Book Chat: March 1, 2023: Pig & Horse Welfare Day

Having been recently dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, recent high school graduate and former child prodigy Colin sets off on a road trip with his best friend to try to find some new direction in life while also trying to create a mathematical formula to explain his relationships.

Orwell's 1945 fable about the power struggles among animals on a farm parallels the situation in Russia at the time as Orwell saw it; the characters include the ruthless pig Stalin, his idealistic Trotsky-like adversary, and the simple, kindly horse who represents the common man. All animals are equals but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is the account of the bold struggle, initiated...

In Broken Horses, Brandi Carlile takes readers through the events of her life that shaped her very raw art--from her start at a local singing competition where she performed Elton John's "Honky Cat" in a bedazzled white polyester suit, to her first break opening for Dave Matthews Band, to many sleepless tours over fifteen years and six studio albums, all while raising two children with her wife, Catherine Shepherd. This hard-won success led her to...

Susan Richards reflects on her unique relationship with an abused horse rescued by the local SPCA, describing how her horse helped her heal the emotional scars of her past and learn to open her heart again.

"Taking place over three non-consecutive but vitally important days in the lives of Amy, Dan, and their three sons, Come with Me is searing, entertaining, and unexpected--a dark comedy that is ultimately a deeply romantic love story, one which takes place on infinite planes but ends in a single chord"--

"Funny Farm is an inspiring and moving memoir of the author's turbulent life with 600 rescue animals. Laurie Zaleski never aspired to run an animal rescue; that was her mother Annie's dream. But from girlhood, Laurie was determined to make the dream come true. Thirty years later as a successful businesswoman, she did it, buying a 15-acre farm deep in the Pinelands of South Jersey. Laurie had planned to relocate Annie and her caravan of ragtag rescues-horses...

A true-life novel about Lily Casey Smith (the author's grandmother) who at age six helped her father break horses, at age fifteen left home to teach in a frontier town, and later as a wife and mother runs a vast ranch in Arizona where she survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy--but despite a life of hardscrabble drudgery still remains a woman of indomitable spirit.

In 1925, Zora Neale Hurston was living in New York as a fledgling writer. This collection of stories, found in archives after her death, reveal African American folk culture in Harlem in the 1920s. This book includes eight of Hurston's "lost" Harlem gems.

When Sarah's grandfather gives her a beautiful horse named Boo, hoping that one day she'll follow in his footsteps to join an elite French riding school, away from their gritty London neighborhood, she quietly trains in city's parks and alleys. But then her grandfather falls ill, and Sarah must juggle horsemanship with school and hospital visits. Natasha, a young lawyer, is reeling after her failed marriage: her professional judgment is being questioned,...

A girl on a horse is involved in a car accident, loses a leg and the horse goes mad. As she won't allow him to be destroyed, her mother, a New York magazine editor, quits job and husband and takes horse and daughter to a rancher in Montana, said to cure horses by talking to them. Despite cultural differences--she is British--love blooms between editor and rancher.