🍽️ Dine: at Library II and 📚Discuss: The Library Book by Susan Orleans

Join Audrey for a night celebrating books and libraries (April's theme!)! We’ll discuss The Library Book by Susan Orlean at Library II, a restaurant in Vorhees, NJ. It's a steak house (with a fabulous salad bar) and walls full of books!

If you have a craving for a riveting nonfiction book (it was a very close runner up for April’s winner!) and dinner surrounded by books, you’re going to love this night with other book-loving friends!

FEE: $3.00 Holds your spot and supports the club. Spots are filled first pay, first goes. There are only 12 spots. Food is pay on your own.

HOW TO PAY: Use Friends and Family! Do not use the business option because it charges a fee. Please note the event name or date on your payment.

Venmo - @audrey-Heller1 (phone ends in 4478)
PayPal - https://www.paypal.me/AudreyBug

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DINE: [Library II](https://www.librarytwo.com/)
Vorhees, NJ
Menu: Steakhouse with a famous salad bar, too
The Library II has served fine food & beverages for over forty years. The establishment originally opened in 1947 and has been a New Jersey landmark and a neighborhood favorite with a family atmosphere and a unique style.

Well known for our steaks, seafood, and salad bar, its mission has always been to serve the finest quality food and provide top-notch service. From meeting our chef at the window who will trim your cut of steak or help you choose your lobster tail, to exploring our premium salad bar with a large assortment of fruits and vegetables, artisan breads and fine cheeses, your dining experience here is one of a kind. And of course, crafted cocktails, and an array of beer and wine is happily served table-side as well as in our spacious bar and lounge.
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**DISCUSS: The Library Book** by Susan Orleans
Genre: Nonfiction
On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?

Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

In The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries across the country and around the world, from their humble beginnings as a metropolitan charitable initiative to their current status as a cornerstone of national identity; brings each department of the library to vivid life through on-the-ground reporting; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; reflects on her own experiences in libraries; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago.

Along the way, Orlean introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters from libraries past and present—from Mary Foy, who in 1880 at eighteen years old was named the head of the Los Angeles Public Library at a time when men still dominated the role, to Dr. C.J.K. Jones, a pastor, citrus farmer, and polymath known as “The Human Encyclopedia” who roamed the library dispensing information; from Charles Lummis, a wildly eccentric journalist and adventurer who was determined to make the L.A. library one of the best in the world, to the current staff, who do heroic work every day to ensure that their institution remains a vital part of the city it serves.

Housekeeping!**

• Here are the Club’s Basic Rules and Liability Release. You should read them because by signing up for an event you agree to them.

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You can ignore all this part. It’s just for the algorithm. To make sure these Book Club events get seen. The Novel Tourist Book Club is a fantastic book club where people can get to know each other meet new friends have fun, exploring hobbies dining out at restaurants. We read books. Make new friends. Lots of fun with Book Club. Socializing. Social event. Lots of hobbies dining out is great fun and a great hobby full of socializing and great people to make friends with. We love books and adventures including foodie adventures and trying new restaurants.