The library has recently purchased many new books. You can view a handful of them here along with descriptions or go to the library catalog to see the full listing.
FICTION
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
Spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, an unforgettable cast of characters are united by the qualities that make us human –fear, love, shame, need, and loneliness. Three sections on 1893, 1993 and 2093, are joined in an enthralling symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: Illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist.
The School for Good Mothers: A Novel by Jessamine Chan
The School for Good Mothers introduces readers to a government-run reform program where bad mothers are retrained using robot doll children with artificial intelligence. The mothers, whose transgressions range from benign to horrific, are under constant surveillance. If they don’t pass all the school’s tests, their parental rights will be terminated. Inspired by dystopian classics such as 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel tells a timeless story of a mother fighting to win back her child, and her struggle to hold onto her integrity while being indoctrinated.
How Lucky: A Novel by Will Leitch
Daniel leads a rich life in the university town of Athens, Georgia. He’s got a couple close friends, a steady paycheck working for a regional airline, and of course, for a few glorious days each fall– college football tailgates. He considers himself to be a mostly lucky guy, despite the fact that he’s suffered from a debilitating disease since he was a small child that has left him unable to speak or to move without a wheelchair. Largely confined to his home, Daniel spends the hours he’s not online communicating with irate air travelers observing his neighborhood from his front porch. One young woman passes by so frequently that spotting her out the window has almost become part of his daily routine. Until the day he’s almost sure he sees her being kidnapped.
After the Rain by John Jennings; illustrated by David Brame; lettering by Damian Duffy
After the Rain is a graphic novel adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s short story “On the Road.” The drama takes place in a small Nigerian town during a violent and unexpected storm. A Nigerian-American woman named Chioma answers a knock at her door and is horrified to see a boy with a severe head wound standing at her doorstep. He reaches for her and his touch burns like fire. Haunted and hunted, Chioma must embrace her heritage in order to survive. John Jennings and David Brame’s graphic novel collaboration uses bold art and colors to powerfully tell this tale of identity and destiny.
Living with Viola by Rosena Fung
Heartbreakingly honest and quietly funny, this #ownvoices graphic novel from a debut creator is a refreshingly real exploration of mental health, cultural differences, and the trials of middle school. Fung draws on her own early experiences with anxiety and the pressures of growing up as the child of Chinese immigrant parents to craft a charming, deeply personal story that combines the poignancy of Raina Telgemeier’s Guts with the wacky humor of Lumberjanes. Exuberant, colorful art brings a rich imaginative world – filled with everything from sentient dumplings to flying unicorns – to life on the page.
GNRT Best Graphic Novels for Children, 2021
NONFICTION
Call Us What We Carry: Poems by Amanda Gorman
Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, her poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that Gorman has become a messenger from the past and a voice for the future. The final poem in the book is “The Hill We Climb,” which was read at Joseph Biden’s 2021 presidential inauguration.
Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World by James Cheshire & Oliver Uberti
An unprecedented portrait of the hidden patterns in human society-visualized through the world of data. Award-winning geographer-designer team James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti transform enormous datasets into rich maps and cutting-edge visualizations. Atlas of the Invisible explores happiness levels around the globe, traces the undersea cables and cell towers that connect us, examines hidden scars of geopolitics, and invites readers to revel in the secrets and contours of a newly visible world.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. Acclaimed historian and activist Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. Spanning more than four hundred years, this peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.
Sustainable, Resilient, Free: the Future of Public Higher Education by John Warner
In 1983, U.S. News and World Report started to rank colleges and universities, throwing them into competition with each other for students and precious resources. Privatization and competition has turned students into consumers and colleges into businesses. Student loan debt is more than $1.6 trillion and a majority of college faculty work in adjunct positions for low pay with no security. Author and educator John Warner maps out a way forward, one by which public colleges and universities enhance the intellectual, social, and economic potentials of students while benefiting the community at large.
How Design Makes Us Think and Feel and Do Things by Sean Adams
While we often discuss the aesthetics of design, we don’t always dig deeper to unearth the ways design can overtly, and covertly, convince us of a certain way of thinking. How Design Makes Us Think delves into the sociological, psychological, and historical reasons for our responses to design, offering practitioners and clients alike a new appreciation of their responsibility to create design with the best intentions.
Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze
The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks. By focusing on finance and business, Tooze casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that.
Summaries adapted from publishers.