Adult Reading Programs

The Great Billings Book Hunt


Great Billings Book Hunt banner


Challenge yourself in the Great Billings Book Hunt!  Monthly activities encourage you to search for titles outside your comfort zone. Log your books and complete our challenges, and you might even win a prize. 

October 1st - 31st: The Unexplained: The Truth is Out There! But can you find it?  For the spookiest month of the year, we'd like you to search for The Unexplained.  Aliens and X-Files, to be sure--but also hauntings, mysterious disappearances, strange creatures, unbelievable coincidences and possibly supernatural events.  You can delve into either fiction or non fiction, we promise to keep an open mind!  

This challenge ends on October 31st, and will earn a badge for Quarter 4. The Great Billings Book Hunt will continue with new challenges all year, and you can sign up anytime.

Sign up here!

One Book Billings 2021 - 2022

One Book Billings The One Book Billings program seeks to provide a forum for readers to discuss in small groups books by regional authors and/or literary works which examine and reflect life on the High Plains, especially Montana. View the schedule for the current season here. 

Sign ups are open now for our November book discussions! We will be reading The Flicker of Old Dreams by Susan Henderson. 

FlickerOldDreams

"The dead come to me vulnerable, sharing their stories and secrets . . . "

Mary Crampton has spent all of her thirty years in Petroleum, a small Western town once supported by a powerful grain company. Living at home, she works as the embalmer in her father's mortuary: an unlikely job that has long marked her as an outsider. Yet, to Mary there is a satisfying art to positioning and styling each body to capture the essence of a subject's life.

Though some townsfolk pretend that the community is thriving, the truth is that Petroleum is crumbling away - a process that began twenty years ago when an accident in the grain elevator killed a beloved high school athlete. The mill closed for good, the train no longer stopped in town, and Robert Golden, the victim's younger brother, was widely blamed for the tragedy and shipped off to live elsewhere. Now, out of the blue, Robert has returned to care for his terminally ill mother. After Mary - reserved, introspective, and deeply lonely - strikes up an unlikely friendship with him, shocking the locals, she finally begins to consider what might happen if she dared to leave Petroleum.

Set in the American West, The Flicker of Old Dreams explores themes of resilience, redemption, and loyalty in prose as lyrical as it is powerful.

Click here to sign up for one of our discussion groups, which take place November 1st - 4th at the library and elsewhere in Billings.