Staff Picks
Check the blog every week for updates on what our staff is reading and watching and recommendations for our new and all-time favorite books and movies. What is your favorite book or movie? Post your answer in the comments section below. To see all previous Staff Picks posts, simply type "Staff Picks" in the search box at the top left of this blog and click the "search blog" button

Like You'd Understand Anyway by Jim Shepard - recommended by Andrew
Like You'd Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed orbits of their joint mission. Two Texas high school football players at the top of their food chain, soliciting their fathers' attention by leveling everything before them on the field. And the rational and compassionate chief executioner of Paris, whose occupation, during the height of the Terror, eats away at all he holds dear.-Book Jacket.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel - recommended by Megan
This brilliant fabulist novel combines the delight of Kipling's "Just So Stories" with the metaphysical adventure of "Jonah and the Whale," as Pi, the son of a zookeeper, is marooned aboard a lifeboat with a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger. - Library Catalog.

MOVIE WATCH
Sweetland - recommended by Cheryl
Inge is a feisty German mail-order bride who has come to Minnesota to marry Olaf, a young Norwegian immigrant farmer of few words. But in a post-WWI, anti-German climate, the local minister openly forbids the marriage. Inge and Olaf fall in love despite the town's disapproval. But when the town banker attempts to foreclose on the farm of his friend Frandsen, Olaf takes a stand. - Library Catalog

Quote of the Week

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
-Oscar Wilde

Staff Picks
Check the blog every week for updates on what our staff is reading and watching and recommendations for our new and all-time favorite books and movies. What is your favorite book or movie? Post your answer in the comments section below. To see all previous Staff Picks posts, simply type "Staff Picks" in the search box at the top left of this blog and click the "search blog" button

The Seeker by Jack McDevitt - recommended by Thea

"Near the end of the twenty-seventh century, when the interstellar age was just dawning, two ships set out from Earth to escape the fascist theocracy that had taken over North America. One was the Bremerhaven, the other the Seeker. On a distant planet, the voyagers established a colony they named Margolia. Then they and the colony disappeared from recorded history." "Thousands of years later, the legendary status of Margolia has made it the new Atlantis - and of special interest to antiquities dealer Alex Benedict when he comes into possession of a cup that seems to be from the Seeker. Investigating the provenance of the cup, Alex and Chase Kolpath follow a deadly trail to the Seeker - strangely adrift in a system barren of habitable worlds. But their discovery raises more questions than it answers, drawing Alex and Chase into the center of the mystery that is Margolia - and into the very heart of danger."--BOOK JACKET.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver - recommended by Megan

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--from garden seeds to Scripture--is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. - Library Catalog

MOVIE WATCH:

Match Point - recommended by Cheryl

Former tennis pro Chris Wilton stumbles into good fortune when Chloe Hewett, the daughter of a wealthy businessman and the sister of one of his tennis students, falls in love with him. But when Chris meets Nola, a much deeper passion is stirred. His desire isn't deterred even after he discovers that Nola is already dating Chloe's brother. But when their affair threatens Chris's increasingly cozy lifestyle, Chris begins to consider a drastic solution. - Library Catalog

Quote of the Week

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
~ Joseph Brodsky

Staff Picks
Check the blog every week for updates on what our staff is reading and watching and recommendations for our new and all-time favorite books and movies. What is your favorite book or movie? Post your answer in the comments section below. To see all previous Staff Picks posts, simply type "Staff Picks" in the search box at the top left of this blog and click the "search blog" button

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan - recommended by Megan
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of food journalist Pollan's thesis. Humans used to know how to eat well, he argues, but the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists. As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense with bad advice and foods that are not "real." Indeed, plain old eating is being replaced by an obsession with nutrition that is, paradoxically, ruining our health, not to mention our meals. Pollan's advice is: "Don't eat anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize as food." Looking at what science does and does not know about diet and health, he proposes a new way to think about what to eat, informed by ecology and tradition rather than by the nutrient-by-nutrient approach

Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon - recommended by Thea

Kenyon has in this new series created her most vivid and compelling society, the Universe Entire. In a landlocked galaxy that tunnels through our own, the Entire is a bizarre mix of long-lived quasi-human and alien beings gathered under a sky of fire. Over all, the elegant and cruel Tarig rule supreme.

MOVIE WATCH:

Breaking Away - recommended by Megan
An idealistic young man and his friends and their pursuit to find jobs and a purpose to life in their hometown of Bloomington, Indiana.

Personalized Recommended Reading Lists

The library now has a new service that allows you to sign up for recommended reading lists of your favorite genres. You can choose from 15 genres of books and we will email you lists of new titles the library acquires in each of those categories. Most of our librarians are selecting in their areas of expertise, so the lists will reflect some of the best new titles the library is getting.

There are several advantages and time saving aspects to this service. First off, you’ll be kept apprised on the new books that are coming into the library. Each month, we add a couple hundred titles to the library collection, and this would be a way to pinpoint the areas you are interested in. And for each title, there are links within each list to our catalog. This means that you see if the book is checked in our out and you can place holds on the books if they are not on the shelf. Also, there might be some new authors in the lists you subscribe to that you might not know about. Which means that possibilities of expanding your reading will be greatly improved.

So, take a look at the NextReads service. It's simple to subscribe, and you might be surprised at what you might find here at the library. Click here to go to the NextReads subscription page.