*** RSVPs are not available due to updating our event scheduling system. RSVPs may be unavailable for registration through Tuesday, Jan. 24. RSVPs will reopen once the update is complete. ***

Join our Book Lovers Book Club, hosted by Anne and Trinh, by attending either of our two monthly meetings – held in-person or via Zoom! Online RSVPs are required for the Zoom meetings and will close 1 hour before each meeting starts. You will receive your Zoom link one day before monthly Zoom meeting and will need a Zoom account (get one for free at www.zoom.us. Please call our library at (904) 827-6950 if you need any assistance with your online RSVP. New members are always welcome! You do not need to be a library member or county resident to participate in our Book Club.

Come celebrate St. Johns Reads 2023 with us by discussing our 2023 selection, Buttermilk Graffiti, by Chef Edward Lee! Print copies, while they last, are available at the Adult Reference Desk at the Ponte Vedra Beach Branch Library for checkout with your SJCPLS library card. This title is also available for requests in multiple formats with your SJCPLS library card:  as a book or as an audio CD book via our SJCPLS online catalog or as an e-book or e-audiobook via Overdrive.

“American food is the story of mash-ups. Immigrants arrive, cultures collide, and out of the push-pull come exciting new dishes and flavors. But for Edward Lee, who, like Anthony Bourdain or Gabrielle Hamilton, is as much a writer as he is a chef, that first surprising bite is just the beginning. What about the people behind the food? What about the traditions, the innovations, the memories? A natural-born storyteller, Lee decided to hit the road and spent two years uncovering fascinating narratives from every corner of the country. There’s a Cambodian couple in Lowell, Massachusetts, and their efforts to re-create the flavors of their lost country. A Uyghur café in New York’s Brighton Beach serves a noodle soup that seems so very familiar and yet so very exotic—one unexpected ingredient opens a window onto an entirely unique culture. A beignet from Café du Monde in New Orleans, as potent as Proust’s madeleine, inspires a narrative that tunnels through time, back to the first Creole cooks, then forward to a Korean rice-flour hoedduck and a beignet dusted with matcha. Sixteen adventures, sixteen vibrant new chapters in the great evolving story of American cuisine. And forty recipes, created by Lee, that bring these new dishes into our own kitchens.”

Thank you to the Friends of the Ponte Vedra Beach Branch Library for sponsoring our Book Lovers Book Club!