Just in time for the Holidays, it's the 2022 issue of Season's Readings!
Take a peek at library staff (and student) recommendations for the holiday season! Peruse the list and get that special someone a great holiday gift, or find something for yourself.
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Michael D. Brooks |
Devotion by Adam Makos Devotion is a riveting telling of a true story of triumph and tragedy between two men from diametrically opposed lives. One was raised in the segregated rural south, the other was from an affluent family in New England. Both were fated to become friends and brothers in arms during a war most have now forgotten.
Devotion tells the story of Jessie Brown, the son of a sharecropper and the US Navy’s first Black carrier fighter pilot, and his wingman and best friend, Tom Hudner. Together they fight the enemy on the battlefield, while alone, Jessie Brown also fights the enemy of racism and discrimination at home.
But it’s their darkest hour that becomes their greatest challenge as they risk it all to save the lives of marines outnumbered and outgunned on the ground.
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Lesley Carey |
The Trip: Andy Warhol’s Plastic Fantastic Cross Country Adventure by Deborah Davis
This is a great bit of history, taking place in the summer of 1963. The author replicates a road trip taken by Andy Warhol and three friends from New York to Los Angeles, some of it on Route 66. There are delicious parts about the history of Pop Art, Andy Warhol’s townhouse in NYC and even the origin of the Diners Club credit card. It was colorful and a great escape.
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Cheryl Collins |
The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections by Eva Jurczyk What holds more secrets in the library: the ancient books shelved in the stacks or the people who preserve them?
Liesl Weiss has been (mostly) happy working in the rare books department of a large university, managing details and working behind the scenes to make the head of the department look good. But when her boss has a stroke and she's left to run things, she discovers that the library's most prized manuscript is missing.
Liesl tries to sound the alarm and inform the police about the missing priceless book but is told repeatedly to keep quiet to keep the doors open and the donors happy. But then a librarian goes missing as well. Liesl must investigate both disappearances, unspooling her colleagues' pasts like the threads of a rare book binding as it becomes clear that someone in the department must be responsible for the theft. What Liesl discovers about the dusty manuscripts she has worked among for so long—and about the people who preserve and revere them—shakes the very foundation on which she has built her life.
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Mary Farewell |
The Cabinet of Un-Su Kim by Kim Un-su The Cabinet is a sci-fi/comedy novel that also acts as a darker social commentary. The cabinet itself is an ordinary filing cabinet filled with extraordinary reports of “symptomers,” humans who have special abilities or report strange experiences, like a man with a ginkgo tree growing out of his finger, or another who's only want in life is to be turned into a cat. The novel centers around an ordinary office worker, Mr. Kong, who is tasked with watching over the cabinet files and taking the calls of new and old symptomers. This book is filled with mysterious and odd tales. It is a subtle reminder to appreciate the simplicities of our time, while not attempting to conceal the real discomfort and monotony that every-day life can bring.
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Jen Hasse |
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell This story gives us a glimpse into the world of Shakespeare: where plague and pestilence threatens and the playwright is pulled between the love he has at home and the life that fills him creatively in London. More his wife’s story than Shakespeare’s own, Hamnet is a tender examination of motherhood and marriage and a brilliant imagining of how the play Hamlet came to be.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer offers wisdom and insight reflective of her identities as a biologist, professor, poet, mother and enrolled member of the citizen Potawatomi Nation. This book is a thoughtful and inspiring read, inviting us to think about new ways of understanding both the natural world and our relationship to it. Braiding Sweetgrass has been selected as a spring semester book club read - look for more information to come about an event in April (Earth Month) co-sponsored with SJU Green Fund.
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Anne Krakow |
Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg Kleinenberg’s book from 2018 explores the importance of social infrastructure, or the creation of social and civic spaces to build community. The author discusses the value of public spaces as an opportunity for human interaction, specifically in libraries, schools, and parks. Admittedly, the author is preaching to the choir, however the book provides some wonderful examples of how community and social connectivity are essential to civic life and to the health of a country.
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Deborah Lenert |
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi I enjoyed Gyasi's debut novel, Homegoing, a few years ago and was excited to read more from her. Transcendent Kingdom was contemporary, and felt much more personal. Her main character, Gifty, is a graduate student in neuroscience, trying to find answers. As the story unfolds we learn that her research is not abstract, but borne from a desperate need to help her mother, who is deeply depressed, and understand what happened to her brother, whom she lost to opioid addiction. Gifty gradually realizes that her intense determination to fix her family is bringing her, too, to a place of despair, and that the only way to move forward is to let others into her life.
My family and other animals by Gerald Durrell Readers may be familiar with this book as part of The Corfu Trilogy, or from the PBS series The Durrells in Corfu. This first book in the trilogy is full of a budding naturalist's discoveries of a new environment, its people, and the fact that one can never escape one's family. A funny, quick read that will bring some warm sun to a winter day.
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Cynthia Slater |
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong Ed Yong is a science journalist. I enjoy reading his pieces in The Atlantic, including How to Tackle a Giraffe. Yong helps the reader perceive the world through the senses of various animals, including jumping spiders (with four pairs of eyes to our one), dogs (who navigate via an “odorscape”), sharks, birds, and more.
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Martha Van Auken |
Honey Roasted by Cleo Coyle The culinary world is buzzing about the fantastic honey that Clare has been able to source for her shop's new latte from an old friend, "Queen" Bea Hastings. The rare, prize-winning nectar from Bea's rooftop hives commands top dollar. The industry’s leading chefs are competing to use it in their signature seasonal dishes. But the question remains, which among them is willing to kill for it? Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone, 9th installment of the Outlander Series, Diana Gabaldon War leaves nobody alone. Neither the past, the present, nor the future offers true safety. Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall Fraser were torn apart by the Jacobite Rising in 1746, and it took them twenty years of loss and heartbreak to find each other again. Now it’s 1779, and reunited with their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their children, and are rebuilding their home on Fraser’s Ridge—a fortress that may shelter them against the winds of war as well as weather. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary War creeps ever closer to Fraser’s Ridge. Jamie prepares his sword, while Claire her surgeon’s blade: It is a time for steel. Brianna and Roger have their own worry: that the dangers that provoked their escape from the twentieth century might catch up to them. And Young Ian Murray fights his own battle between past and future, and the two women he’s loved. Not so far away, young William Ransom (Fraser) is coming to terms with the mysteries of his identity, his future, and the family he’s never known. His father, Lord John Grey, has reconciliations to make and dangers to meet on his son’s behalf and on his own. Intersections in Time by Michael D. Brooks
The story picks up right where the previous book ends in the Destined series, but this time the stakes are even greater and the dangers are plenty. Instead of a planet at war, the survival of two universes is at stake. The fabric of time itself is in danger of being ripped apart.
A freak accident divides a crew. A buried secret threatens to reveal a long-forgotten mystery. And a desperate action has long-term consequences for the past, present, and future. A race to save the present could endanger the future by altering the past. Can everything be set right before there is nothing left to save?
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Lexi Visco |
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig This is a riveting story about a woman who visits a library that exists between life and death. The books here contain various versions of your life, where you made completely different choices than the ones you made in your previous life. Throughout this story, the main character has the chance to start over, but has to decide if she would change anything, to change her regrets and mistakes, or to embrace who she is, mistakes and all, and live the life that she had.
Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult This story is about an African American woman who is trying to navigate the world filled with skinheads, racism, and bias and trying to prove her integrity and competence. Ruth Jefferson must set a good example for her son, but also not succumb in the face of adversity. This is a story about a mother simply trying to do her job, a skinhead couple who blame Ruth for their misfortunes, a white public defender who must face her own implicit biases to defend Ruth in court, and her son, who has to figure out how to navigate high school.
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Hilda Wilson |
Do Hard Things by Alex and Brett Harris Twins Alex and Brett have sparked a growing movement of young people who rebel against their culture's low expectations. Choosing to "do hard things" for God's glory, they present compelling strategies for long-term fulfillment and eternal impact!
Downshiftology: Healthy Meal Prep by Lisa Bryan Discover an easier, more balanced way to meal prep as you whip up 100 fresh and healthy dishes that happen to be gluten-free, from the creator of the popular blog and YouTube channel Downshiftology. |
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