The Round Rock Public Library's Adult Summer Reading program presents the Explorer Book Discussion Group. The group will discuss Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (translated by Ina Rilke) from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Friday, August 31 at Star Company in downtown Round Rock.

This beautifully presented novella tracks the lives of two teens, childhood friends who have been sent to a small Chinese village for "re-education" during Mao's Cultural Revolution. Sons of doctors and dentists, their days are now spent muscling buckets of excrement up the mountainside and mining coal. When the boys acquire a suitcase full of forbidden Western literature, one boy decides to "re-educate" an ignorant seamtress whom he hopes will become his intellectual match. -- School Library Journal