Vermillion Library’s “Book Chatter” is back together

Book Chatter is a Vermillion book club where members of the community come together to discuss their thoughts on books they’ve read each month.

Kendra Brewer, the new adult programmer for the Vermillion Public Library, said they meet on the second Friday of every month at 2 p.m.

The group is once again being held in-person, having previously been moved online to a Facebook group last March. The club usually has anywhere from five to 15 members at a meeting, Brewer said.

“Book Chatter is (where) you bring a book you want to talk about that you have read. It could be a book you’ve read before, it could be a book that you’re reading,” Brewer said. “We talk about our books that we have read, which is kind of nice because it’s a good way to get recommendations.”

The previous programmer would then put out a list of all the books discussed so attendees could put them on their own reading lists, Brewer said. She said the club reads a variety of genres, but fiction is the most common.

Book Chatter was founded at USD before being moved to the public library, Brewer said.

“Some of the people in the library wanted to get together for their own little book group and then started doing it here. It’s kind of morphed from that into a public program, which I think is pretty awesome,” Brewer said.

The program is important to the community because people love to talk about the books they’ve been reading, Brewer said. With the pandemic shutting the library down, the community was not able to come together.

“I think that sense of community—we need that. I think it’s very important to give people that sense of community and that relationship with others to rely on or just to have somebody to talk to, especially because we saw how lonely it could get in the isolation,” Brewer said.