Book Club

Many of our AGS members are avid readers and have shelves full of cemetery/gravestone related books.

If that is you, please join us for our AGS Virtual Book Club. Each month, we'll focus on a book about cemeteries, gravestones, mourning customs, funerary practices or death and dying. We hope to include books written by AGS members, classics in our field, newly published books, as well as novels that feature the subjects mentioned above. Grab a coffee or a tea, cozy up, and join our conversation!

We generally meet on the third Sunday of every month, at 7:00 eastern time.

Meeting information is included in our monthly e-newsletter. Sign up here: https://visitor.r20.constantcontact.com/manage/optin?v=001bWApi8U865sSjjV8lvo-efCqKiAdSUV3-mcAUMdUlOinDpu5edf_9oBinstqR3-sVfEVnsnFGAIlS9XewPoRdz8Zah8JvONZ79pyiijDuTo%3D

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Books we'll be reading in 2023:

January 2023The Victorian Celebration of Death by James Stevens Curl

February 2023Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral by Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays

March 2023The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in Nineteenth-Century America by Jeffrey Smith

April 2023We'll be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravediggers Daughter by Rachael Hanel

May 2023Mapping & Documenting Cemeteries by Pamela Goffinet

June 2023Gone to the Grave: Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 1850-1950 by Abby Burnett

July 2023Grave Landscapes: The Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemetery Movement by James R. Cothran

August 2023Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography by Douglas Keister

September 2023The Archaeology of American Cemeteries and Gravemarkers by Sherene Baugher and Richard Veit 

October 2023: Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom

November 2023Necropolis: London and Its Dead by Catharine Arnold 

December 2023Silent City on a Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery by Blanche M G Linden

2024 AGS Book Club Selections:

January 2024Death’s Garden Revisited by Loren Rhoads

February 2024Love Cemetery, Unburying the Secret History of Slaves by China Galland

Your hosts: Alma Sinan and Ashlynn Rickord Werner

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Past AGS Book Club Selections (for your personal library):

January 2022199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die by Loren Rhoads

February 2022City of Immortals: Père-Lachaise Cemetery, Paris by Carolyn Campbell

March 2022From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty

April 2022Tales and Tombstones of Sunset Cemetery: Tracing Lives and Memorial Customs in a Southern Graveyard by June Hadden Hobbs, Joe DePriest, and photos by Hal Bryant

May 2022Death: A Graveside Companion edited by Joanna Ebenstein

June 2022Going out in Style: The Architecture of Eternity by Douglas Keister

July 2022: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

August 2022: Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses by Bess Lovejoy

September 2022: The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds by Marilyn Yalom and Reid S. Yalom

October 2022: Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial by Penny Colman

November 2022: The Aftermath of Battle: The Burial of the Civil War Dead by Meg Groeling

December 2022The Speaking Stone: Stories Cemeteries Tell by Michael Griffith