Hi everyone, here are our recommended titles for the week, five digital titles available through OverDrive and five print titles available through StarCat.
(Note: Click on the photo of the item you’d like to request or check out)
Digital Suggestions Of The Week:
The Common Good by Robert Reich (Format: Downloadable audiobook):
From the best-selling author of Saving Capitalism and The Work of Nations, a passionate, clear-eyed manifesto on why we must restore the idea of the common good to the center of our economics and politics.
With the warmth and lucidity that have made him one of our most important public voices, Robert B. Reich makes the case for a generous, inclusive understanding of the American project, centering on the moral obligations of citizenship. Rooting his argument in everyday reality and common sense, Reich demonstrates the existence of a common good, and argues that it is this that defines a society or a nation. Societies and nations undergo virtuous cycles that reinforce and build the common good, as well as vicious cycles that undermine it. Over the course of the past five decades, Reich contends, America has been in a slowly accelerating vicious cycle—one that can and must be reversed. But first we need to weigh what really matters, and how we as a country should relate to honor, shame, patriotism, truth, and the meaning of leadership.
Powerful, urgent, and utterly vital, this is a heartfelt missive from one of our foremost political thinkers: a fundamental statement about the purpose of society and a cri de coeur to save America’s soul.
The Girl With The Red Balloon by Katherine Locke (Format: eBook):
This book is the current Big Read title. And what that means it that it is available on demand for your reading pleasure. So check it out!
Here’s a summary of the plot: When sixteen-year-old Ellie Baum accidentally time-travels via red balloon to 1988 East Berlin, she’s caught up in a conspiracy of history and magic. She meets members of an underground guild in East Berlin who use balloons and magic to help people escape over the Wall—but even to the balloon makers, Ellie’s time travel is a mystery. When it becomes clear that someone is using dark magic to change history, Ellie must risk everything—including her only way home—to stop the process.
Halloween (1978) (Format: Streaming Video):
The classic John Carpenter horror film starring Jamie Lee Curtis.
It was “The Night HE Came Home,” warned the posters for John Carpenter’s career-making horror smash. In Haddonfield, IL, on Halloween night 1963, six-year-old Michael Myers inexplicably slaughters his teenage sister. His psychiatrist Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) can’t penetrate Michael’s psyche after years of institutionalization, but he knows that, when Myers escapes before Halloween in 1978, there is going to be hell to pay in Haddonfield. While Loomis heads to Haddonfield to alert police, Myers spots bookish teenager Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and follows her, constantly appearing and vanishing as Laurie and her looser friends Lynda (P.J. Soles) and Annie (Nancy Loomis) make their Halloween plans. By nightfall, the responsible Laurie is doing her own and Annie’s babysitting jobs, while Annie and Lynda frolic in the parent-free house across the street. But Annie and Lynda are not answering the phone, and suspicious Laurie heads across the street to the darkened house to see what is going on….
No Place Like Home: A Small Town Romance Collection by Debbie Macomber (16 Lighthouse Road\Welcome to Moonlight Harbor\No One but You\The 10-Year Reunion\Cedar Cove) (Format: eBook):
Four heartwarming stories of finding love in friendly small towns, from bestselling and favorite authors, together for the first time in one value-packed box set!
16 Lighthouse Road by Debbie Macomber
Welcome to Cedar Cove, Washington, where the news of the day is that family court Judge Olivia Lockhart has denied the divorce petition of a young local couple. Olivia is trusting her instincts that the two need to try again. Newspaper editor Jack Griffin admires Olivia’s choice, and the woman herself. Now Olivia has her hands full between her work and her tricky relationships with her daughter and her mother—and now Jack’s courtship. Everyone in Cedar Cove is talking!
The 10-Year Reunion by Susan Wiggs
Beautician Twyla McCabe was voted most likely to succeed in her high school graduating class, but a run of bad luck forced her to give up her dreams of college and a career. Now a widow with a six-year-old and essentially Dear Abby with a blow-dryer, she longs to show up at her ten-year school reunion with a date she can show off. But when her well-meaning customers arrange for her to attend the Hell Creek High School Reunion with Rob Carter, M.D., Twyla knows they’ve gone too far. Who would believe a woman who dyes hair for a living could be engaged to such a hunk?
No One But You by Brenda Novak
Silver Springs, a picturesque small town in Southern California where even the hardest hearts can learn to love again… Sadie Harris is out of options, and desperately determined not to lose the custody battle for her son, so she takes position assisting Dawson Reed—who recently stood trial for murder. Dawson just wants to leave his painful past behind and fix up the family farm. As their professional relationship grows into something else, Sadie realizes that Dawson has a good heart, one that might be worth fighting for.
Welcome to Moonlight Harbor by Sheila Roberts
For her fortieth birthday, Jenna Jones is getting a divorce. She’s barely able to support herself and her teenage daughter, and now her deadbeat ex is demanding spousal support! The unexpected gift of being asked to manage the Driftwood Inn for her aging Aunt Edie might be the rainbow at the end of the storm. Or not. The coastal town is a little more run-down that Jenna remembered, and the inn is worse. But with the help of her new friends and a couple of handsome citizens, perhaps the sunshine is on the horizon after all. Because, no matter what, life is always good at the beach.
Things Fall Apart: A Novel by Chinua Achebe:
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe’s critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.
With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
Print Suggestions Of The Week:
Beethoven’s Tenth: A Novel by Richard Kluger:
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ashes to Ashes
When the assistant manager of a hardware store in rural New Jersey shows up at the offices of Cubbage & Wakeham, an elite New York auction house, with a worn musical manuscript he hopes to sell for a small (or perhaps hefty) fortune, he is greeted with subdued snickers—and not surprisingly. The title page of the document reads, “William Tell: A Dramatic Symphony” and is signed “Ludwig van Beethoven.” The bearer of the composition claims he recently came upon it in an old attic trunk while cleaning out his lately deceased grandfather’s home in Zurich; several accompanying documents suggest the work was written there during the summer of 1814.
Since virtually all lovers of classical music—and many others who can’t tell Stravinsky from Springsteen—know that Beethoven wrote nine sublime symphonies, and so evidence of a new-found tenth one by the supreme master of that musical form sets off an instant international uproar. Is the seemingly miraculous discovery the genuine article or an ingenious hoax?
To solve the tantalizing puzzle before placing the manuscript on the auction block at risk of becoming a global laughingstock, Cubbage & Wakeham’s management organizes a team of intensely skeptical investigators, among them the world’s top Beethoven scholars and forensic experts, all of them out to prove the find a fraud. But as evidence to the contrary begins to pile up, tensions rise among the corps of authenticators, the financial stakes soar as would-be exploiters of the symphony gather, the governments of five nations seek to claim the work as a national treasure, and the mystery artfully spun by novelist Richard Kluger deepens by the day.
Among the beguiling questions that demand answers:
The mountain of archival documentation on Beethoven’s life and works is silent about his activities and whereabouts in the summer of 1814, but why would he have gone to Zurich then and written a symphony in tribute to, of all people, Swizterland’s great folk hero?
Why are the form and structure of the Tell symphony—each movement contains a number of vocal interludes seamlessly blended with the instrumental passages—so different from all the other Beethoven symphonies?
And why, if he had produced such a monumental work, would Beethoven have abandoned it? Did he think it below his incomparably high standard of artistry? Was it stolen from him? Or did he fear pressing political considerations back in Vienna, where he had long resided, that could have endangered his career if the new work were to be publicly performed?
The answers—and a cast of feisty characters with conflicting stakes in the quest—make Beethoven’s Tenth a deftly twisty and challenging detective novel, enriched by the prodigious research of author Kluger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning social historian.
Lady Henterman’s Wardrobe by Marshall Ryan Maresca:
Mixing high fantasy and urban fantasy, the second novel of the Streets of Maradaine series follows the Rynax brothers’ crew of outlaws as they attempt their biggest heist yet and restore justice to the common people.
The neighborhood of North Seleth has suffered—and not just the Holver Alley Fire. Poverty and marginalization are forcing people out of the neighborhood, and violence on the streets is getting worse. Only the Rynax brothers—Asti and Verci—and their Holver Alley Crew are fighting for the common people. They’ve taken care of the people who actually burned down Holver Alley, but they’re still looking for the moneyed interests behind the fire.
The trail of breadcrumbs leads the crew to Lord Henterman, and they plan to infiltrate the noble’s house on the other side of the city. While the crew tries to penetrate the heart of the house, the worst elements of North Seleth seem to be uniting under a mysterious new leader. With the crew’s attention divided, Asti discovers that the secrets behind the fire, including ones from his past, might be found in Lady Henterman’s wardrobe.
The books in the Streets of Maradaine series:
1. The Holver Alley Crew
2. Lady Henterman’s Wardrobe
Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart:
“Spectacular.”—NPR • “Uproariously funny.”—The Boston Globe • “An artistic triumph.”—San Francisco Chronicle • “A novel in which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced.”—The Washington Post • “Shteyngart’s best book.”—The Seattle Times
The bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story returns with a biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times.
Narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded, and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his three-year-old son’s diagnosis of autism, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler, more romantic life with his old college sweetheart. Meanwhile, his super-smart wife, Seema—a driven first-generation American who craved the picture-perfect life that comes with wealth—has her own demons to face. How these two flawed characters navigate the Shteyngartian chaos of their own making is at the heart of this piercing exploration of the 0.1 Percent, a poignant tale of familial longing and an unsentimental ode to what really makes America great.
The Vanishing Box by Elly Griffiths:
In a nail-biting hunt for a missing loved one, DI Edgar Stephens and the magician Max Mephisto discover once again that the line between art, life, and death is all too easily blurred.
It’s the holiday season and Max Mephisto and his daughter Ruby have landed a headlining gig at the Brighton Hippodrome, the biggest theater in the city, an achievement only slightly marred by the less-than-savory supporting act: a tableau show of naked “living statues.” But when one of the girls goes missing and turns up dead not long after, Max and Ruby realize there’s something far more sinister than obscenity afoot in the theater.
DI Edgar Stephens is on the case. As he searches for the killer, he begins to suspect that her fatal vanishing act may very well be related to another case, the death of a quiet local florist. But just as he’s narrowing in on the missing link, Ruby goes missing, and he and Max must team up once again to find her.
Wicked and the Wallflower by Sarah MacLean:
When Wicked Comes Calling . . .
When a mysterious stranger finds his way into her bedchamber and offers his help in landing a duke, Lady Felicity Faircloth agrees—on one condition. She’s seen enough of the world to believe in passion, and won’t accept a marriage without it.
The Wallflower Makes a Dangerous Bargain . . .
Bastard son of a duke and king of London’s dark streets, Devil has spent a lifetime wielding power and seizing opportunity, and the spinster wallflower is everything he needs to exact a revenge years in the making. All he must do is turn the plain little mouse into an irresistible temptress, set his trap, and destroy his enemy.
For the Promise of Passion . . .
But there’s nothing plain about Felicity Faircloth, who quickly decides she’d rather have Devil than another. Soon, Devil’s carefully laid plans are in chaos and he must choose between everything he’s ever wanted . . . and the only thing he’s ever desired.
Have a great week!
Linda, SSCL
Online Catalog Links:
StarCat
The catalog of physical materials, i.e. print books, DVDs, audiobooks on CD etc.
The Digital Catalog (OverDrive)
The catalog of e-books, downloadable audiobooks and a handful of streaming videos.
Freegal Music Service
This music service is free to library card holders and offers the option to download, and keep, three free songs per week and to stream three hours of commercial free music each day:
RBDigital
Digital magazines on demand and for free! Back issues are available and you can even choose to be notified by email when the new issue of your favorite magazine is available.
About Library Apps:
You can access digital library content on PCs, Macs and mobile devices. For mobile devices simply download the OverDrive, Freegal or Zinio app from your app store to get started. If you have questions call the library at: 607-936-3713 and one of our Digital Literacy Specialists will be happy to assist you.
Tech Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
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