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, December 20, 2023.
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So many books, so little time!
And speaking of time, it is that time of the year again – the time when the best books of the year lists come out!
So I’ve compiled a list of great best-of-2023 reads, from a variety of sources, including NPR, The New York Times, LitHub, Time and more for your perusal.
The recommended reading schedule for the next month is as follows:
December 13: A selection of the best fiction books of 2023, part 1 (12 titles)
December 20: A selection of the best fiction books of 2023, part 2 (12 titles)
December 27: A selection of the best mysteries of 2023 (12 titles)
January 3: A selection of the best non-fiction books of 2023 (12 titles)
And, as a bonus, just in you case you need something extra to read over the one of the long holiday weekends this month, on December 22, I’ll post a list containing twelve of the best Science Fiction & Fantasy titles of 2023.
And if you wish to do a deep dive into the best of 2023 reading lists – I’ve included reference links at the end of this post.
And without further ado, here is our first dozen of, among best of 2023, fiction titles!
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Absolution by Alice McDermitt
A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.
You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.
American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.
Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions—have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.
A virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers, about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world. – Publisher Description
(Recommended by: Good Housekeeping, LA Times, NPR, NYPL & Time Magazine)
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The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters
Peters’ debut combines narrative skill and a poignant story for a wonderful novel to which many readers will gravitate. In 1962, an Indigenous Mi’kmaq family is in Maine to pick summer blueberries when their youngest child, four-year-old Ruthie, disappears. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, saw her last. Told in alternating, first-person chapters from Joe and a narrator called Norma, the novel follows the painful reverberations of Ruthie’s disappearance across five decades. Peters wisely never makes the reader wonder if Norma is Ruthie; we know that she is, which allows more compelling questions to come into focus. How much do Joe’s subsequent life events and choices trace back to this first major trauma? Is his lifelong guilt justified? How does Norma/Ruthie reconcile love for the white mother who stole her from her birth mother and for the white aunt who saved her from a lonely childhood but knew the secret all along? The story is told in braided strands, and it is a testament to Peters’ ability that both strands fascinate. Indigenous stories like this matter, and while little is easy for Peters’ characters, in the end, for all of them–even for those who stole a small child–there is hope. – Starred Booklist Review
(Recommended by: B&N)
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The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
In a small town outside of Dublin, an economic downturn spells trouble for the once-affluent Barnes family at the heart of this latest from Murray, perhaps best known for the Booker Prize–shortlisted Skippy Dies. For Cass, finishing up high school, it’s the worry that her parents won’t be able to send her to university. For her little brother, PJ, it’s the illogical fear that they will send him away to boarding school. Shopaholic mother Imelda is forced to curtail her spending and sell off some of her treasures. For father Dickie, who has lived in the shadow of his dead brother, a beloved football star, it’s the disgrace of running his father’s car business into the ground. Will Grandfather return from his golfing life in Portugal to set things right and save the family from those who threaten them, including a gang of local thugs, a Polish blackmailer, an online predator, and a crackpot survivalist, or will it all implode? VERDICT This is a big, multilayered book full of secrets and surprises. But not a word is wasted in this unsettling, character-rich, devilishly plotted page-turner. – Starred Library Journal Review
(Recommended by: Booker Prize shortlist, LitHub, NYT & NYPL)
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Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, Financial Times, Slate, The Chicago Public Library, Kirkus, The Telegraph
A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick
“[A] savagely satirical thriller.” —People
The Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries brings us Birnam Wood, a gripping thriller of high drama and kaleidoscopic insight into what drives us to survive.
Birnam Wood is on the move . . .
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last.
But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He’s intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they’re poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?
A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival. – Publisher Description
(Recommended by: NPR & Time Magazine)
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Biography of X: A Novel by Catherine Lacey
Named one of the Best Books of 2023 by The New York Times, the New Yorker, Vulture, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Time, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Lit Hub, and Amazon. National Bestseller. Winner of the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
“A major novel, and a notably audacious one.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.
When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification.
A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.
Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.
(Recommended by: LA Times, LitHub, NPR, Publishers Weekly & Time Magazine)
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Blackouts by Justin Torres
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, BookPage, The New York Public Library, Powell’s
A Must-Read: The New York Times, Time, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Boston Herald, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Bay Area Reporter, Datebook, Electric Literature, The Stacks, Them, Publishers Weekly
“Sweeping, ingenious . . . A kiss to build a dream on.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories—personal and collective.
Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book—Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns—and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?
A book about storytelling—its legacies, dangers, delights, and potential for change—and a bold exploration of form, art, and love, Justin Torres’s Blackouts uses fiction to see through the inventions of history and narrative. A marvel of creative imagination, it draws on testimony, photographs, illustrations, and a range of influences as it insists that we look long and steadily at what we have inherited and what we have made—a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth. A reclamation of ransacked history, a celebration of defiance, and a transformative encounter, Blackouts mines the stories that have been kept from us and brings them into the light. – Publisher Description
(2023 Nation Book Award Fiction Winner)
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Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwane Adjei-Brenyah
Reader’s Note: This novel, as you might expect from the description of the plot, contains graphic violence – so just FYI, before you start to read!
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own in this explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black • LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE
“Like Orwell’s 1984 and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Adjei-Brenyah’s book presents a dystopian vision so…illuminating that it should permanently shift our understanding of who we are and what we’re capable of doing.” —The Washington Post
“This book will change you!…A masterpiece.” —Jenna Bush Hager, The Today Show’s #ReadWithJenna
She felt their eyes, all those executioners…
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of the Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly popular, highly controversial profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators, and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death matches before packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, Thurwar considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games. But CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo, and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar’s path have devastating consequences.
Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors, to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system’s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a “new and necessary American voice” (Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review). – Publisher Description
(Recommended by: B&N, Library Journal, National Book Award Finalist, NYPL & NYT)
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Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Harlem Shuffle continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, BookPage
“Dazzling” –Walter Mosley, The New York Times Book Review.
It’s 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It’s strictly the straight-and-narrow for him — until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated – and deadly.
1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney’s endearingly violent partner in crime. It’s getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook – to their regret.
1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. (“Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!”), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney’s tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.
CROOK MANIFESTO is a darkly funny tale of a city under siege, but also a sneakily searching portrait of the meaning of family. Colson Whitehead’s kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem is sure to stand as one of the all-time great evocations of a place and a time.
(Recommended by: NPR & Time Magazine)
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The Cuban Heiress by Chanel Cleeton
An NPR Books We Love selection for 2023
“An unforgettable read that should be at the top of every TBR list.”—NPR
In 1934, a luxury cruise becomes a fight for survival as two women’s pasts collide on a round-trip voyage from New York to Havana in New York Times bestselling author Chanel Cleeton’s page-turning new novel inspired by the true story of the SS Morro Castle.
New York heiress Catherine Dohan seemingly has it all. There’s only one problem. It’s a lie. As soon as the Morro Castle leaves port, Catherine’s past returns with a vengeance and threatens her life. Joining forces with a charismatic jewel thief, Catherine must discover who wants her dead—and why.
Elena Palacio is a dead woman. Or so everyone thinks. After a devastating betrayal left her penniless and on the run, Elena’s journey on the Morro Castle is her last hope. Steeped in secrecy and a burning desire for revenge, her return to Havana is a chance to right the wrong that has been done to her—and her prey is on the ship.
As danger swirls aboard the Morro Castle and their fates intertwine, Elena and Catherine must risk everything to see justice served once and for all.
(Recommended by: NPR)
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Day by Michael Cunningham
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Cunningham follows a Brooklyn family over the span of three years. Cunningham focuses his first novel since The Snow Queen (2014) on two siblings–Isabel, a flinty photo editor, wife, and mother of two; and Robbie, her softhearted younger brother, who lives in the attic of her brownstone–and the rest of their somewhat loosely defined family, glimpsing them in snapshots of time over three years: “April 5, 2019: Morning,” “April 5, 2020: Afternoon,” and “April 5, 2021: Evening.” During the course of those days, which comprise the three sections of the book and are punctuated by the pandemic, Isabel’s marriage to aging musician Dan deteriorates; her two children, precocious elementary-schooler Violet and angsty preteen Nathan, struggle and grow; and Dan’s brother, bad-boy artist Garth, contends with his deepening feelings for his friend Chess and the child they share, Odin. But it is Robbie–the sweet emotional center of the family, whom everyone adores; who is trading an unfulfilling role as a schoolteacher for a life of exotic travel and, eventually, he hopes, medical school; and who has amassed a significant Instagram following under the guise of an alter-ego, Wolfe–whose life changes most dramatically. Writing with empathy, insight, keen observation, and elegant subtlety, Cunningham reveals something not only about the characters whose lives he limns in these pages, but also about the crises and traumas, awakenings and opportunities for growth the world writ large experienced during a particularly challenging era–and about the way people found a way to connect with one another and themselves as individuals in a time heightened by love and loss. This subtle, sensitively written family story proves poignant and quietly powerful. – Kirkus Review
(Recommended by: LitHub)
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Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal
** SELECTED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AS 1 OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR **
** INCLUDED ON THE NEW YORKER’S BEST BOOKS OF 2023 **
“At The New York Times Book Review, I think it’s fair to say we were dazzled by the way the author creates . . . a miniature masterpiece of narrative tension and compression” – Emily Eakin, “The Book Review” podcast
In this gripping tale, a Russian conscript and a French woman cross paths on the Trans-Siberian railroad, each fleeing to the east for their own reasons
Perfect for fans of Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle and The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Eastbound is both an adventure story and a duet of two vibrant inner worlds.
In mysterious, winding sentences gorgeously translated by Jessica Moore, De Kerangal gives us the story of two unlikely souls entwined in a quest for freedom with a striking sense of tenderness, sharply contrasting the brutality of the surrounding world.
Racing toward Vladivostok, we meet the young Aliocha, packed onto a Trans-Siberian train with other Russian conscripts. Soon after boarding, he decides to desert and over a midnight smoke in a dark corridor of the train, he encounters an older French woman, Hélène, for whom he feels an uncanny trust.
A complicity quickly grows between the two when he manages to urgently ask—through a pantomime and basic Russian that Hélène must decipher—for her help to hide him. They hurry from the filth of his third-class carriage to Hélène’s first-class sleeping car. Aliocha now a hunted deserter and Hélène his accomplice with her own inner landscape of recent memories to contend with.
(Recommended by: NYT)
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The Faraway World: Stories by Patricia Engel
Engel follows up her New American Voices Award–winning novel Infinite Country with a strong collection of 10 short stories. The stories primarily focus on the Colombian diaspora in the United States and Cuba and are tied together by events of misfortune and trauma as well as pervasive feelings of isolation and melancholy. A twin on the cusp of adulthood is left behind after her sister goes missing and is forced to grapple with her uncertain future and her parents’ failing marriage as they desperately await their child’s return. A young woman begins unknowingly and then knowingly helping her boyfriend run drugs for money to begin their lives together. A grieving woman must find a new resting place for her brother after his grave is ransacked. Engel writes with empathy and care, deeply exploring the inner world of her characters, and despite using first-person perspective, she keeps the stories from being melodramatic by having them told in retrospect. The result is a peek into rich, fully realized characters and their lives.
VERDICT Engel’s character-focused short stories are thought-provoking and intense; readers of literary fiction will enjoy this masterfully written collection. – Library Journal Review
(Recommended by: Good Housekeeping & LitHub)
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Happy reading!
Linda Reimer, SSCL
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Reference Links (for December 2023 & January 5, 2024; Best of 2023 recommended reads posts!)
The 10 Best Books of 2023 [Review of The 10 Best Books of 2023] (2023, November 28) . The New York Times; The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/books/review/best-books-2023.html
The 10 best mystery novels of 2023. (2023, November 14). Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/11/14/best-mystery-novels-osman/
The 38 Best Books We Read in 2023. (2023, December 5). Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/the-38-best-books-we-read-in-2023/
The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023. (n.d.). Time. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from https://time.com/collection/must-read-books-2023/
Athitakis, M., Kelly, H., & Patrick, B. (2023, December 5). The 13 best novels (and 2 best short story collections) of 2023. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-12-05/best-books-fiction-2023-novels
Barnes & Noble (n.d.). Barnes & Noble Best Books of 2023. Barnes & Noble. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from https://www.barnesandnoble.com/b/books/awards/best-books-of-the-year
Becker, A. (2023, December 5). The Best Historical Fiction of 2023 [Review of The Best Historical Fiction of 2023]. The New York Times; The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/books/review/best-historical-fiction-books-2023.html
The Best Books of 2023. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-best-books-of-2023-180983339/
The Booker Prize 2023 | The Booker Prizes. (n.d.). Thebookerprizes.com. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2023
Books We Love (2023). (n.d.). NPR. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from https://apps.npr.org/best-books/?year=2023#view=list&year=2023
In a year of book bans, Maureen Corrigan’s top 10 affirm the joy of reading widely. (2023, December 6). NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/12/06/1217368011/best-books-2023-what-to-read
National Book Awards 2023. (n.d.). National Book Foundation. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-2023/
The New York Public Library: Best Books of 2023 | The New York Public Library. (n.d.). Www.nypl.org. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from https://www.nypl.org/spotlight/best-books-2023
Patchett, A., Beard, M., Myrie, C., Levy, D., Kilroy, C., O’Connell, M., Frankopan, P., Nolan, M., Enright, A., Morrison, B., Paterson, D., Li, Y., Ford, R., Heisey, M., Branigan, T., Grant, C., Thrall, N., Adegoke, Y., & Penman, I. (2023, December 3). The best books to give as presents this Christmas. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/03/the-best-books-to-give-as-presents-this-christmas
Riveting Reads. (n.d.). Library Journal. Retrieved December 12, 2023, from https://www.libraryjournal.com/page/best-books-2023
Some of the Best Books of the Year Are on Sale Right Now. (2023, March 7). Good Housekeeping. https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/g42122275/best-books-2023/
These are Science News’ favorite books of 2023. (2023, December 5). https://www.sciencenews.org/article/science-news-favorite-top-books-2023
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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.
Have questions about how to access digital content? Call the Reference & Tech Desk at: 607-936-3713 x502
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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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Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
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Tech Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 