Hi everyone, with this posting we will be switching to a slightly different format, in that I will suggest five books to read each week, instead of ten.
Our weekly Suggested Reading Five posts, combined with the recent addition of our monthly New Books Coming Your Way posts, should offer plenty of suggested reading recommendations for everyone.
However, if you’re in need of even more reading recommendations than you find on the Tech & Book Talk blog, please feel free to stop by the Circulation Desk or Reference Desk at the library and staff will be happy to assist you in finding even more books to read! We’ll even be happy to print off author readings lists for you, to help you keep track of which books you have, or haven’t, read by your favorite authors!
Alternatively, you can send me an email with your book-related questions. My email address is: reimerl@stls.org
Have a great day,
Linda Reimer, SSCL
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Weekly Suggested Reading Five postings are published on Wednesdays.
And the next Suggested Reading posting will be published on Wednesday, April 10, 2024.
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The Cemetery Of Untold Stories: A Novel by Julia Alvarez
Alvarez (Afterlife, 2020) brings the magic again in this nesting box of a novel. Writer Alma, Alvarez’s stand-in for a touch of autobiographical fiction, and her sisters Refuge, Consolation, and Pity, the English versions Alma often invokes for Amparo, Consuelo, and Piedad, have inherited property in the Dominican Republic. The sisters are not happy with Alma’s decision to make over one of the parcels in the eponymous cemetery. She and her sculptor friend, Brava, haul boxes of her unfinished manuscripts there, and she buries the pages that won’t burn, hoping to finally be free of them. As Alma and Brava transform the cemetery plot with statues and install a gate that opens only when a story is told, the surrounding neighborhood watches and wonders. Alma hires one of the neighbors to be the cemetery’s caretaker, and the restless ghosts/statues tell sensitive Filomena their stories. These tales surround and crisscross each other as Filomena and her family; Alma’s father, Dr. Manuel Cruz; and Bienvenida Inocencia, the discarded first wife of the brutal dictator Trujillo, are linked in surprising ways, most especially in a humanity that transcends pathos and passion. May Alvarez continue to excavate stories for many years to come!
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The best-selling Alvarez has a committed readership, and word of this inventive novel will also attract new followers. – Booklist Review
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Erasure by Percival Everett
Percival Everett’s blistering satire about race and publishing, now adapted for the screen as the Academy Award-winning AMERICAN FICTION, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been “critically acclaimed.” He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited “some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days.” Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father’s suicide seven years before.
In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s bestseller. He doesn’t intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.
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The Morningside: A Novel by Téa Obreht
Silvia, a tall, worried, intrepid 11-year-old, and her wiry, pragmatic, reticent mother, climate refugees, finally reach waterlogged Island City and the Morningside, a luxury apartment building that, like everything on this near-future Earth, has seen better days. The superintendent is Silvia’s Aunt Ena, who tells heart-stopping stories of the lost old country and the family Silvia knows nothing about, since her intractable mother insists on keeping their past secret. Silvia soon becomes obsessed with Bezi Duras, the mysterious woman who lives in the penthouse with her enormous dogs, convinced that she is a Vila, “a spirit of the mountain” with epic powers. As in her previous richly imagined and profoundly insightful novels, Tiger’s Wife (2011) and Inland (2019), Obreht writes at the crossroads of myth and history, but here with a twist as she envisions a catastrophic tomorrow in which rampaging forces of nature and human atrocities intensify in impact and scope. Silvia’s narration is a marvel of evolving perception under duress as she navigates the “world beneath the world” and a “cosmos of dangers.” With fairy-tale eeriness, a man with a staggering backstory running a pirate radio station, Silvia’s mother’s treacherous work as a salvage diver in the city’s flooded towers and, finally, her harrowing revelations, this is a bewitchingly atmospheric, psychologically lush, and deeply knowing tale of ancient sorrows and coalescing crises, courage and fortitude. – Booklist Review
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Table For Two: Stories by Amor Towles
In his first collection, Towles sequel-izes his debut novel, Rules of Civility (2011), with a 200-page novella and adds six short fictions involving unlikely encounters and unexpected outcomes. Set in the late 1930s, the novella, Eve in Hollywood, extends the story of Evelyn Ross, nervy sidekick of Rules protagonist Katey Kontent. On a train from New York to Los Angeles, the flinty, facially scarred blond, impulsively rejecting a return to her home in Indiana, strikes up a friendship with widowed former homicide cop Charlie Granger. They meet months later in L.A. when Eve’s cutely met new friend, starlet Olivia de Havilland, is blackmailed over surreptitiously taken nude photos. In classic noir fashion, an untrustworthy man of significant girth is at the heart of the plot. The book’s other lively pairings include a used bookseller and a young would-be writer who finds his calling forging signatures of famous authors for him (Paul Auster plays a key role); a newly committed concertgoer and an older patron who drives him to distraction by secretly recording the music; and two travelers stranded at the airport who share a cab ride to a hotel, where one of them transforms from a harmless nice guy into a raging alcoholic and the other attempts to drag him away from the bar on desperately phoned orders from the man’s wife. Towles has fun leaping ahead with his narratives. In a cruel twist of fate, a peasant in late-czarist Russia pays a price for daring to profit from holding people’s places on excessively long food lines in Moscow. Towles sometimes lays on the philosophical wisdom and historical knowledge a bit, but the novella and all the stories are treated to his understated (and occasionally mischievous) irony. A sneakily entertaining assortment of tales. – Kirkus Review
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The Truth About The Devlins by Lisa Scottoline
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear. The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier–until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ. As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect. – Kirkus Review
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Happy reading!
Linda
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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, eAudiobooks, and digital magazines. You can use your library card and checkout/download content to a PC; you can also use the companion app, Libby, to access titles on your mobile devices; so you can enjoy eBooks and eAudiobooks 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, eAudiobooks, comic books, albums, movies and TV shows. Patron check out limit is 10 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 mobile devices, PCs, Macs*, 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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*You must have an active Internet connection to access Hoopla content on a Mac.
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Tech Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 