirk had not seen the show.

“I vaguely recalled the image on the billboards — a guy in his underwear in the desert?” He figured, “I would phone a friend, see if anyone had actually seen it,” Odenkirk writes in his new memoir.

Breaking Bad, of course, would go on to be a monster hit and make household names out of Odenkirk and several of his costars. And the show’s success eclipsed the work he’d been doing since he was in middle school. (“By age twenty, I’d been steadily pumping out the blithering idiocy for over a decade,” he writes.) What he wanted to do, what he’d always done, was make people laugh, and he had been (mostly) paying his bills by writing jokes and sketches, going from the famed comedy stages in Chicago to the set of Saturday Night Live.

Saul Goodman, of course, is in many ways a comical character, although he exists within a serious and often violent drama. So maybe Odenkirk’s transition from stand-up wasn’t as big a transition as, say, playing the butler in The Remains of The Day, but it’s surprising enough to sustain a 200-plus-page book, at least for Breaking Bad fans. Those who have no interest in the show or its spinoff would have a tougher time paying attention unless they are young people looking to get into comedy.

The book, of course, begins with a joke:

“How does one begin a book? … Dickens, Melville, Odenkirk — all have faced the same query, and only one has failed. Melville. ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Talk about giving up.”

He goes on to riff about a childhood in Naperville, Illinois, that was most likely more painful than described. “A tale as old as time. Daddy issues. The end,” he jokes. Odenkirk was one of seven children in a Catholic family headed by a man with anger issues, so to speak. “Generally speaking, my dad was rough and too intense, and those were his good qualities. He was never around, and when he was, there was tension in the air.”

Odenkirk was relieved when his parents split up when he was 15; he says he shrugged when his father died when he was 22. His salvation was his brothers and sisters, encouraging teachers and, most importantly, discovering Monty Python, the British comedy troupe. Their comedy taught him that much of the world and many of its people were pretty awful “and you don’t have to respect these people, you can laugh at them.”

He mowed lawns in order to save enough money to buy a cassette recorder from Kmart (Google both of them, kids), on which he recorded comedy bits and interviews, but he couldn’t really envision doing comedy for a living until he was in college and had a chance encounter with Del Close, a legend in Chicago’s comedy scene. On impulse, Odenkirk asked if he could interview Close, “a gnarled, shaggy Sasquatch of a man,” and got two and a half hours of rambling memories, confessions, inspiration and advice. “All I can say is that it drew me in and shook me by the collar and screamed in my face, ‘YOU CAN DO THIS! THIS IS GONNA BE GREAT! I trembled in the presence of his galloping mind.”

From there, Odenkirk describes the ins and outs of his early career as a comedian and writer, including a trying time as a writer at SNL, which was then in its 13th season, working with people such as Al Franken and Chris Farley. It’s a revelatory in that he describes how what seems to be a dream job can actually wreck even someone with talent. (And it’s clear Odenkirk had talent — I am still laughing over a sketch he pitched about a cheap airline called “Greyhound Air” that doesn’t promise destinations but vague directions: “the plane is headed in a general direction … like towards New York.”)

It’s interesting that Breaking Bad doesn’t show up in the memoir in any real way until the ninth chapter, some 200 pages in. It shows how so many people in Hollywood can define a person by a single series or film, despite a robust body of work that precedes or follows it. And Breaking Bad, of course, gave birth to the prequel that Odenkirk is still immersed in: Better Call Saul, which he calls “the biggest break of my career by a fair margin.”

But here’s one of Odenkirk’s more interesting reveals: He initially said no to the role, because it was going to be shot in Albuquerque. He and his wife/manager had two kids, he was a school volunteer and a soccer coach, and a raft of other reasons, including that he felt he was famous and successful enough. “I am in this to entertain myself. Here’s how much fame I need: ‘just enough’ and no more.”

Maybe that’s the secret to Hollywood success: not really caring about it. Odenkirk concedes that his own success has in some ways been driven by luck. (He tells a young woman seeking advice, “You can’t make your own break.”) But it’s hard to look over Odenkirk’s life and not recall the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” With enough raw talent and a cheap tape recorder, it’s apparently enough to just want to entertain yourself.

B

---

Book Notes

The literary genre known as autofiction is a blending of fiction and autobiography, and not everyone accepts it as necessary. “It’s either memoir or fiction. There’s no such category as autofiction,” writing coach Brooke Warner argued in Publishers Weekly last year.

The industry begs to differ, as perhaps would authors of centuries past. Let’s just say Charles Dickens’ fiction likely would have been much different had he not grown up in his own bleak house.

The latest buzz in the realm of autofiction is Checkout 19 (Riverhead, 288 pages) by Claire-Louise Bennett, a novel published in the U.K. last year and released this month in the U.S.

It is, as much as I can tell from reading excerpts and reviews, a stream-of-consciousness novel about books and their effects on the narrator’s life. But the opening will draw in anyone who, like the narrator, would go to the public library as a child and emerge with a stack of books they could barely see over.

It’s better, Bennett’s narrator, says, to just pick one book, rather than to be distracted by the siren songs of 10 others all week: “[J]ust because we were allowed to take out six books eight books twelve books four books didn’t mean did it that we had to.”

That could be autofiction for many of us.

Meanwhile, one has to marvel at the timing of Vladimir: A Novel (Avid Reader Press, 256 pages) by Julia May Jonas, which was released a few weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It has nothing to do with Putin, but surely benefits from people searching for books on Russia’s president. It’s about a New York college professor who develops an obsession with the titular Vladimir while her husband is under investigation for having untoward relationships with students.

Finally, Anne Tyler fans are rejoicing at this week’s release of her 24th novel, French Braid (Knopf, 256 pages), a multigenerational family story — set in Baltimore, of course.

---

Book Events

Author events

• AN EVENING TO REMEMBER: CONVERSATIONS WITH CONCORD-AREA AUTHORS Authors Margaret Porter, Virginia MacGregor (Nina Monroe), Paul Brogan and Mark Okrant, in conversation with NHPR’s Laura Knoy. Presented by The Duprey Companies. Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., April 6, 7:30 p.m. Free to attend. Visit ccanh.com.

• MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD Author presents The Great Circle. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 6 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• MARIE BOSTWICK Author presents her new book The Restoration of Celia Fairchild. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., April 15, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• BRANDON K. GAUTHIER Author presents Before Evil: Young Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Kim. Gibson’s Bookstore, 45 S. Main St., Concord. Wed., April 27, 6:30 p.m. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is 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.

Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari (Crown, 345 pages)

The late Harvard professor B.F. Skinner became famous for animal experiments that he believed destroyed the idea of free will. Animals can be manipulated to perform an action by repeatedly offering them a reward until their behaviors become ingrained, similar to Pavlov’s salivating dog. Humans, being animals, are basically the same as pigeons in how we respond to rewards. So when we go to Instagram or Twitter looking for “likes,” we’re the equivalent of a Skinner’s pigeon extending its left wing and expecting a treat.

That’s one of the many unsettling images British writer Johann Hari puts forth in his blistering critique of what the digital world has wrought. Researchers have been watching our attention spans shrink over the past few decades and have theorized that this is occurring not only because of the processing speed of all the digital tools we use, but also because of sheer information overload.

The average worker spends about three minutes on a task before being distracted by something else, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s an incoming text or Slack message, a call from your boss or the siren call of TikTok. After we’re interrupted, it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back into a state of deep focus. This isn’t only a problem in terms of our ability to accomplish the things on our to-do list, but has more profound implications than any individual’s stress.

When our ability to pay attention deteriorates, so does our ability to solve problems, Hari says. “Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years. Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them,” he writes. (Unrelated to the book, I’ve seen commentators remark lately that America’s involvement in Ukraine will only last as long as Twitter will continue to pay attention to what Russia is doing there.)

For Hari, the societal decline in focus became personal and urgent when he took his godson, a high-school dropout who was obsessed with screens, to visit Elvis Presley’s estate, Graceland. While this was supposed to be a trip of human connection, they were given iPads and earbuds to use while walking around. Hari watched as a couple got obsessed with looking at the images of Presley’s “Jungle Room” on the iPad — while they were standing in the Jungle Room. In a darkly funny moment, he told them, “There’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It’s called turning your head. Because we’re here. We’re in the Jungle Room.”

But Hari knew that, in different ways, he was as addicted to screens as the couple he chastised, and decided to spend three months in Provincetown without any form of connection to the internet. His experience there, however, is a fraction of Stolen Focus, which is built more on research than anecdote, and as such is a damning indictment of the attention economy, tech and what it’s doing to our brains. We can’t solve it by simply throwing away our phones; Hari identifies 12 forces — which include stress, poor diets, physical and mental exhaustion and a decline in long periods of reading — that are contributing to the problem.

“The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns,” Hari writes.

Unfortunately, a one-day or three-month digital detox does not solve the problem, even though Hari found that without the tyranny of his smartphone, he found time to write 93,000 words of a novel and to read three volumes of War and Peace. Indeed, former Google strategist James Williams later told him that a break from tech “is not the solution for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution.”

Hari doesn’t just read the work of people like Williams, Google engineer turned tech ethicist Tristan Harris, nutritionist Dale Pinnock and renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who died last year); he interviewed these men and others in person, and weaves their narratives into what ultimately is a manifesto for an “attention rebellion.”

The steps he outlines that can help may seem overly simple and ineffective, given the enormousness of the problem, but maybe that’s the point. If they were too daunting, we wouldn’t even try. Among the changes Hari has made in his own life: taking action (which he calls pre-commitment) to cut down on distractions before they can occur; taking periodic breaks from social media; building in unstructured “flow” time to let his mind wander and thus make creative connections; and being obsessive about getting enough sleep. He estimates that he’s improved his own focus by 15 to 20 percent, not a huge amount, but enough to make a difference in the quality of his life.

Stolen Focus is not a self-help book, not a cultural critique, but something even more important: an education. Read it, and you will be forced to evaluate the role of technology in your life, and that little bird on Twitter may forever look like one of B.F. Skinner’s pigeons; a reminder, in the immortal words of children’s book author Mo Willems: Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus. A

---

Book Notes

America’s shrinking attention span is a problem of such scale that it requires more than one book to address it. In addition to Johann Hari’s excellent Stolen Focus, reviewed this week, there are two other new books that provide variations on the theme:

In Peak Mind (HarperOne, 368 pages) Amishi Jha promises we can find our focus and “own our attention” in 12 minutes a day. (Seems a lot of pages for a 12-minute strategy, but OK.) And Bob Goff weighs in on the subject with Distracted (Thomas Nelson, 256 pages), in which he makes the case for living like a racehorse wearing blinders to focus on the most important stuff.

Otherwise, here are two new nonfiction books worth your attention:

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni is out with The Beauty of Dusk (Avid Reader Press, 320 pages), a reflection on how his life changed when he woke one morning with changed vision and fuzzy thinking, which he eventually found out was the result of a stroke he’d had during the night. The excerpts I’ve read so far are compelling.

For another look at lives suddenly changed, check out Amy Bloom’s In Love (Random House, 240 pages), which examines the fraught subject of medically assisted suicide — not when a person has a terminal diagnosis and six months or less to live, as allowed in some states in the U.S., but when the person still has a decent quality of life and a longer expected life span.

Bloom’s husband was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and wanted to die on his own terms, not the disease’s, so the couple sought the help of Dignitas, a nonprofit in Zurich that helps people arrange “accompanied suicide.” There is no happy ending here, but Bloom provides a thoughtful examination of a controversial issue.

Finally, in a novel described as a modern allegory in the vein of Animal Farm, Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo (Viking, 416 pages) savages social media through the voices of animals living through a revolution in Zimbabwe. It’s getting great reviews, but at over 400 pages, you’ll need a good attention span to get through it. George Orwell needed only about a quarter of those pages to make his points in Animal Farm. Just sayin’.

---

Book Events

Author events

• AZAR NAFISI Author presents Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, in conversation with Jacki Lyden. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., March 19, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $27 to $31 and include a copy of the book. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• MARIE BOSTWICK Author presents her new book The Restoration of Celia Fairchild. Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester. Fri., April 15, 5:30 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

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.

Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 216 pages)

In her new novel Pure Colour, Canadian Sheila Heti imagines a new Genesis, one in which God is not yet finished with the work of creation but is just taking a break, stepping back, critically looking at what he has so far produced. “This is the moment we are living in — the moment of God standing back,” Heti writes on the first page.

And that, my friends, is the last time that this novel makes sense.

From there, Heti hurtles into a book-length word salad that is at times poignant and insightful; other times, a baffling stream of consciousness. At its best, it’s an imaginative fable about love and loss, wrapped in a blistering social critique. At its worst, which happens too often, you wonder what (and how much) Heti was drinking when she wrote it. Such is speculative fiction.

We begin in a world that is “heating up in advance of its destruction” since God has decided the first draft wasn’t good enough and a new one is needed. Like any good manager, God needs feedback, so “God appears, splits, and manifests as three critics in the sky: a large bird who critiques from above, a large fish who critiques from the middle, and a large bear who critiques while cradling creation in its arms.”

People are born from the eggs of these creatures (yes, even the bear produces eggs in this world), and take on the characteristics of their breeders. People born from fish eggs care most about the collective; people born of bird eggs care about things like beauty, meaning and order; people born from bear eggs care about a few other people: “They are deeply consumed with their own.”

Our protagonist, Mira, wished she was of bear lineage, but she, born of a bird, had the hollow bones and heart of an artist. We follow Mira around in her strange world, where she works at a store that sells expensive lamps. (This all occurs during an unspecified age before the internet, when people found jobs and housing from “little paper signs.” Mira goes to school at the prestigious American Academy of American Critics (which, in a wry twist, has international branches) where self-important students learn to “hone their insights” and to “develop a style of writing and thinking that could survive down through the ages, and at the same time penetrate their own generation so incisively.”

The school, it seems, could have been worth an entire cynical book, or at least a couple of chapters, but it is quickly dropped to explore a brief love relationship Mira has with an American orphan named — wait for it — Annie. Coincidence or something more? Hard to say. Then her father dies, and this strange little novel gets even stranger.

When Mira’s father dies, his essence seems to take over her body. For a while, the book turns into a meditation on grief, as Mira processes her loss. “She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.” She stopped caring about the business of living (though, frankly, it wasn’t like she was doing that much living before her father’s death). “It was the dead who needed our love, the dead who she wanted to be loyal to, the dead who needed us most. The living could take care of themselves, going to the grocery store in all that sunshine. It was the dead who need to be held on to, so they would not slip away. Who would save the dead from oblivion, if not the living?”

Then, Mira has an experience in which she takes the form of a leaf — a leaf in which her father’s spirit also dwelled — and they have the sort of beautiful and cleansing Kafkaesque conversations you might have if you suddenly found yourself inside a leaf. Was she dead? It seems so for a while, then she comes out of the leaf and is back with orphan Annie for a while while musing about gods, plural, specifically gods who tired people out when they wanted to stop them from doing things. “The weariest people are being the most prevented. They are the most dangerous ones, who would change the world if they could.”

Eventually, Mira’s mind-boggling dialogue comes to a close, though we are not sure what, if anything, has been accomplished, either for Mira or for the long-suffering reader.

Still, Heti proves herself a shrewd critic of modern life, as in her observation about social media:

“There were so many ways of being hated, and one could be hated by so many people. … Hate seemed to spring from the deepest core of our beings. Years later, all you had to do was peep through a peephole and there it was for anyone to see — a whole world of vitriol, entirely without end. It seemed that rage was what we were made of.”

That said, it seems that the world would be better served if she just wrote columns of cultural criticism. Maybe we are bears, and she’s a bird, building thought nests that others can’t fully see. In Mira’s world, artists who created stories, books and movies were producing their own second drafts, better versions of God’s world, as if hoping to get his (or her) attention. For the sake of the next world, let’s hope God doesn’t option this book. C

---

Book Notes

One of the silver linings of the pandemic was the virtual author event.

When physical bookstores were shuttered, many took to having author readings and Q&As online, which enabled people in remote locations to participate. You couldn’t get a book signed this way or shake the author’s hand, but it was still a better way to “connect” with an author than reading an interview.

Author events have now returned live in many places, but there are some bookstores that are still enabling people to watch online. Others have posted past events on YouTube, such as Washington, D.C.,’s famous bookstore, Politics and Prose. A quick Google search may find a few videos of your favorite author that will make for a more enjoyable evening than watching NFL reruns.

Here are a couple coming up of note:

Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., will have a virtual event March 14 for How She Did It(Rodale, 336 pages), by Molly Huddle and Sara Slattery, who offer “stories, advice and secrets to success from 50 legendary distance runners.”

Mystery writer Simone St. James has a new novel, The Book of Cold Cases (Berkley, 352 pages), for which she’s doing a virtual event March 17 through the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona.

Novelist Lisa Scottoline doesn’t release What Happened to the Bennetts (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 400 pages) until March 29 but is already doing events. One virtual one will be through Friend and Fiction on Facebook Live on March 23.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk has a new book, Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama (Random House, 304 pages), for which he’s doing both live and virtual events. He’s got a virtual event March 13 through Live Talks Los Angeles. It’ll cost you $40 to get admitted, but you also get actor Jack Black, for what that’s worth.

---

Book Events

Author events

• AZAR NAFISI Author presents Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times, in conversation with Jacki Lyden. Ticketed virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., March 19, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $27 to $31 and include a copy of the book. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• HOWARD MANSFIELD Author presents Chasing Eden. Sat., March 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• EMMA LOEWE Author presents Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us, in conversation with author Hannah Fries. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Wed., April 13, 7 p.m. Registration is required. Held via Zoom. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• BECKY SAKELLERIOU AND HENRY WALTERS Becky Sakelleriou presents The Possibility of Red. Henry Walters presents Field Guide A Tempo. Sat., April 16, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• ANNE HILLERMAN Author presents The Sacred Bridge. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., April 19, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

Poetry

• REBECCA KAISER Poet presents Girl as Birch. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., April 11, 7 p.m. Held via Zoom. Registration is 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 [email protected] or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email [email protected].

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