Life Story Writing @ The Homestead
2025-08-01 15:00 - 16:00, 2025-10-03 15:00 - 16:00, 2025-11-07 15:00 - 16:00, 2025-12-05 15:00 - 16:00, 2026-02-06 15:00 - 16:00, 2026-03-06 15:00 - 16:00, 2026-05-01 15:00 - 16:00, 2026-06-05 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) and 1 more date | Bergquist Library at the Homestead in Gerry @ 4600 Route 60 Gerry NY 14740
Join us to explore life themes together and to create a written life story for personal reflection or to share with friends and family members.
Open to the public.

Homestead Library Services
2025-08-15 14:30 - 15:00, 2025-10-03 14:30 - 15:00, 2025-10-17 14:30 - 15:00, 2025-12-05 14:30 - 15:30, 2025-12-19 14:30 - 15:00 | Bergquist Library at the Homestead in Gerry @ 4600 Route 60 Gerry NY 14740
Help with library cards, borrowing/requesting materials, returning materials. Please bring passwords for digital assistance.

Event is at the Bergquist Library at The Homestead in Gerry.

Open to the public.

Book Club @ The Homestead
2025-08-15 15:00 - 16:00, 2025-10-17 15:00 - 16:00 | Bergquist Library at the Homestead in Gerry @ 4600 Route 60 Gerry NY 14740
The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher
Artist’s daughter Penelope Keeling can look back on a full and varied life: a Bohemian childhood in London and Cornwall, an unhappy wartime marriage, and the one man she truly loved. She has brought up three children – and learned to accept them as they are. Yet she is far too energetic and independent to settle sweetly into pensioned-off old-age. And when she discovers that her most treasured possession, her father’s painting, The Shell Seekers, is now worth a small fortune, it is Penelope who must make the decisions that will determine whether her family can continue to survive as a family, or be split apart.
Copies are available through the library system.
No registration is required. Open to the public.

CLSC Book Club
2025-08-30 09:00 - 10:00 | 3 Lakes Cafe, 11 S Main Street, Cassadaga, United States
CLSC BOOK CLUB
The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle is the oldest book club in the US.
This book club will meet in person at 3 Lakes Cafe (located on Main Street in Cassadaga) to discuss books from the CLSC book list.

August’s Book Selection: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser

Hosted by Erin Gray in partnership with the Sinclairville Free Library. Copies are available for checkout through the library’s hold process.
For more information on CLSC.

Book Club @ The Homestead
2025-11-21 15:00 - 16:00 | Bergquist Library at the Homestead in Gerry @ 4600 Route 60 Gerry NY 14740
For One More Day by Mitch Albom
“Every family is a ghost story…”
Mitch Albom mesmerized readers around the world with his number one New York Times bestsellers, The Five People You Meet in Heaven and Tuesdays with Morrie. Now he returns with a beautiful, haunting novel about the family we love and the chances we miss.
For One More Day is the story of a mother and a son, and a relationship that covers a lifetime and beyond. It explores the question: What would you do if you could spend one more day with a lost loved one?
As a child, Charley “Chick” Benetto was told by his father, “You can be a mama’s boy or a daddy’s boy, but you can’t be both.” So he chooses his father, only to see the man disappear when Charley is on the verge of adolescence.
Decades later, Charley is a broken man. His life has been crumbled by alcohol and regret. He loses his job. He leaves his family. He hits bottom after discovering his only daughter has shut him out of her wedding. And he decides to take his own life.
He makes a midnight ride to his small hometown, with plans to do himself in. But upon failing even to do that, he staggers back to his old house, only to make an astonishing discovery. His mother, who died eight years earlier, is still living there, and welcomes him home as if nothing ever happened..
What follows is the one “ordinary” day so many of us yearn for, a chance to make good with a lost parent, to explain the family secrets, and to seek forgiveness. Somewhere between this life and the next, Charley learns the astonishing things he never knew about his mother and her sacrifices. And he tries, with her tender guidance, to put the crumbled pieces of his life back together.
Through Albom’s inspiring characters and masterful storytelling, readers will newly appreciate those whom they love and may have thought they’d lost in their own lives. For One More Day is a book for anyone in a family, and will be cherished by Albom’s millions of fans worldwide.
Copies are available through the library system.
No registration is required. Open to the public.

Book Club @ The Homestead
2026-01-16 15:00 - 16:00 | Sinclairville Free Library @ 15 Main Street, Sinclairville NY 14782
The Christmas Promise by Richard Paul Evans
This holiday season, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Noel Collection returns with another heartwarming story of secrets, heartbreak, forgiveness, and the true meaning of Christmas.
On the night of her high school graduation, Richelle Bach’s father gives her and her identical twin sister, Michelle, matching opal necklaces. “These opals look identical,” he tells them, “but the fire inside each is completely unique—just like the two of you.”
Indeed, the two sisters couldn’t be more different, and their paths diverge as they embark on adulthood. Years pass, until—at their father’s behest—they both come home for Christmas. What happens then forever damages their relationship, and Richelle vows never to see or speak to her sister again. In their father’s last days, he asks Richelle to forgive Michelle, a deathbed promise she never fulfills as her twin is killed in an accident.
Now, painfully alone and broken, caring for the sickest of children in a hospital PICU, Richelle has one last dream: to be an author. The plot of her book, The Prodigal Daughter , is a story based on her sister’s life. It’s not until she meets Justin Ek, a man who harbors his own loss, that a secret promise is revealed, and Richelle learns that the story she’s writing is not about her sister, but about herself.
Copies are available through the library system.
No registration is required. Open to the public.

Book Club @ The Homestead
2026-02-20 15:00 - 16:00 | Bergquist Library at the Homestead in Gerry @ 4600 Route 60 Gerry NY 14740
Devil’s Food Cake Murder (#14 Hannah Swensen series) by Joanne Fluke
These days, everyone in Lake Eden, Minnesota, is buzzing with activity, and Hannah Swensen is no exception. But no matter how busy she may be, Hannah can always find time to help a friend in need–especially when he’s been murdered. . .
Hannah Swensen has to admit that her life is pretty sweet. Things are going well in the romance department, and her bakery’s delectable confections are selling almost as fast as she can bake them. Even her good friend Claire is on Cloud Nine, head over heels with her new husband, Reverend Bob Knudson. If only they could find time to take their honeymoon!
When Bob’s childhood friend, Matthew Walters, comes to town, it seems like divine intervention. Matthew, like Bob, is a Lutheran minister with a stubborn sweet tooth. Since he’s on sabbatical, Matthew is happy to fill in for Bob while he and Claire take that long-awaited honeymoon. It sounds like the perfect plan–until Hannah finds Matthew in the rectory, face-down in a plate full of Devil’s Food Cake, a single bullet in his head.
Determined to find out who killed Matthew, Hannah starts asking questions–and discovers that the good Reverend wasn’t quite the saintly fellow he appeared to be. But could the gold Sacagawea coins in Sunday’s collection plate hold the key to solving the crime? Or is the murder connected to that big jewel heist out in Minneapolis? Is it possible that Matthew’s love of chocolate somehow led to his downfall? It will take some more digging to find out, but Hannah is sure of one thing: even the most half-baked murder plot can be oh so deadly. . .
Copies are available through the library system.
No registration is required. Open to the public.

Life Story Writing @ the Homestead
2026-07-03 15:00 - 16:00 | Sinclairville Free Library @ 15 Main Street, Sinclairville NY 14782

Book Club @ The Homestead
2026-07-17 15:00 - 16:00 | Bergquist Library at the Homestead in Gerry @ 4600 Route 60 Gerry NY 14740
Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls
Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle was “nothing short of spectacular” (Entertainment Weekly). Now, in Half Broke Horses, she brings us the story of her grandmother, told in a first-person voice that is authentic, irresistible, and triumphant.
“Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.” So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls’s no nonsense, resourceful, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town — riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car (“I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn’t need to be fed if they weren’t working, and they didn’t leave big piles of manure all over the place”) and fly a plane. And, with her husband Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette’s memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle.
Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds — against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn’t fit the mold. Rosemary Smith Walls always told Jeannette that she was like her grandmother, and in this true-life novel, Jeannette Walls channels that kindred spirit. Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa or Beryl Markham’s West with the Night. Destined to become a classic, it will transfix audiences everywhere. (from Goodreads)

Copies are available through the library system.
No registration is required. Open to the public

Book Club @ The Homestead
2026-08-21 15:00 - 16:00 | Bergquist Library at the Homestead in Gerry @ 4600 Route 60 Gerry NY 14740
Summer of ’69 by Elin Hilderbrand

Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers’ Favorite Historical Fiction (2019)

Four siblings experience the drama, intrigue, and upheaval of the ’60s summer when everything changed in Elin Hilderbrand’s #1 New York Times bestselling historical novel.
Welcome to the most tumultuous summer of the twentieth century. It’s 1969, and for the Levin family, the times they are a-changing. Every year the children have looked forward to spending the summer at their grandmother’s historic home in downtown Nantucket. But like so much else in America, nothing is the same: Blair, the oldest sister, is marooned in Boston, pregnant with twins and unable to travel. Middle sister Kirby, caught up in the thrilling vortex of civil rights protests and determined to be independent, takes a summer job on Martha’s Vineyard. Only-son Tiger is an infantry soldier, recently deployed to Vietnam. And thirteen-year-old Jessie suddenly feels like an only child, marooned in the house with her out-of-touch grandmother and her worried mother, while each of them hides a troubling secret.
As the summer heats up, Ted Kennedy sinks a car in Chappaquiddick, man flies to the moon, and Jessie and her family experience their own dramatic upheavals along with the rest of the country. In her first historical novel, rich with the details of an era that shaped both a nation and an island thirty miles out to sea, Elin Hilderbrand once again earns her title as queen of the summer novel.

(from Goodreads)

Copies are available through the library system.
No registration is required. Open to the public
