Castine Reads
What if everyone in Castine read the same book at the same time? That’s the idea behind Castine Reads!, a common reading program designed to bring neighbors together and build a sense of camaraderie and community while promoting literacy at all ages. We hope you’ll join in the fun!
“The city that opens the same book closes it in greater harmony.” – Mary McGrory
THE BOOKS:
JUNE: BLUE MARLIN BY LEE SMITH
JULY AND AUGUST: THE DOLPHIN LETTERS EDITED BY SASKIA HAMILTON
HOW TO PARTICIPATE
Copies of our Castine Reads! selection are available at the Witherle and Blue Hill Public Library and for sale at Compass Rose Books and other bookstores. Once you’ve read the book, there are lots of ways to participate:
1. Join or start a discussion in your neighborhood
2. Attend one of our public book discussions listed on our Events Page.
3. Take part in our fun events and activities.
BLUE MARLIN BY LEE SMITH
Lee Smith brings her masterful storytelling magic to this jewel of a novella that follows Jenny, an adventurous thirteen-year-old, down to Key West for a patched-up family vacation following the discovery of her father’s illicit affair.
Available for the first time as a stand-alone novella, this book centers on the Blue Marlin Motel, where Jenny, her beautiful socialite mother, and chastened father share their sunny days with movie stars who are in town to make the movie Operation Petticoat.
Jenny is precocious and a bit of a sleuth, so her innocent “observations” to uncover the secrets of movie stars also end up revealing the secrets of her own family. Jenny confronts the frailty of family life while also vying for the attention of actor Tony Curtis and even a role in his movie. Smith delivers humor and honesty to her flawed characters with genuine Southern dignity.
The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle
by Elizabeth Hardwick (Author), Robert Lowell (Author), Saskia Hamilton (Editor)
The correspondence between one of the most famous couples of twentieth-century literature
The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell’s life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Centered on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle―writers, intellectuals, friends, and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich―the book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of their twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation.
Lowell’s controversial sonnet-sequence The Dolphin (for which he used Hardwick’s letters as a source) and his last book, Day by Day, were written during this period, as were Hardwick’s influential books Seduction and Betrayal: Essays on Women in Literature and Sleepless Nights: A Novel. Lowell and Hardwick are acutely intelligent observers of marriages, children, and friends, and of the feelings that their personal crises gave rise to.
The Dolphin Letters, masterfully edited by Saskia Hamilton, is a debate about the limits of art―what occasions a work of art, what moral and artistic license artists have to make use of their lives as material, what formal innovations such debates give rise to. The crisis of Lowell’s The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone surrounding him, and Bishop’s warning to Lowell―“art just isn’t worth that much”―haunts.
Martha Barry’s presentation on Unlearning Racism:
Tosa Unlearning Racism Feb 2020
Materials from attorney Lindsey Draper:
OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE Power Point
OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE pdf
Just Mercy Presentation Resources
Materials from the “Tender Topics” event at the Tosa Children’s Library: