Library Staff Reads - Fall 2019

A great comic to escape into! Who wouldn't want to be protected by someone who never sleeps?! Be careful though... unseen forces are out for you! Read the stars and you'll know the way.

A great book to learn about switching to a plant-based diet. It's a good starting point for learning about vegan nutrition, as well as info for specific populations - weight loss, athletes, seniors. There's a lot of info about specific nutrient needs & vitamins - all vegans should to take a B12 supplement. Go eat your greens!

"In Susan Orlean’s enthralling and inspirational account of the Los Angeles Public Library, she alludes to a common euphemism used by the Senegalese when someone dies, namely that 'his or her library has burned'. This poetic expression, implying the loss of a great store of knowledge, came into literal focus on 29 April 1986, when the LA library caught fire, destroying more than 400,000 books and devastating the community reliant on its resources. Yet, like a phoenix, it rose from the flames, greater and more beloved than ever. This book is a homage not just to the spirit and resilience of those who rebuilt the library, but to those whose lives are transformed by these public palaces of reading, on both sides of the lending desk." --Alexander Larman, writing for The Guardian

For those who didn’t grow up in the 80’s this will be an eye opener. Satanists were everywhere! Current and former Satanists debated each other on TV talk shows, there were evening special news reports, and there were rumors of cults abducting unwitting teenagers. Even the popular game Dungeons & Dragons fell victim to the hype as it was typecast as a ‘gateway to witchcraft and the devil!’ This book looks how this phenomena made its way into 80’s pop culture.

"What we call I is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale." That's one of the many quotes in the book and maybe the most true of them all. The book is not about finding answers for life after death (an oxymoron) or making dying an easier process. With the knowledge and technology we have nowadays, each birth is still unique and can be complicated, unpredictable and sometimes unsuccessful: same as dying. Like any self-help/new age books, the narration can sound syrupy at times. But that can be because the author would like to gently invite us to incorporate the acceptance/awareness of death into our lives. Then we can learn to realize that the door can stop swinging at any moment and learn to live to the fullest and then let go.

I just started reading this book, and it examines video games and educational settings. Give it a go, it's really cool!

"A persistent theme of this acutely lovely novel is the way in which all societies—whether ancient or modern, rich or poor—depend on scaffoldings of cruelty, from the meat they eat to the clothes they wear. Wealthy and democratic societies demand sacrificial victims too, even if the killing is outsourced... So what kind of people would carefully and ritualistically maim their neighbors and stake them into the mud to be preserved for eternity? Ghost Wall suggests an answer: modern people as well as ancient ones; people whose lives depend, in myriad small ways, on the pain of others." --Annalisa Quinn, writing for The Atlantic

"Memoirs are our modern fairy tales, the harrowing fables of the Brothers Grimm reimagined from the perspective of the plucky child who has, against all odds, evaded the fate of being chopped up, cooked and served to the family for dinner. What the memoir writer knows is what readers of Grimm intuit: the loving parent and the evil stepparent may in reality be the same person viewed at successive moments and in different lights. And so the autobiographer is faced with the daunting challenge of describing the narrow escape from being baked into gingerbread while at the same time attempting to understand, forgive and even love the witch. How fitting, then, that the title of Jeannette Walls's chilling memoir, The Glass Castle, should evoke the architecture of fantasy and magic." --Francine Prose, writing for The New York Times

An apocalyptic struggle between the forces of good and evil that lures the reader to choose sides. I'm a good guy!

A neo-noir of interlocking short stories involving characters from Baltimore. A superb indie comic book from the '90s that was beloved by me as a teen, and even though I hate almost everything I liked from those years--I still dig this and have reread it many times over the years always ready to see if my opinion diminishes, but it never does (it's a shame that the spin-offs and issues/collections after the original run--the five volumes we have in the library are the original run, by the way--are all lackluster and like a xerox of a xerox). Random fact: These comics are the reason I still say "cool beans" all the time.

A great book that proves that truth will always come to light, no matter how deep it's buried.

Very interesting!

When I was young, the Soviet Union was just two pages in an atlas, with city names, rivers, and not much else. Now, you can "drive" online through many of the countries of the former USSR and learn more than any atlas could ever tell me as a child. Khanty is a book that only deepens that knowledge, focusing on one people living in what is still a vast and little-known land: Siberia. Take a look, have a read, and learn a little more than you knew when you checked it out.

This graphic memoir of a girl involved in competitive skating absolutely blew me away. Ultimately, this is a gorgeous a story of a girl finding her own space to stand.

Michelle Obama is an amazing woman. Becoming is a must read.

This book is the story about Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman in America. Coming to America, Ifemelu encounters hardship, culture shock, trying to fit in and struggles with racism. Her journey takes her from babysitting, to writing a popular blog post, and earning a fellowship to Princeton. However, all is not what it seems... This is one of my all time favorite books. A must read.