Library Collections
Librarian Reads 2009
Ever wonder what your Adult Services Librarians are recommending for the summer? Check out some of our favorite books!
New Titles • Other Titles Worth Reading
New Books
| The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery) - NEWBOOKS FIC BARBERY: Narrated by a disillusioned 13 year old and an intelligent concierge pretending to be less than she is, this book brings a new perspective on the lives of the rich. Check Availability | |
| Little Bee (Chris Cleave) - NEWBOOKS FIC CLEAVE: Presents a tale of a precarious friendship between an illegal Nigerian refugee and a recent widow from suburban London, a story told from the alternating and disparate perspectives of both women. Check Availability | |
| Plum Spooky (Janet Evanovich) - NEWBOOKS MYSTERY NEWBOOKS EVANOVICH: Trenton bounty hunter Stephanie Plum must track down a bail jumper intent on wreaking havoc in Evanovich's breezy "between the numbers" adventure. Check Availability | |
| Starvation Lake (Bryan Gruley) - NEWBOOKS MYSTERY GRULEY: Gus Carpenter, editor of the local newspaper, has recently returned to Starvation after a failed attempt to make it big at the Detroit Times. Now he's investigating the murder of his former coach. But even more unsettling to Gus are the holes in the town’s past. Check Availability | |
| Sing Them Home (Stephanie Kallos) - NEWBOOKS FIC KALLOS: This novel is a portrait of three siblings who have lived in the shadow of unresolved grief since their mother's disappearance when they were children. Check Availability | |
| The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Steig Larsson) - NEWBOOKS FIC LARSSON: The disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden, gnaws at her octogenarian uncle, Henrik Vanger. He hires an unlikely team who discover a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, an astonishing corruption at the highest echelon of Swedish industrialism. Check Availability | |
| Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British (Sarah Lyall) - NEWBOOKS 941.086 LYALL: Dispatches from the new Britain: a slyly funny and compulsively readable portrait of a nation finally refurbished for the twenty-first century. Check Availability | |
| We Bought a Zoo (Benjamin Mee) - NEWBOOKS BIO MEE: The author describes how he uprooted his family to the English countryside and purchased a dilapidated zoo, which he planned to refurbish and reopen as a family business, a scheme compliated by a lack of money and his wife's devastating illness. Check Availability | |
| The Long Fall (Walter Mosley) - NEWBOOKS MYSTERY MOSLEY: A brand-new mystery series from one of the country's best-known, best-loved writers: a new character, a new city, a new era. A new Walter Mosley. Check Availability | |
| Exit Music (Ian Rankin) - NEWBOOKS MYSTERY RANKIN: In his final case, Detective Inspector John Rebus examines the murder of a dissident Russian poet and tracks the activities of an elite delegation of Russian businessmen whose seemingly professional endeavors are rocked by the killing of a local gangster. Check Availability | |
| Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of the Mona Lisa (R.A. Scott) - NEWBOOKS 759.5 SCOTTI: On August 21, 1911, the unfathomable happened–Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre. The prime suspects were as shocking as the crime: Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire. Check Availability | |
| American Wife (Curtis Sittenfeld) - NEWBOOKS FIC SITTENFELD: When her husband is elected president of the United States, Alice Blackwell finds her new life as first lady increasingly tumultuous as she reflects on the privileges and difficulties of her position as her private beliefs conflict with her public responsibilities. Check Availability | |
| The Art of Racing In the Rain (Garth Stein) - NEWBOOKS FIC STEIN: Evaluating his life on the eve of his death, atypical canine Enzo considers the sacrifices his master, Denny Swift, has made in his pursuit of becoming a professional race car driver, and the dog's own efforts to preserve the Swift family. Check Availability | |
| The Help (Kathryn Stockett) - NEWBOOKS FIC STOCKETT: Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women, including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend, and a recently graduated white woman, team up for a clandestine project. Check Availability | |
| Cutting For Stone (Andrew Verghese) - NEWBOOKS FIC VERGHESE: Focusing on the world of medicine, this epic first novel by well-known doctor/author Verghese (My Own Country) follows a man on a mythic quest to find his father. Check Availability | |
| Dead Silence (Randy Wayne White) - NEWBOOKS MYSTERY WHITE: The 16th thriller to to feature Marion Doc Ford involves vigilante behavior and the kidnapping of a 14 year old boy. Check Availability | |
| The Leisure Seeker (Michael Zadoorian) - NEWBOOKS FIC ZADOORIAN: An elderly married couple leave their Detroit home and take off in their camper for one last adventure. Check Availability |
Other Titles Worth Reading
| Garden Spells (Sarah Addison Allen) - FIC ALLEN: Two gifted sisters draw on their talents to belatedly forge a bond and find their ways in life in Allen's easygoing debut novel. Check Availability | |
| The Alexandria Link (Steve Berry) - FIC BERRY: Cotton Malone retired from the high-risk world of elite operatives for the U.S. State Department to lead the low-key life of a rare-book dealer. But his quiet existence is shattered when he receives an anonymous e-mail. Check Availability | |
| Magical Thinking: True Stories (Augusten Burroughs) - BIO BURROUGHS: A contest of wills with a deranged cleaning lady. The execution of a rodent carried out with military precision and utter horror. Telemarketing revenge. Dating an undertaker who drives a mini-van. This is the fabric of Augusten Burroughs's life: a collection of true stories that are universal in their appeal yet unabashedly intimate, stories that shine a flashlight into both dark and hilarious places. Check Availability | |
| Witch of Portobello (Paulo Coelho) - FIC COELHO: Follows the life of Athena, the Witch of Portobello Road, born a gypsy, adopted, who struggles with her magic powers while searching for enlightenment, who gains herself a following. Check Availability | |
| The Hungry Tide (Amitav Ghosh) - FIC GHOSH: A contemporary story of adventure and romance, identity and history, The Hungry Tide travels deep into one of the most fascinating regions on earth, where the treacherous forces of nature and human folly threaten to destroy a way of life. Check Availability | |
| Princess Bride (William Goldman) - FIC GOLDMAN: A classic tale of love and adventure including pirates, fencing, giants, magic, princes, bravery, honor, and true love. Check Availability | |
| Water For Elephants (Sara Gruen) - FIC GRUEN: It's the Depression Era and Jacob, finding himself parentless and penniless, joins the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. There he meets the freaks, grifters, and misfits that populate this world. Check Availability | |
| A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Husseini) - FIC HUSSEINI: Mariam and Laila are born a generation apart but are brought together by war and fate. Together they endure the dangers surrounding them and discover the power of both love and sacrifice. Check Availability | |
| Broken For You (Stephanie Kallos) - FIC KALLOS: Margaret lives alone in her mansion until, driven by cancer, she begins to let a variety of characters into her life and into her home and learns more about herself and her past. Check Availability | |
| The Husband (Dean Koontz) - FIC KOONTZ: Mitch recieves a call on day, his wife has been kidnapped and he has to get two million dollars for the kidnappers by following their instructions exactly, but what will get in the way? Check Availability | |
| The Memory of Running (Ron McLarty) - FIC MCLARTY: Smithy Ide's life isn't excactly going how he planned, when middle-aged, alone, and overweight he embarks on a cross-country bicycling trip to recieve the body of his dead sister. But the characters that he meets along the way and the redemption he needs may not be out of reach. Check Availability | |
| Twilight (Stephenie Meyer) - YA FIC MEYER: When seventeen-year-old Bella leaves Phoenix to live with her father in Forks, Washington, she meets an exquisitely handsome boy at school for whom she feels an overwhelming attraction and who she comes to realize is not wholly human. Check Availability | |
| Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger) - FIC NIFFENEGGER: An imaginative extension of everyday life, the story asks: What if two people who loved each other deeply, married, and faced a life in which one person remained constant while the other slipped fluidly in and out of time? Check Availability | |
| Julie and Julia (Julie Powell) - BIO POWELL: With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"--and saved her soul. Check Availability | |
| Dragon Bones (Lisa See) - FIC SEE: Attempting to solve the murder of an archeologist suspected of stealing artifacts from the site of the construction of the Three Gorge Dan, Liu Hulan and her husband David Stark involve themselves in this mystery while trying to repair their relationship. Check Availability | |
| Snow flower And the Secert Fan (Lisa See) - FIC SEE: In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu ("women's writing"). With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become "old sames" at the tender age of seven. Check Availability |
For other good reads, check out our Suggested Reads Page.