Garfield Park Library Hot Topics Book Club

with local author, Susie Bright

Join our book club every second Tuesday to explore great reads and share engaging conversations with fellow book lovers.

A book club organized around discussing the “hot topic” titles in the news,  and book buzz— the controversies, the new classics or perhaps overexposed. 

The Hot Topics Book Discussion group meets on the second Tuesday of the month from 1 to 2pm.  All adults are welcome.

Conversation led by Susie Bright

Free. Spaces limited.
Include your email for more info: we’ll send you excerpts of the book, and
copies of its most talked-about reviews.

Garfield Park Branch Library, SCPL

705 Woodrow Avenue

Santa Cruz, CA 95060

The views and opinions expressed by presenters in Santa Cruz Public Libraries programs are their own and do not constitute an endorsement by Santa Cruz Public Libraries or its member jurisdictions. 

Los puntos de vista y opiniones expresadas por los presentadores de programas en las Bibliotecas Públicas de Santa Cruz son propias y no constituyen en un respaldo o reflejo de la postura de las Bibliotecas Públicas de Santa Cruz ni de sus jurisdicciones miembro.

The below information will be updated monthly to reflect the most current selection:

November 10, 2026, 1-2 pm

Dreaming the Third Reich, by Charlotte Beradt

"The only person in Germany who still leads a private life is the person who sleeps.” 

—Robert Ley, Nazi head of The German Labor Front

A reporter’s secret collection of 1930s German dream data reads like a thriller, where the editor secretly met with Jewish and non-Jewish Berliners to record their intimate diaries-of-the-night.

Excerpts and Reader Copies of The Third Reich of Dreams

• Excerpt, The Paris Review
• Internet Archive, full copy of the original 1968 edition, not the new edition.
• Kindle excerpt
• How Hannah Arendt and Bruno Bettleheim helped Charlotte get her work into America, the first time.

Reviews

• The New Yorker, Mireille Juchau, “How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism”
• Wall St Journal, Benjamin Balint: “a collection of parables worthy of Kafka and a revelatory account of despotism internalized.”
• Times Literary Supplement: “Beradt’s project is an unprecedented record of how the Nazi regime extended its grip into the innermost recesses of private existence.”
• The Telegraph, review by Olivia Ward Jackson: One factory owner reported: “It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, milli­metre by millimetre,” he recalled. Then, dream-Goebbels said, “I don’t want your salute”, and walked off.”
• Jennifer Bridge review: “She arranges dreams around symbols and preoccupations. Chapter titles like “The Non-Hero” and “Nothing Gives Me Pleasure Anymore.”

Biographies of the authors

• Author/Editor Charlotte Beradt
• Translator Damion Searls— he’s the one Nobel Prize winners turn to
• Dunya Mikhail a poet who wrote the preface
• Amanda Rubin is a film director who pushed for Princeton to do a new edition of the book, and is now making a documentary of the same. 

Calendar:

July 14: Strangers, by Belle Burden

August 11: Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

September 8: Regime Change, by Maggie Haberman

October 13: Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

November 1: The Third Reich of Dreams, by Charlotte Beradt, editor

December 8: “Le Cookbook Special” - Your Favorites This Year

For More Info, email: patrickr@santacruzpl.org

All of the above listed titles can be found in the library catalog; inquire at any circulation desk or your SCPL online request account.

*** Reminder: request “any medium” of the Title (audio, ebook, print) 
Also,  if you're signed up for other California libraries, check their catalog - for example, San Francisco PL or Watsonville PL.

The views and opinions expressed by presenters in Santa Cruz Public Libraries programs are their own and do not constitute an endorsement by Santa Cruz Public Libraries or its member jurisdictions. 

Los puntos de vista y opiniones expresadas por los presentadores de programas en las Bibliotecas Públicas de Santa Cruz son propias y no constituyen en un respaldo o reflejo de la postura de las Bibliotecas Públicas de Santa Cruz ni de sus jurisdicciones miembro.