Current Year's Books
Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson
When 10-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered
pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.The crime was never solved—and because the
Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans
want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get. In this
sweeping, evocative novel Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.
Emma by Jane Austen
Emma teased readers with the idea of a 'heroine whom no one but myself will much like', but Emma is irresistible. "Handsome, clever, and rich," Emma is also an "imaginis," "on fire with speculation and foresight." She sees the signs of romance all around her, but thinks she will never be married. Her matchmaking maps out relationships that Jane Austen ironically tweaks into a clearer perspective. Judgement and imagination are matched in games the reader too can enjoy, and the end is a triumph of understanding.
Dinners With Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships by Nina Totenburg
Celebrated NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg delivers an extraordinary memoir of her personal successes, struggles, and life-affirming relationships, including her beautiful friendship of nearly fifty years with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Four years before Nina Totenberg was hired at NPR, where she cemented her legacy as a prizewinning reporter, and nearly twenty-two years before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court, Nina called Ruth. A reporter for The National Observer, Nina was curious about Ruth’s legal brief, asking the Supreme Court to do something declare a law that discriminated “on the basis of sex” to be unconstitutional. In a time when women were fired for becoming pregnant, often could not apply for credit cards or get a mortgage in their own names, Ruth patiently explained her argument. That call launched a remarkable, nearly fifty-year friendship. Dinners with Ruth is an extraordinary account of two women who paved the way for future generations by tearing down professional and legal barriers. It is also an intimate memoir of the power of friendships as women began to pry open career doors and transform the workplace. At the story’s heart is one, special Ruth and Nina saw each other not only through personal joys, but also illness, loss, and widowhood. During the devastating illness and eventual death of Nina’s first husband, Ruth drew her out of grief; twelve years later, Nina would reciprocate when Ruth’s beloved husband died. They shared not only a love of opera, but also of shopping, as they instinctively understood that clothes were armor for women who wanted to be taken seriously in a workplace dominated by men. During Ruth’s last year, they shared so many small dinners that Saturdays were “reserved for Ruth” in Nina’s house. Dinners with Ruth also weaves together compelling, personal portraits of other fascinating women and men from Nina’s life, including her cherished NPR colleagues Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer; her beloved husbands; her friendships with multiple Supreme Court Justices, including Lewis Powell, William Brennan, and Antonin Scalia, and Nina’s own family—her father, the legendary violinist Roman Totenberg, and her “best friends,” her sisters. Inspiring and revelatory, Dinners with Ruth is a moving story of the joy and true meaning of friendship.
My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende
In San Francisco in 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia del Valle. Raised by a loving
stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman.
To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of seventeen, she begins to publish pulp fiction using a man’s pen name. When these fictional worlds
can no longer satisfy her sense of adventure, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at The Daily Examiner to hire her. There she is paired with another talented reporter, Eric
Whelan.
As she proves herself, her restlessness returns, until an opportunity arises to cover a brewing civil war in Chile. She seizes it, as does Eric, and while there, she meets her estranged
father and delves into the violent confrontation in the country where her roots lie. As she and Eric discover love, the war escalates and Emilia finds herself in extreme danger, fearing for her life
and questioning her identity and her destiny.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine.
When Lia Lee entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness and healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe while medical community marks a division between body and soul and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former.
Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness qaug dab peg - the spirit catches you and you fall down - and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Theo visits the local coffeehouse, where ninety-two pencil portraits hang on the walls, portraits of the people of Golden done by a local artist. He begins purchasing them, one at a time, and putting them back in the hands of their “rightful owners.” With each exchange, a story is told, a friendship born, and a life altered.
A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is a beautifully crafted novel about the power of creative generosity, the importance of wonder to a purposeful life, and the invisible threads of kindness that bind us to one another.
Inspired by true events, a thrilling Depression-era novel from the author of The Librarian of Burned Books about a woman’s quest to uncover a mystery surrounding a local librarian and the Boxcar Library – a converted mining train that brought books to isolated rural towns in Montana.
When Works Progress Administration (WPA) editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she’s shipped off to Montana to work on the state’s American Guide Series – travel books intended to put the nation’s destitute writers to work.
Millie arrives to an eclectic staff claiming their missed deadlines are due to sabotage, possibly from the state’s powerful Copper Kings who don’t want their long and bloody history with union organizers aired for the rest of the country to read. But Millie begins to suspect that the answer might instead lie with the town’s mysterious librarian, Alice Monroe.
More than a decade earlier, Alice Monroe created the Boxcar Library in order to deliver books to isolated mining towns where men longed for entertainment and connection. Alice thought she found the perfect librarian to staff the train car in Colette Durand, a miner’s daughter with a shotgun and too many secrets behind her eyes.
Now, no one in Missoula will tell Millie why both Alice and Colette went out on the inaugural journey of the Boxcar Library, but only Alice returned.
The three women’s stories dramatically converge in the search to uncover what someone is so desperately trying to what happened to Colette Durand.
Inspired by the fascinating, true history of Missoula’s Boxcar Library, the novel blends the story of the strong, courageous women who survived and thrived in the rough and rowdy West with that of the power of standing together to fight for workers’ lives. And through it all shines the capacity of books to provide connection and light to those who need it most.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection
with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.
Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her
brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks
of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.
Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past
force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it
in her heart to offer forgiveness.
Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read.
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