Synopses & Availability:
Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Jane Austen Society, Mercies, Pretty Things, Squeeze Me
New Books
Tag Archives: Fiction
New Books!
The majority of the books ordered since March are now available! They will be primarily housed in the tall bookshelf by the library’s entrance. Favorites are displayed in the windows and atop shelves. Synopses and availability listed below!
Synopses & Availability:
28 Summers, After Sundown, Afterlife, Big Summer, Bombshell, Book of Lost Friends, Burning, Code Name Helene, Conjure Women, Countdown 1945, Dance Away with Me, Daughters of Erietown, Devolution, Entangled Life, Fair Warning, Feasting Wild, Firing Point, Girl with the Louding Voice, Hello Summer, Hid from Our Eyes, Hidden Valley Road, Hideaway, Inheritors, Joy at Work, Lightness, Moment of Tenderness, Muzzled, My Vanishing Country, Ocean without a Shore, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, Plague of Corruption, Redhead by the Side of the Road, Rodham, Room Where It Happened, Sad Janet, Sigh Gone, Sisters Grimm, Someone Like You, Student Guide to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, So You Want to Talk about Race, Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Such a Fun Age, Valentine, Vanishing Half, Walk the Wire, Week at the Shore, Writers & Lovers
Even More Books!
Synopses & Availability:
All Adults Here, Camino Winds, Careful What You Click for, Caste, Chosen Ones, COVID-19, Goodbye Man, House of Kennedy, If It Bleeds, Interlibrary Loan, Line Becomes a River, Masked Prey, Most Beautiful Thing, Seeing Darkness, Shadows in Death, Summer House, Survivor Song, Untamed, Weekend, What You Wish for
More Books!
The orders from the past few months are now flooding in! Stop by soon to catch what you may have missed!
Synopses & Availability:
20th Victim, All-Night Sun, American Dirt, Apeirogon, Begin Again, Blacktop Wasteland, Book of Longings, Breath, Business of Lovers, Changeling, City We Became, Deacon King Kong, Deadly Divide, Dear America, Disappearing Earth, Florence Adler Swims Forever, Frankissstein, Friends and Strangers, Girls Like Us, Girls of Summer, Good Talk, Greenwood, Growing Things, Inland, Journey of the Pharaohs, Mutts and Men, My Dark Vanessa, Octopus Museum, Oona Out of Order, Order, Petals to the Metal, Separation Anxiety, Shakespeare for Squirrels, Son of Good Fortune, Talented Mr. Varg, Things in Jars, Twisted Ones, Valuing, Visiting Privilege, Want, We Are Displaced, Wedding Dress, Wrath of Poseidon, Yellow Bird
New Books!
We may have been away for a few months, but we never stopped ordering new books! Here are your most recently processed titles!
Synopses and Availability:
Beauty in Breaking, Big Door Prize, Chaos, Choppy Water, Color of Law, Cries from the Lost Island, Death in Her Hands, Devoted, Engineer’s Wife, Final Deception, Friendship List, How to be an Antiracist, It’s Not All Downhill from Here, K Team, Mexican Gothic, Midwife Murders, Other Bennet Sister, Private Cathedral, Pull of the Stars, Revenge, Royal, Society of the Spectacle, Texas Outlaw, Too Much and Never Enough, Walking with the Wind, Wandering in Strange Lands
Book Review: Frankissstein: A love story by Jeanette Winterson
In Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson, author of mind-expanding, gender-bending, time-shifting fiction, brings to life a new creature cobbled together and electrified by language.
Picture the scene: Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is vacationing at Villa Diodati in the company of her stepsister Clair Clairmont Romantic bad boy poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician William Polidori. The summer is dark and damp; nothing stays dry and even her underclothes are molding. Then one evening Byron challenges his guests to write ghost stories, leading Mary to have a monstrous dream that sparks her most famous work—Frankenstein, a novel that has endured for over 200 years.
Winterson weaves this story through Frankissstein. Mary has already lost so much—her mother, her firstborn—and considers these losses as she experiences the pains and promises of love (“How would I love you, my lovely boy, if you had no body?” she muses to Percy, and then, “I cannot divide you.”)
But Winterson does not leave readers in 1816. Instead, she time hops to the present (the future?), and fills this space, too, with love, loss, and philosophical speculation. She populates Frankissstein with a transgender doctor (Ry Shelley), an AI-obsessed professor (Victor Stein), a sex doll inventor and marketer (Ron Lord), and an evangelist converted to view sex dolls as an opportunity for doing God’s work (Claire).
In her 2019 article, “Why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is More Relevant Now Than Ever”, Winterson asks: “What happens when our newly created life forms can copy themselves, are immortal, can update their own software and make their own decisions? Will they feel remorse? Will humanity really be worth keeping?”
Frankissstein: A Love Story examines these questions unburdened by a need for answers.
Book Review: The Outsider by Stephen King
This book is classic Stephen King. The premise is: “Can a person be 2 places at once?” WARNING: The book starts with a brutal, graphic murder of a young boy. If you can get through the first chapter you should be okay. A man who witnesses place at the murder, suddenly has credible witnesses that place him miles away. The race is on to find the killer. The tension builds, the bodies stack up, and the horror begins.
My only complaint is I think the book would be better if the editor had chopped out 50 pages. This is a long book and at times can drag. But given that, if you like Stephen King, I think you will like this book.
Book Review: Earth as it is by Jan Maher
“This was the burden Charlie Bader was unable to lay down: his need for softness.” In one quiet sentence, Jan Maher captures the heart of Earth As It Is, a richly layered novel about one person’s journey across time, place, and gender to find softness, community, and love.
In the hands of a lesser writer, a novel about a cross-dressing man living as a woman could become shallow and sensationalist, but not in Maher’s. Maher’s understanding and empathy for the honest complexity of individuals is a gift both to her characters and her readers.
Maher constructs her novel in such a way so that when Charlie Bader moves to Heaven, Indiana, as Charlene, readers know Charlie’s history but Heaven’s residents do not. To them, Charlene is just Charlene, the hairdresser who shampoos, cuts, and perms the hair of Heaven’s women even as she hears and holds in confidence their stories and secrets. Charlene is a woman to be trusted, and so they do, to the benefit of the whole community.
Earth As It Is reminds readers that Earth truly is as it is, woven through with heartache, longing, secrets, love, sacred trust, softness, and a desire to be in every moment one’s best and truest self.
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Scribd is providing free access to popular Ebooks and periodicals
Scribd is a subscription ebook and audiobook service. For one month staring March 17th to April 17th, they are providing free access to their collections for any new customer. Access will end; you will not be automatically enrolled. We have tried this free service and recommend it. We were required to download a free app on our mobile phone to use the service.
Reading a ripping yarn is a great way to relax during these stressful times. You will find many of the same titles in the Scribd ebook collection as we have in our current Baker & Taylor print collection. The Scribd collection also includes the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and other titles useful for course work assignments. (We have access to these titles in our databases, with various embargo periods.)
Here is the link to sign up: https://www.scribd.com/readfree?utm_source=readfree
