Join us for our first-ever community read: Salisbury READS North Woods, presented by the Scoville Library in partnership with the Salisbury Association. For more on the READ and North Woods and to sign up for events, please scroll down. (An explanation of Salisbury READS is included below the last event date.)

Copies of North Woods are available at the library, and we've packed the fall with fun North-Woods-related events and book discussions!

Click any of the dates below to learn more and sign up for an event!

Future events will be posted on the Socville Library calendar.

Salisbury READS North Woods Launch, Saturday, October 12th, 10:00 - 4:00 PM 

Come by the library during Fall Festival and visit our table to pick up a free copy of North Woods, Courtesy of the Salisbury Association. Enjoy a free apple, a bookmarks, and a chance to discuss North Woods and the READ program with Library Director Karin Goodell and Head of Adult Programs Karen Vrotsos.

Saturday, October 12th, 10:00 - 4:00 PM 

North Woods Book Discussions

• Tuesday, October 29th
• Thursday, November 7th
• Tuesday, November 12th
• Tuesday, November 21st

Apple Cooking & Baking Contest

Apples are entwined with human legacy in North Woods, beginning with the seeds of a rare apple sown under extraordinary circumstances. Celebrate our area's apple bounty by bringing your apple dish down to the library for a friendly competition. Judges will include the Scoville Library's literary seminar luminary, Mark Scarbrough, and surprise apple enthusiasts. Learn more and sign up to participate by clicking the date below:

Sunday, October 27, 3:00 - 4:30 PM

Current-Day Hauntings in Connecticut with the Eastern CT Paranormal Society

Ghosts plays a major and harrowing role in Daniel Mason's novel, but do you believe spirits really haunt the living? At this event we'll delve into claims of paranormal encounters. Ask questions and enjoy spooky treats. This event is made possible by the generous support of the Friends of the Scoville Library. 

Friday, November 1, 5:00 - 7:00 PM

Wild Apples, Apple Culture, and Foraging with Matt Kaminsky (AKA Gnarly Pippins)

Join Matt Kaminsky, wild apple expert and grower, and discover the vast variety of little-known wild, uncultivated, and seedling apples and pears growing in our area. Learn about outstanding apple varieties and old and new traditions of apple growing. Get expert guidance on apple foraging so that you can discover wild apples on your own" (If you're reading North Woods, the importance of apples needs no explanation. If you love apples and haven't read North Woods, we hope you will. Apple growing and the lives of trees play a central role throoughout the novel!

Sunday, November 10, 2:00 - 4:00 PM

Property Records 101: Researching Your Home's History with Salisbury Town Selectman Katherine Keifer

Join Katherine Kiefer and learn how to research the history of your home’s ownership and other property information. We’ll start in the library, with an introduction to Salisbury’s online property data resources. Then we’ll visit the Town Hall for an introduction to the town's records holdings. Salisbury’s property records date back to the original land grant of the 1600s, and it can take some sleuthing to trace property history! If you’re curious to reveal your home’s past, this workshop is a great entry point. North Woods is all about the loves, hopes, desires, and forces of nature (and the supernatural) that are buried in our homes' unknown histories!

Wednesday, November 20, 9:30 AM - 10:30 AM, and  Thursday, January 23, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM 

Bird Conservationist George Wallace on Bird Populations in the Northwest Corner: Changes, Needs, and How to Help

Join bird conservationist George Wallace for a presentation on bird populations in Northwest Corner. Learn about changes in bird populations, how different bird species are faring, what their needs and vulnerabilities are, and what we can do to support birds in the Northwest Corner and beyond. This event is presented in partnership with the Salisbury Association Land Trust.

Thursday, December 12, 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Heirloom Apple Cultivation, Cider Making, & Cider Tasting with Ron Bixby

Join apple grower Ron Bixby for a talk on orchard restoration and cultivating organic heirloom apples for cider pressing. 40 years ago, Ron Bixby acquired an old orchard, overgrown with gnarly little apples. Through years of careful clearing, pruning, replanting, and grafting, he restored the orchard, which is now thriving and producing organic heirloom fruit including Northern Spy, Golden Russet, and Baldwin apples. This event is presented in partnership with the Salisbury Association Land Trust.

Sunday, January 19,  2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Check the library calendar for future events, including workshops on researching your home's history, nature writing, landscape art, a community art show, and more. Please check the Scoville Library calendar for details.

What is "Salisbury READS North Woods"?

The READ is a series of discussions and events centered around North Woods and its themes. By encouraging the community to read North Woods and making copies available (50 giveaway copies, 50 free copies for event participants, and extra books for borrowing at the library), we hope to spark a shared experience of reading and community conversation. The library is partnering with the Salisbury Association and collaborating with other local organizations to bring you a series of varied activities that will run from mid-October through March.

Why North Woods?

Widely admired by Scoville Library members (as well as critics and the media), this novel has been chosen for its literary inventiveness, its captivating sweep of human struggle and historical change, its brilliance, stunning style, and broad appeal, and its resonance with our own area's history, natural beauty, woodlands, wildlife, cultural shifts, and environmental changes. It also features heirloom apples, music, mysterious murders, forbidden love, family strife, passionate freethinkers, a mad pseudo-scientist, a renegade artist, devious criminals, the secret lives of trees, heroism, terror, romance, suspense, heartbreak, and homicidal ghosts.

Critics have called North Woods "brilliant," "dazzling," and "a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic." Whether you've already read it, were waiting to buy it in paperback (now available), or just want to find out what all the accolades are about, we hope you'll join us for this first-ever community read!

More about North Woods

North Woods is a sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries.

North Woods is a Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year; Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award; and named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Chicago Public Library, The Star Tribune, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, Real Simple, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Bookreporter. 

What critics and authors have to say about North Woods

"Gorgeous... a tale of ephemerality and succession, of the way time accrues in layers, like sedimentary soil." — Heller McAlpin, NPR

“The most original and spellbinding novel I’ve read in ages. Mason makes bramble, brush, and orchard come alive with the spirits of their unforgettable former inhabitants. Their lives and passionate loves and their chilling acts of vengeance had me glued to my seat.” — Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water

"Haunting, haunted ... Elegantly designed with photos and illustrations, this is a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic ... Mason isn’t just passively watching the evolution of this site in the forest. Each chapter germinates its own form while sending out tendrils that entwine beneath the surface of the novel ... Revelatory." — Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"To read it is to travel to the limits of what the novel can do." — Alice Jolly, The Guardian

"A dazzling, high-wire act... ... There are a lot of great books coming out this fall but, if I were you, I'd start with this one." — Chris Hewitt, The Star Tribune

“A monumental achievement of polyphony and humanity. Relating the narrative of an entire country via a single plot of land, it sweeps the reader through hundreds of years and an array of protagonists with a deft, heartbreaking, idiosyncratic zeal. I loved it.” — Maggie O’Farrell, author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait

"A treatise on forest management (and mismanagement), a hallucinatory dream sequence, and an anthropologist’s life’s work all rolled into one — with an ample helping of unruly ghosts...  North Woods fires on all cylinders by engaging all the senses as it transports readers through history." — Alexis Burling, The San Francisco Chronicle

"Kaleidoscopic, multi-voiced... it has that Nan Shepherd sense that looking deeply and observantly pierces the natural." — Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

"It seems almost a magic trick, the way in which Mason knits his lives into a single tale." — Erica Wagner, The Sunday Times

"How to describe Mason’s sui generis fiction? Think of E.L. Doctorow crossed with Wendell Berry, then graced with a Nabokovian predilection for pattern, puzzle and echo." — Rand Richards Cooper, The New York Times

“Ambitious, alive, and lush with generosity, North Woods is an immersive sprint through time... I emerged from this book as though from an enchanted forest, covered in leaves and changed by what I had seen there. . . . Electrifying.” — Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch

“A sui generis work of pure brilliance, an epic written with a miniaturist’s precision. Daniel Mason has unearthed, in the centuries-spanning history of a single New England home, a universal story of loss and reclamation... the best book I’ve read in ages.” — Anthony Marra, author of Mercury Pictures Presents

“Mason depicts all of [the] stories with sympathy, sensitivity, and affectionate humor. Epic in scope and ambitious in style, this book succeeds on all counts. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“Readers, too, will find themselves in an entrancing fictional realm where the human, natural, and supernatural mingle, all captured in the author’s effortlessly virtuosic prose . . . Like the house at its center, a book that is multitudinous and magical.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Each arc is beautifully, heartbreakingly conveyed, stitching together subtle connections across time. This astonishes.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[A] magisterial mosaic … Truly triumphant.” – Booklist (starred review)