Hi everyone, here are our recommended reads for the week!
*More information on the three catalogs and available formats is found at the end of the list of recommended reads*
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Weekly Suggested Reading postings are published on Wednesday.
And the next Suggested Reading posting will be published on Wednesday, November 8, 2023.
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And here are our ten recommended reads for the week!
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The Boston Girl by Anita Diamont
(Available Formats: Print Book, Large Print, CD Audiobook, eAudiobook & Hoopla Instant Checkout eAudiobook)
Bestseller Diamant (The Red Tent) tells a gripping story of a young Jewish woman growing up in early-20th-century Boston. Addie Baum, an octogenarian grandmother in 1985, relates long-ago history to a beloved granddaughter, answering the question: “How did I get to be the woman I am today?” The answer: by living a fascinating life. First reminiscing about 1915 and the reading club she became a part of as a teenager, Addie, in a conversational tone, recounts the lifelong friendships that began at club meetings and days by the seaside at nearby Rockport. She tells movingly of the fatal effects of the flu, a relative’s suicide, the touchy subject of abortion and its aftermath, and even her own disastrous first date, which nearly ended in rape. Ahead of her time, Addie also becomes a career woman, working as a newspaper typist who stands up for her beliefs at all costs. This is a stunning look into the past with a plucky heroine readers will cheer for. – Publishers Weekly Review
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How To Know A Person: The Art Of Seeing Others Deeply And Being Seen by David Brooks
(Available Formats: Print Book)
In this chatty, charming volume, conservative NY Times commentator Brooks (The Road to Character, 2015) synthesizes the findings of psychologists and philosophers recent and past to make a case for the value of friendship and offer practical suggestions on how to connect more deeply with both old friends and new acquaintances. Acknowledging his own “certain aloofness,” he illustrates his points with personal anecdotes from his life (including a wrenching one about the death by suicide of a close friend and earnestly told experiences on discussion panels) and those of others (including novelist and theologian Frederick Buechner and former president George W. Bush). Seeking to confront the “epidemic of loneliness” in the United States, Brooks recommends “tenderness, receptivity, and active curiosity,” and suggests that we should all strive less to be heroes than to be “illuminators”–in other words, people who are “social, humble, understanding, and warm.” His advice may not be revolutionary, but it’s certainly down-to-earth and entertaining. – Booklist Review
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The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
(Available Formats: Print Book, Large Print, CD Audiobook & eBook)
Orringer’s stunning first novel far exceeds the expectations generated by her much-lauded debut collection, How to Breath Underwater
In this WWII saga, Orringer illuminates the life of Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jew of meager means whose world is upended by a scholarship to the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. There, he makes an unlikely liaison with ballet teacher Claire Morgenstern (née Klara Hász), a woman nine years his senior whose past links her to a wealthy Hungarian family familiar to Andras. Against the backdrop of grueling school assignments, exhausting work at a theater, budding romance, and the developing kinship between Andras and his fellow Jewish students, Orringer ingeniously depicts the insidious reach of the growing tide of anti-Semitism that eventually lands him back in Hungary. Once there, Orringer sheds light on how Hungary treated its Jewish citizens—first, sending them into hard labor, though not without a modicum of common decency—but as the country’s alliance with Germany strengthens, the situation for Jews becomes increasingly dire. Throughout the hardships and injustices, Andras’s love for Claire acts as a beacon through the unimaginable devastation and the dark hours of hunger, thirst, and deprivation. Orringer’s triumphant novel is as much a lucid reminder of a time not so far away as it is a luminous story about the redemptive power of love. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
(Available Formats: Print Book, Large Print, eAudiobook & Hoopla Instant Checkout eAudiobook)
Intensely poetic, startlingly imaginative and moving, this remarkable book will speak to many women, mothers and grown daughters, about the persistent tensions and powerful bonds between generations and cultures. The narrative voice moves among seven characters. Jing-mei June'' Woo recounts her first session in a San Francisco mah-jong club founded by her recently dead, spiritually vital, mother. The three remaining club members and their daughters alternate with stories of their lives, tales that are stunning, funny and heartbreaking. The mothers, all born in China, tell about grueling hardship and misery, the tyranny of family pride and the fear of losing face. The daughters try to reconcile their personalities, shaped by American standards, with seemingly irrational maternal expectations.My mother and I never understood each other; we translated each other’s meanings. I talked to her in English, she answered back in Chinese,” says one character. A crippling generation gap is the result: the mothers, superstitious, full of dread, always fearing bad luck, raise their daughters with hope that their lives will be better, but they also mourn the loss of a heritage their daughters cannot comprehend. Deceptively simple, yet inherently dramatic, each chapter can stand alone; yet personalities unfold and details build to deepen the impact and meaning of the whole. Thus, when infants abandoned in China in the first chapter turn up as adults in the last, their reunion with the one remaining family member is a poignant reminder of what is possible and what is not. On the order of Maxine Hong Kingston’s work, but more accessible, its Oriental orientation an irresistible magnet, Tan’s first novel is a major achievement. First serial to Atlantic, Ladies’ Home Journal and San Francisco Focus; BOMC and QPBC featured alternates. – Publishers Weekly Review
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The Night Watch by Sara Waters
(Available Formats: Print Book & CD Audiobook)
Waters applies her talent for literary suspense to WWII-era London in her latest historical. She populates the novel with ordinary people overlooked by history books and sets their individual passions against the chaotic background of extraordinary times. There are Kay, a “night watch” ambulance driver; her lover, Helen; two imprisoned conscientious objectors, upper-class Fraser and working-class Duncan; Duncan’s sister, Viv; Viv’s married soldier-lover, Reggie; and Julia, a building inspector–cum–mystery novelist. The novel works backward in time, beginning in 1947, as London emerges from the rubble of war, then to 1944, a time of nightly air raids, and finally to 1941, when the war’s end was not in sight. Through all the turmoil on the world stage, the characters steal moments of love, fragments of calm and put their lives on the line for great sex and small kindnesses. Waters’s sharply drawn page-turner doesn’t quite equal the work of literary greats who’ve already mapped out WWII-era London. But she matches any of them with her scene of two women on the verge of an affair during a nighttime bombing raid, lost in blackout London with only the light of their passion as a guide. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, edited by John Joseph Adams and Jordan Peele
(Available Formats: Print Book)
For this electrifying anthology, horror movie director Peele brings together 19 Black authors to “give us their Sunken Places.” The cars have eyes in N.K. Jemisin’s “Reckless Eyeballing,” about a corrupt police officer named Carl who gets his comeuppance for wrongfully pulling people over. “Wandering Devil” by Cadwell Turnbull follows Freddy, a man driven by wanderlust and a fear of commitment, who finally finds a place—and a person—he wants to call his home, only to encounter a terrible apparition that threatens him if he stays still too long. Other authors find horror in history: in Tananarive Due’s “The Rider,” two Freedom Riders on their way to Montgomery, Ala., in 1961, are joined on their bus by a strange being whose presence may spell their doom, while “The Norwood Trouble” by Maurice Broaddus concerns a Reconstruction-era community calling upon higher powers to bring bloody justice to a lynch mob of Night Riders. These tales are all both gruesomely imaginative and firmly rooted in the realities of anti-Black racism and brutality—and there isn’t a weak one in the bunch. This is essential reading for any horror fan. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
(Available Formats: Print Book, eBook, Hoopla Instant Checkout eBook & eAudiobook)
Alyan blends joy with pain, frustration with elation, longing with boredom in this beautiful debut novel filled with the panoply of life. The frontispiece tells the whole story in microcosm with a family tree of the Palestinian Yacoub family, who, for most of the book, no longer lives in Palestine. One brother, Mustafa, is lost in the Six-Day War and the sisters, Alia and Widad, relocate to Kuwait while their mother, Salma, moves to Jordan. Later generations end up in France, America, and Lebanon. Alia, the young bride in 1963 in the first pages, is the family matriarch with Alzheimer’s as the book comes to a close. In 1977, her daughter, Souad, is a tantrum-throwing five-year-old in Kuwait City; by 1990, she is a student in Paris entering into an ill-considered marriage, then, 14 years later, a divorced mother of two, recently relocated from America to Beirut. Chapters focus on different family members as time and geography shift. These lives full of promise and loss will feel familiar to any reader; Alyan’s excellent storytelling and deft handling of the complex relationships ensures that readers will not soon forget the Yacoub family. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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Their Eyes Watching God by Zora Neale Thurston
(Available Formats: Print Book, Large Print, CD Audiobook, eBook & eAudiobook)
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick
“A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly.” —Zadie Smith
One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
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Touched by Walter Mosely
(Available Formats: Print Book, eAudiobook, Hoopla Instant Checkout eBook & eAudiobook)
An unsuspecting host finds himself at the center of a supernatural plot to eradicate life from the planet. Rattled awake from a disorienting slumber–and apparently unaware of his own nudity and physical arousal–mild-mannered Black family man Marty Just wanders onto his balcony, the elaborate details of an intergalactic plan to end life on Earth seared into his mind. “Mama, look!” a neighbor child cries, and from that moment, Marty’s week only gets weirder: He’s arrested for public indecency; kills his vile, racist cellmate in a fugue state of self-defense; posts bail and returns home, only to encounter Aryan gang members ready to avenge their murdered leader. Until this point, the question of whether Marty has suffered a psychotic break or schizophrenic episode is unresolved, but then something inside Marty–an entity called Temple–takes over, attacking the racist thugs with his teeth, biting and tearing the life out of them in a marvelously frenzied action sequence. As it turns out, not only can Temple summon inhuman strength, he can resurrect the dead (!), and he recruits the formerly lifeless racists to help him prevent the encroaching genocide, personified by Tor Waxman, the Angel of Death. Equal parts body horror and necromancy, the book has cinematic fast cuts and an explosive pace that make it read like a Black Mirror episode set against the Hollywood Hills. While a subplot about Marty’s pending legal woes adds little to the excitement (it wouldn’t be Mosley without sharp-tongued lawyers and pushy cops), the novel is complicated in compelling ways by the racial dynamics and overt gestures toward a pandemic, as Tor Waxman spreads feverish death via unseen contagion to nearly 5,000 souls. Fast-moving action and jaw-dropping twists move this slim volume along at a dizzying rate. – Kirkus Review
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A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum
(Available Formats: Print Book, eAudiobook, Hoopla Instant Checkout eBook & eAudiobook)
The New York Times bestseller and Read with Jenna TODAY SHOW Book Club pick telling the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their community.
“Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of—dangerous, the ultimate shame.”
Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children—four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear.
Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man.
But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family—knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.
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Happy reading!
Linda Reimer, SSCL
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Have questions or want to request a book?
Feel free to call the library! Our telephone number is 607-936-3713.
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Note: Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
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Information on the three library catalogs
Digital Catalog: https://stls.overdrive.com/
The Digital Catalog, is an online catalog containing eBooks, Downloadable Audiobooks, digital magazines and a handful of streaming videos. The catalog, which allows one to download content to a PC, also has a companion app, Libby, which you can download to your mobile device; so you can enjoy eBooks and Downloadable Audiobooks on the go!
All card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can check out items from the Digital Catalog.
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Hoopla Catalog: https://www.hoopladigital.com/
The Hoopla Catalog features instant checkouts of eBooks, Downloadable Audiobooks, comic books, albums, movies and TV series. Patron check out limit is 6 items per month.
Hoopla is a Southeast Steuben County Library service available to all Southeast Steuben County Library card holders.
The Hoopla App is available for Android or Apple devices, smart TVs & media streaming players.
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StarCat: The catalog of physical/traditional library materials: https://starcat.stls.org
Card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can access StarCat to search for and request materials available at libraries through out the Southern Tier Library System.
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Format Note: Under each book title you’ll find a list of all the different formats that specific title is available in; including: Print Books, Large Print Books, CD Audiobooks, eBooks & Downloadable Audiobooks from the Digital Catalog (Libby app) and Hoopla eBooks & Hoopla Downloadable Audiobooks (Hoopla app).
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Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
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