Hi everyone, here are our five suggested reads of the week!
Weekly Suggested Reading Five postings are usually published on Wednesdays, unless Monday is a holiday and then they are published later in the week.
And the next Suggested Reading posting will be published on Wednesday, October 9, 2024.
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The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates presents three blazing essays on race, moral complicity, and a storyteller’s responsibility to the truth. Coates evokes his father’s struggle with the wretched narrative legacy of Jim Crow. He travels to South Carolina, where school districts seek to ban his work for suggesting that America was “fundamentally racist,” or any other “divisive concept.” Coates concludes that “it is neither ‘anguish’ nor ‘discomfort’ that these people were trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment.” Finally, he connects the dots between the self-justifying narratives of European and American racism and Palestinian oppression in Israel. Going to Palestine is like time traveling back to Jim Crow: IDF soldiers with “sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs” harass Palestinians at checkpoints, proving that “as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.” Dehumanization is essential to exploitation, whether the targets are serfs in medieval Europe, African slaves and their descendants in America, or Palestinians on the West Bank. Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely. – Starred Booklist Review
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Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz
The aptly titled follow-up to The Plot (2021) focuses on Anna Williams Bonner, now the widow of the much-lauded author, Jacob Finch Bonner. Anna decides to pen her own novel, largely based on the story she shared with the world about how Jacob died, which she works on at writing retreats described in cringe-inducing and hilarious detail. The Afterword manages to be both critically acclaimed and a best-seller, but mysterious excerpts of the novel cribbed by her late husband and originally penned by her late brother, start to arrive in her mail, hinting that she has left a loose end somewhere and that her many lies, deceptions, and crimes will perhaps be exposed. While Anna is a deeply unsympathetic antihero, Korelitz so expertly depicts how Anna is convinced of her own righteousness and that her being deeply wronged justifies heinous acts that Anna’s flimsy justifications are almost convincing. Korelitz presents a compelling and worthy sequel, another rip-roaring thriller full of very amusing scenes of delusional writers and their awful prose and many twists and turns. – Booklist Review
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See Me Rolling: On Disability, Equality and Ten-Point Turns by Lottie Jackson
Disability activist Jackson uses her debut book (BISAC’ed as memoir, though it could also fit in social sciences) to illustrate ways society devalues, undervalues, or marginalizes people with disabilities. The book combines personal experience, blunt honesty, and occasional humor with research from primary sources like Disability News Service, New York Times, Financial Times, The Nation, the CDC, and the BBC. The topics of the book’s eight stand-alone essays range from the practical (visiting a department store that turns out to be scooter-inaccessible) to philosophical (removing ableism from the bedroom), and they redefine terms such as “recovery.” This book thoroughly discusses the various ways the public perceives visible and invisible disabilities. Jackson demonstrates what it means to be disabled, and she pushes for changes in public attitudes and access. The book includes eye-opening statistics, as well as quotes about disability from Margaret Atwood, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Immanuel Kant (all fully identified in the endnotes). VERDICT This gripping title will appeal to readers interested in how the lives of people with disabilities are impacted by architecture, access, clothing, employment, transportation, and mobility. It will also interest people working with or providing services as caregivers, social workers, think tanks, and more. – Starred Library Journal Review
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Triangle by Danielle Steel
A Paris gallery owner finds herself in danger when a mysterious man begins leaving her messages, in #1 New York Times bestselling author Danielle Steel’s thrilling new novel.
As she approaches the milestone birthday of forty, delicate blond beauty Amanda Delanoe finds joy in running a chic contemporary art gallery in the City of Light. The only child of a French businessman and an American model, both now deceased, Amanda lives well and adores her dog, Lulu, but so far the love of her life has eluded her.
Then she meets Olivier Saint Albin, a dashing publisher. At the same time, she reconnects with Tom Quinlan, an old boyfriend from her days at NYU twenty years ago, now a lawyer on sabbatical who has come to Paris to devote himself to writing a thriller.
Charming Olivier is a master at the art of flirtation, but as Amanda feels herself falling for him, she learns he is married. Providing counsel and support is her friend and co-owner of the gallery, fun-loving bachelor Pascal Leblanc. When Amanda begins to receive threatening phone calls late at night, it is Pascal she turns to. Then someone breaks into her apartment on the Left Bank, and it’s all too clear she is in real danger. But from whom? An old love, a new love, or a stranger? As love enters her life, so does terror. . . .
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The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker by Amy Reading
Readers enamored of the New Yorker and its history will recognize White as a legendary editor yet know little about her. Reading fills in the blanks, explaining precisely why, from the moment White arrived in 1925 to her retirement in 1961, she was essential to the magazine’s identity and success. Reading recounts White’s demanding life, from her mostly motherless New England girlhood as a “promiscuous reader” to her literary adventures at Bryn Mawr and her marriage to lawyer Ernest Angell, which brought two children and endless heartaches. She helped her second husband, writer E. B. White, contend with debilitating disorders so that he could create the works that made him famous as they had a son and lived in New York and Maine. White performed phenomenal amounts of exacting editorial work, cajoling and advising writers in discursive “personal-editorial letters,” battling with fellow editors, and fine-tuning the magazine’s mission, appeal, and significance, even while gravely ill. Reading’s fine-tuned chronicling of White’s work with writers such as Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov illuminates the diligence, brilliance, and vision of this “magnificent editor,” whose son, Roger Angell, also became a New Yorker fiction editor. With profound understanding of and appreciation for the full extent of White’s achievements, Reading’s in-depth, ardently and expertly written biography is a literary landmark. – Starred Booklist Review
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Happy reading!
Linda Reimer, SSCL
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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
The 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 content on 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 on demand 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 companion app, also called Hoopla is available for mobile 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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Have questions about how to access Internet based content (i.e. eBooks, eAudios)? Feel free to drop by the Reference Desk or call the library and we will assist you! The library’s telephone number is: 607-936-3713.
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Tech & Book Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 