Come enjoy discussing newer fiction and nonfiction titles. We meet on the first Tuesday of each month at 1 p.m. When we meet, we start by sharing books we’ve read recently, then discuss that month’s book. You do not have to read the book to attend the meeting.
This month we will be meeting on Tuesday, September 2 at 1 p.m. in Meeting Room A.
In September, we'll be discussing “The Water Dancer” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation family, Thena, his chosen mother, a woman of few words and many secrets, and Sophia, a young woman fighting her own war even as she and Hiram fall in love, he becomes determined to escape the only home he's ever known. So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to return to the Walker Plantation to free the family he left behind--but to do so, he must first master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss. This is a bracingly original vision of the world of slavery, written with the narrative force of a great adventure. Driven by the author's bold imagination and striking ability to bring readers deep into the interior lives of his brilliantly rendered characters, The Water Dancer is the story of America's oldest struggle--the struggle to tell the truth--from one of our most exciting thinkers and beautiful writers.
Upcoming titles:
September: The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
October: Violeta by Isabel Allende
November: Braiding Sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Previous titles:
An immense world: how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us by Ed Yong
Florida by Lauren Groff
Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty
Their eyes were watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
On Call: a Doctor's Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci, M.D.
The Women by Kristin Hannah
James by Percival Everett
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Click here for a list of all of the 2025 book club titles for Millhopper.
Interested in other book clubs? The Alachua County Library District has several. You can find more information on our Book Clubs page.