Main Street News

Douglas Library — Canaan, CT

BOOK CLUB

When the last Wednesday of the month rolls around, it’s time for the monthly meeting of the Douglas Library’s Book Club. The club meets at 2 p.m.

Some of the books they’ve read in the past? Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Fannie Flagg’s “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe,” Edna O’Brien’s “House of Splendid Isolation,” and Richard Russo’s “Empire Falls.”

One thing’s for sure (at least in my experience) about joining and committing to a book club: A reader can be knocked off their usual, well-trod course of fare and discover a whole new vein(s) of subject matter, simply through sheer exposure to a genre they never imagined would pique their interest. 

SCRABBLE NIGHT FOR EVERYONE

If you’ve not achieved your fill of words through book club activities, keep in mind that every Monday at 6 p.m., it’s Scrabble Night for Everyone. As the library notes, “All levels are welcome.”

For the uninitiated, Scrabble, according to Wikipedia, “is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns and are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.” It was invented in Poughkeepsie in 1931 by Alfred Mosher Butts, info to be tucked away for your next trivia night event.

For word freaks, Scrabble is known to be ridiculously addictive, to the point where what might begin as a friendly Saturday night contest extends into Sunday morning, with the accompanying call for “Just one more game!” But you won’t have that problem here – at a certain point library staff is sure to send you on your way.

Hudson Area Library

HISTORY

Wartime Refugee Crisis in the Hudson Valley, 1754-1763

I seriously need to make time for this one, a long-forgotten local historical issue that flies completely under the radar. 

This one being Tom Arne Midtrød, Ph.D. discussing how the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War – a harbinger of the American Revolution — affected Mahican and Munsee-speaking populations in the Hudson Valley. During this conflict, many Native American groups felt themselves pressured to relocate to new areas both inside and outside of the Hudson Valley, creating a refugee crisis that led to a variety of responses from both colonial officials and the Mohawks and other members of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Six Nations.

The discussion will be conducted on Zoom from 6-7:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 4. Visit the Hudson Area Library website to register for the Zoom link.

CHESS CLUB

If Scrabble isn’t your thing, perhaps a trip to the Hudson Area Library on Thursdays through the end of June from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. will find you tangled up in a game of chess in the library’s Chess Club.

You never know who’ll you find hunched over the board, brow furrowed, thinker thinking, fingers twitching in anticipation of the next, possibly fateful move. Will that move spell your demise, or unlock the avenue to checkmate?

Hotchkiss Library

LEARN BACKGAMMON WITH ED COREY

Once upon a time, as part of a group of friends, yours truly attempted – really tried! – to cultivate an interest in backgammon. At the time, it seemed like it had potential as a pretty decent drinking game, but then again, so was “Hi, Bob” as the signal it’s time to take another swig. Perhaps a skosh too callow for the intricacies and delights of what’s known as the oldest board game in existence, dating back in the neighborhood of 5,000 years, could be that now’s the time for me. How about you?

Wednesdays through September from 3-4:30 p.m. Registration is required at the Hotchkiss Library website.