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Boardman library hosts monthly Reader’s Choice Book Club meeting
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Boardman library librarian John Yingling (foreground) led the discussion during the meeting of the Reader's Choice Book Club.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Boardman library librarian John Yingling led the discussion of Truman Capote's book "In Cold Blood," during the meeting of the Reader's Choice Book Club.
By TIM CLEVELAND
Every month, the Boardman library hosts a meeting of the Reader’s Choice Book Club, which brings together area residents to discuss a wide variety of books, from classics to newer releases to fiction and nonfiction.
The most recent meeting was on Jan. 5, which was one night before what was supposed to be the one-year anniversary of the first meeting. That meeting was pushed back one month due to the weather, so the club had two meetings in February.
Boardman librarian John Yingling said a request by a library patron was the start of the club’s beginnings.
“There was a lady here who was a regular patron and she wanted to start a book club,” he said. “She lived in Akron and they had book clubs in that neck of the woods. She contacted our main library downtown Youngstown and they got the ball rolling. I volunteered to conduct the club.”
Among the books the club has read in the past include “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” “Mrs. Kennedy and Me,” and “The Sound and the Fury.”
During the most recent meeting the club discussed Truman Capote’s true-crime classic “In Cold Blood,” which is the story of the 1959 quadruple murder of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock.
Capote and his friend, the author Harper Lee, interviewed the detectives working on the case, Holcomb residents, and Smith and Hickock themselves before the pair was executed in 1965.
The case and the making of the book were depicted in the movie “Capote,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and released in 2005.
“I read it when I was in high school when it first came out and I liked it a lot,” Yingling said. “I thought let’s read it again and see if I still have the same feeling for it. Plus it is considered a classic.”
Each meeting lasts about one hour. Yingling said he leaves some time at the end of each meeting for people to tell about the books they’ve read recently that they would recommend. Yingling also has a list of books that club members have recommended.
Yingling said a goal of the meetings is to encourage people to read more. He added that attending the meetings can give people a new perspective on books they might not have had otherwise.
“I hope it would get them to come to the library more often and check out books,” he said. “I hope it would get them to enjoy reading and also, when you talk with other people about a book you’ve read, you get something new out of it that you didn’t realize.
“I hope the people who come to the club will talk to their friends about it.”