school books

it's september and it's back-to-school time...

• the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian by sherman alexie
• carrie by stephen king
• election by tom perrotta
• the group by mary mccarthy
• the headmaster's dilemma by louis auchincloss
• how opal mehta got kissed, got wild and got a life by kaavya viswanathan
• looking for alaska by john green 
• old school by tobias wolff
• the perks of being a wallflower by stephen chbosky
• prep by curtis sittenfeld
• a secret history by donna tartt
• a separate peace by john knowles
• sloppy firsts by megan mccaffery
• testimony by anita shreve
• we need to talk about kevin by lionel shriver
• the whistling season by ivan doig

have more "school books"?  leave us a comment!

artsy thieves...

here are some books about the fine art of stealing art...

The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick

The World to Come by Dara Horn

Vanished Smile: The mysterious theft of Mona Lisa by R. A. Scotti

 

Buy Back by Brian M. Wiprud

moms in fiction...

want to continue celebrating mother's day?  here's some fiction about moms...

· Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout

· Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

· The Bad Mother’s Handbook by Kate Long

· Blue Shoe by Anne Lamott 

· The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan 

· Cane River by Lalita Tademy 

· The Diary by Ellen Goudge

· The Good Mother by Sue Miller

· I Don’t Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson

· Joy Luck Club by Amy Tam

· Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

· Mrs. Dalloway by Virgina Woolf

· Pieces of the Heart by Karen White 

· The Rice Mother by Rani Manicka 

· The Secret Life of Bess by Sue Monk Kidd

· The Seduction of Water by Carol Goodman 

· Shopaholic and Baby by Sophie Kinsella

· Summer Light by Luanne Rice 

· Unless by Carol Shields

· White Oleander : A Novel by Janet Fitch

it’s Black History month

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

by Isabel Wilkerson

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.



Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

The book is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.  The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.  The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.



Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama

Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life. Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa. So Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voyage to racial identity, tensions in school, struggling with black literature—with one month-long visit when he was 10 from his commanding father. After college, Obama became a community organizer in Chicago. He slowly found place and purpose among folks of similar hue but different memory, winning enough small victories to commit himself to the work. Before going to law school, he finally visited Kenya; with his father dead, he still confronted obligation and loss, and found wellsprings of love and attachment. Obama leaves some lingering questions—his mother is virtually absent—but still has written a resonant book.



Soul on Ice

by Eldridge Cleaver

By turns shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw, the searingly honest memoirs of Eldridge Cleaver are a testament to his unique place in American history. Cleaver writes in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist, and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver shows us, on the pages of this now classic autobiography, is how much he was a man.



A Lesson Before Dying

by Ernest J Gaines

A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is unwitting party to a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson's godmother persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting — and defying — the expected.



The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison

Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrisons virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized her writing.



The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates
by Wes Moore

Two kids with the same name lived in the same decaying city. One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation.



Ruth and the Green Book

by Calvin A. Ramsey

Ruth was so excited to take a trip in her family's new car! In the early 1950s, few African Americans could afford to buy cars, so this would be an adventure. But she soon found out that black travelers weren't treated very well in some towns. Many hotels and gas stations refused service to black people. Daddy was upset about something called Jim Crow laws...

Finally, a friendly attendant at a gas station showed Ruth's family The Green Book. It listed all of the places that would welcome black travelers. With this guidebook — and the kindness of strangers — Ruth could finally make a safe journey from Chicago to her grandma's house in Alabama.



The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

The Black History of the White House presents the untold history, racial politics, and shifting significance of the White House as experienced by African Americans, from the generations of enslaved people who helped to build it or were forced to work there to its first black First Family, the Obamas.



Blues Legacies and Black Feminism
by Angela Y. Davis 

Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of many famous women blues singers as the articulation of a black, working-class feminist consciousness at odds with mainstream American culture.



Native Son
by Richard Wright 

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.



Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong
by Terry Teachout 

Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century and a giant of modern American culture. He knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts, wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies - without a collaborator - and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden. The ranks of his admirers included Johnny Cash, Jackson Pollock and Orson Welles. Offstage he was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more sharp-edged than his worshipping fans ever knew.



Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
by Langston Hughes 

With the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America.  The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night."  They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture.  They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror-- and the marrow of the bone of life."



Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr

edited by Clayborne Carson

Using Stanford University's voluminous collection of archival material, including previously unpublished writings, interviews, recordings, and correspondence, King scholar Clayborne Carson has constructed a remarkable first-person account of Dr. King's extraordinary life.

Let’s Go to the Library!!

winter reading has begun... are you ready?

we are going to visit different parts of the library with your reading...

round one: read one book from five of these areas-

biography * classic fiction * fantasy general fiction * historical fiction * horror * memoir * mystery    * non-fiction * religious fiction * romance
*  sci-fi * self help * short stories * thiller * travel memoir * urban gothic * young adult

 

round two: read one book from five of these areas-

African American author     * Asian author    * Costa Book Award winner * Edgar Award winner

* Hispanic author * National Book Award winner * Nobel Prize winner * Pen Faulkner Award winner * Pulitzer Prize winner * Man Booker Award winner

or

horror/thriller * memoir * sci-fi/fantasy * start a new series * western * woman author

 

round three: read one book from five of these areas-

fiction authors cataloged under A-F, G-L, M-S, and/or T-Z

 

non-fiction from the 100s, the 200s, the 300s, the 400s, the 500s, the 600s, the 700s, the 800s, and/or the 900s

 

books published in the 1700's, the 1800's, 1900-1950s, 1950-1999s
and/or after 2000

 

 

program runs thru the end of MARCH and prizes will be awarded while supplies last!

 

National Book Award Nominees

Great House by Nicole Krauss

Krauss pens a powerful, soaring novel about a stolen desk that contains the secrets, and becomes the obsession, of the lives it passes through.

   

So Much For That by Lionel Shriver

From the author of The Post-Birthday World and A Perfectly Good Family comes this deeply resonant novel that looks at America's healthcare system, and poses the disturbing moral question that affects more people every day: How much is one life worth?



I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita

Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned.



Parrot and Oliver by Peter Carey

Olivieran improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocquevilleis the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected by an enigmatic one-armed marquis.

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

"Lord of Misrule" is a darkly realistic novel about a young woman living through a year of horse racing at a half-mile track in West Virginia, while everyone's best laid schemes keep going brutally wrong. 

something to sink your teeth in...

Apple Turnover Murder by Joanne Fluke

Beat Until Still by Claire Johnson

Belle in the Big Apple by Brooke Parkhurst

Big Night by Joseph Tropinano

Blackberry Wine by Joanne Harris

Blueberry Muffin Murder by Joanne Fluke

Bread Alone by Judith Ryan Hendricks

Candy Cane Murder by Joanne Fluke

Carrot Cake Murder by Joanne Fluke

Catering to Nobody by Diane Mott Davidson

Cherry Cheesecake Murder by Joanne Fluke

Chocolate by Joanne Harris

Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke

Chopping Spree by Diane Mott Davidson

Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs

Comfort Me with Apples by Ruth Reichl

Cooking for Harry by Kay-Marie James

Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson

Cream Puff Murder by Joanne Fluke

Crunch Time by Diane Mott Davidson

Dark Tort by Diane Mott Davidson

Desperately Seeking Sushi by Jerrilyn Farmer

Devil's Food Cake Murder by Joanne Fluke

Dim Sum Dead by Jerrilyn Farmer

Double Shot by Diane Mott Davidson

Dying for Chocolate by Diane Mott Davidson

Eat Cake by Jeanne Ray

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Fat Chance: A love story of food and fantasy by Deborah Blumenthal

Fatally Flaky by Diane Mott Davidson

Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris

Francesca's Kitchen by Peter Pezzelli

Fudge Cupcake Murder by Joanne Fluke

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

Gingerbread Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke

How to Cook a Tart: a novel by Nina Killham

Immaculate Reception by Jerrilyn Farmer

Key Lime Pie Murder by Joanne Fluke

Killer Pancake by Diane Mott Davidson

Killer Wedding by Jerrilyn Farmer

La Cucina by Lily Prior               

Lemon Meringue Pie Murder by Joanne Fluke

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquival

Mumbo Gumbo by Jerrilyn Farmer

My Saucy Stuffed Ravoli by Cherry Whytock

Peach Cobbler Murder by Joanne Fluke

Perfect Sax by Jerrilyn Farmer

Plum Pudding Murder by Joanne Fluke

Prime Cut by Diane Mott Davidson

Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy

Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Sideways by Rex Pickett

Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor

Sticks and Scones by Diane Mott Davidson

Strawberry Shortcake Murder by Joanne Fluke

Sugar Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke

Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen

Sweet Revenge by Diane Mott Davidson

Sympathy For the Devil by Jerrilyn Farmer

Texas Cooking by Lisa Wingate

The Cereal Murders by Diane Mott Davidson

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood

The Flaming Luau of Death by Jerrilyn Farmer

The Grilling Season by Diane Mott Davidson

The Last Suppers by Diane Mott Davidson

The Main Corpse by Diane Mott Davidson

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

The Persian Pickle Club by Sandra Dallas

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

The Secret Ingredient Murders by Nancy Pickard

The Sunday Tertulia by Lori Carlson

The Tortilla Curtain by Boyle T. Coraghessan

The Wedding Officer by Anthony Capella

Tough Cookie by Diane Mott Davidson

Velma Still Cooks in Leeway by Vinita Hampton Wright

World of Pies by Karen Stolz