Hannah has been on a great reading streak this summer and wanted to share her favorite titles from the last few months:
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
A modern retelling of the Oedipus myth. This is a strange and mythical story full of strange and beautiful language. Unsettling and memorable and rich.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Aurora’s staff pick! Part mystery, part naturalist reflection, dry and unexpectedly funny.
Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller
My favorite kind of horror novel, where you spend the majority of the book not even sure if the horror is there at all or if it’s simply a (very) unreliable narrator.
Crabgrass by Tauhid Bondia
My seven year old introduced me to this comic series about two elementary school aged best friends and their families and classmates. Funny for all ages, and perfect for any Calvin and Hobbes fans!
The Children by Melissa Albert
I love a creepy book on a hot summer day, and this one is an atmospheric, smart, and scary with a lot of callouts to children’s literature I remember from my own childhood.
Meet the Newmans by Jennifer Niven
A family in the 60s turns their lives into the original scripted reality show. But it’s not all Leave it To Beaver off screen. When a terrible accident effects both the family and the show itself, all of the characters are forced to access what it is they really want. Set mostly in 1964 but with some real parallels to today.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
A tradwife influencer wakes up in what appears to be the past, with a family almost, but not quite, just like hers. What’s really going on? Filled with so many unlikable, unredeemable, and unreliable character (in the best way!)
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
I first read this collection of short stories when it came out nearly a decade ago, and never really stopped thinking about it. Particularly memorable is the first story “The Husband Stitch,” which takes elements familiar for those of us who read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark as children (IYKYK!) and blends them into something even scarier. This time I listened to the audio book, which was excellent.
The Author Weekend by Laura Zigman
A famous (and famously prickly) mystery author’s getaway weekend with her fans is ruined when someone is is murdered. Self aware and self referential and a lot of fun.
Ordinary Girls is a coming of age memoir that takes place in the housing projects (and streets) of Miami Beach. So many societal and cultural issues are packed into this book. Mental health, poverty, queerness, and racism are all presented through the appalling childhood of Jaquira and her family and friends. This book is not for the faint of heart, and definitely not a light beach read.
-Meredith, Children’s Room
Guinevere and Ennis Sharpe live a storybook childhood with their author mother and actor father in a beloved old farmhouse in the woods of Vermont, surrounded by nature, artists, and their own imaginations. Or at least that’s how the outside world sees it. In reality, the children don’t go to school, are often hungry, and something is wrong with their father. When their mother’s fantasy series explodes into popularity, Guinevere and Ennis discover that her main characters bear a shocking resemblance, and even borrow names from, the two of them. Their newfound fame doesn’t make their lives any easier, but at least they have each other.
After a tragic fire that only the children survive, Guinevere and Ennis are separated and grow up apart, and their mother’s books never finished. As adults, Guinevere works for her mother’s publisher, promoting her decades old books and keeping her legacy alive. Ennis is a much lauded and mysterious artist, whose installations are as magical and immersive as his mother’s books once were. The siblings no longer speak, but Ennis’ latest art installation, Mother, is threatening to bring to the surface a past that Guinevere has worked so hard to keep hidden, even from herself.
Mired in memories, magic, and the creepy heart of old fairy tales, this book will especially ring true to anyone who grew up on a steady diet of children’s fantasy novels. Reading these pages is akin to revisiting some old favorites, only to find them twisted and scarier than you remember. The Children is atmospheric, smart, and scary is a way that feels ancient and primal, like someone is walking behind you and ready to pounce. I was only able to read this book a little at a time, when all I really wanted to do was devour it whole.
-Hannah, Programs and Outreach
Each month, Reference Librarian Aurora gives a glimpse of a few new titles she is most looking forward to. Read on for July’s picks and don’t forget to place a hold on your favorites!
We’re Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond edited by Judith A. Peraino and Tom McEnaney
A young friend of mine is jealous that I was a teenager in 2006, when it would have been possible for me to travel to New Jersey to see a certain band play live before the frontman of said band was charged with abusing a teenage girl and promptly decamped from the scald of the limelight. It is troubling to find myself in an age in which teenagers yearn for mid-aughts New Jersey as some sort of cultural Atlantis, lost to the unrelenting waters of time. I feel the same sickly jolt, considering this, as when I happen upon low-rise flare jeans crawling with butterfly appliques on proud display in a consignment shop. It is not out of any poorly repressed horror of aging that I resent these things; I accept that 2006 and low-rise flare jeans and, indeed, my own person are now old enough to rate as vintage. Rather, it seems to me there are things best pried loose of the grasping, greedy little hands of our retrospective tendencies.
What was ugly once, the passing of years alone does not make beautiful: would it be so terrible just to put it behind us and move on? Still, I can sympathize with my friend’s sense of having missed out on a more vibrant moment in culture, because when I was her age, I would have given anything to have been in New York City in the 1980s, to taste punk uncorrupted by the aspartame of mass-market popification. Judith A. Peraino and Tom McEnany’s scrapbook of flyers, zines, photographs, and miscellaneous ephemera from the Cornell University archives – apparently, Cornell is home to one of the world’s largest caches of punk relics – accompanied by interviews and essays from the stars of the scene, confirms that my adolescent grief was justified. We’re Having Much More Fun maps the shifting landscape of punk in the United States, as it erupted in NYC and then spread from coast to coast, kicking up hot spots of creative and political rebellion. Through Peraino and McEnany’s curation, we see the punk scene as raucously oppositional and yet, in its own often clumsy, imperfect way, utopian: a welcoming shore for society’s rejects and rejecters. Here, pioneering women of color, feminist lesbian punks and Afropunk, as well as straightedge’s challenge to recreational anesthesia are summoned back from the margins to the main stage where they belong. Punk’s power, after all, was never with the hardcore bros in the mosh pit, but in the tireless defiance of the outsiders it gave free rein. We’re Having Much More Fun is an invigorating reminder that what made punk revolutionary is not lost to us today. We can’t get 2006 New Jersey back – may it rest in peace – but as long as we keep our politics sharp, our refusals loud, and our doors flung open, punk need never die.
For fans of music history and memorabilia, subculture scenes, and sifting through the archives.
Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage by Matthew Wolfe
Feeling dulled down by the 9-to-5 hustle? Contemplating infusing a dose of fresh excitement into your days by embarking on a life of crime? You could do worse than giving environmental direct action a try. It’s easier than ever to get yourself arrested for defending the earth and its creatures, what with the international throttling of activism, so chances are good you’ll barely have to break a sweat to land yourself on someone’s most-wanted list or in a prison cell. Tempted? Read up on the path ahead with Matthew Wolfe’s Fires in the Night, a riveting account of the original “eco-terrorists,” the Earth Liberation Front. A decentralized, anarchistic activist collective, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) originated in the U.K. before landing stateside in the Pacific Northwest. Its trademark strategy was sabotage: damaging corporate property in the hope of making ecological devastation less profitable. At their most extreme, those operating under the ELF banner started fires, choosing for targets businesses symbolic of the ecocide they indicted. The arsonists struck SUV dealerships, a meatpacking plant, a luxury ski resort, logging companies. Although attacks were planned methodically to avoid harming any living beings, and no one was ever killed in an ELF action, the U.S. federal government named the group – which, like Antifa today, hardly constituted a group at all – the “foremost domestic terrorism threat.” This label gave the state righteous cause to descend upon monkeywrenchers, and radical environmentalism in general, with all the fury of the post-9/11 War on Terror. Cowed, the environmental movement retreated from direct action and commenced its glum slump into corporate co-optation. No longer was the mission to undo industrialism, or global capitalism, or consumer culture, but to “green” and thereby redeem them. In Fires in the Night, Wolfe concedes that this approach has proven a bust. His question, then, is what, in our present state of ecological emergency, counts as an “extreme” response, and what is simply commensurate. Let’s be clear. I am in no way endorsing any acts the FBI would call eco-terrorism – how irresponsible of me that would be! – but I am thinking of a line from Edward Abbey: “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”
For fans of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Andreas Malm, environmental true crime, and civil disobedience from Thoreau to Extinction Rebellion.
This coming of age story follows a 15 year-old Nigerian Igbo teenager, Kambili, as she struggles with an overpowering abusive father and an oppressive Catholic upbringing. The story explores a post Colonial Nigeria where the clashes of Igbo traditions bump up against new Christian beliefs for Kambili and her brother Jaja. After spending time with their Aunty Ifeoma in Nsukka, away from the privileged life in neighboring Enugu State and away from their father’s control and rigid schedules, conflicts arise in the family. Jaja begins to reject the strict Catholic upbringing as they learn about the Igbo pagan traditions of their ancestors, while Kambili’s sexuality is awakened by a crush on a Nsukka pastor. Purple Hibiscus is both beautiful and painful, exploring the conflicts of colonialism on the people of Nigeria, and the dichotomy of a religious life that is filled with both fear and hope.
-Samantha, Development
Summer Reading is here! Check our what PFL staff is reading to complete their Bingo sheets and Reading Tickets! Place a title on hold by clicking the link provided and don’t forget to register for Summer Reading!
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Children by Melissa Albert
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
The Nantucket Reader by Susan Beegel
The Hospital by Ahmed Bouanani
The Making of a Mechanical Heart: Self-discovery, Joy, and Forgiveness on the Road to Dying by Joanne Felice Boucher
Museum of Bone and Water by Nicole Brossard
Now You Care by di brandt
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Glass, Irony, and God by Anne Carson
Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski
Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Dias
Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined written and wonderfully narrated by Stephen Fry
Middle ages divorcee Adora Hazzard has it all; a best selling philosophy book and and a cushy job as a personal philosopher to a wealthy family, a smart (and smart alek) teenage daughter, a coven of other divorcees to share the second half of her life, and the wisdom and attitudes of the stoics to guide her. She loves the way her life has turned out, but a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger makes her question everything she has built for herself; but not in the way you might expect!
I don’t remember the last time I had to much fun with such a smart book (but perhaps it was with one of Maria Semple‘s other titles?). Go Gentle is madcap, big hearted, philosophical novel chock full of art heists, rich people behaving badly, political intrigue, snarky teenagers and middle aged women, beautiful architecture, and the hidden pasts of multiple people coming to light. Above all it is funny, smart, and intricately plotted. What more could you want in a summer read?
-Hannah, Programs and Outreach
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
If I were to distill the lesson of novelist Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s essay collection Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl into a single sentence, that sentence would be: snails are someones, too! The same goes for crabs, jellyfish, starfish, oysters, mussels—Wong excludes no one, no matter how eyeless or slimy. Her essays on undersea invertebrates operate as experiments in empathy, striving towards an alert and open-hearted attunement to creatures whose ways of being can seem so alien, from our limited terrestrial mammalian perspective, that we reject their beinghood out of hand. Wong repudiates the arrogance that underlies this dismissal, along with the accusations of “anthropomorphism” that those afflicted by it tend to level at efforts to imaginatively honor other animals’ inner lives. It is vulgar, she writes, “to think that everybody’s feelings must be intelligible to oneself in order to exist or qualify as feelings.” Against this crude habit of mind, Wong challenges readers to let themselves be humbled before the shimmering, spiraling polymorphic strangeness of other lives, and the marvel it is to share the earth with myriad precious and mysterious someones.
For fans of My Octopus Teacher, Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, and those looking for motivation to keep expanding their own personal circle of care.
Organ Speak: What It Really Means to Listen to Our Bodies by Giulia Enders
When people talk about “body positivity,” they typically mean something rather superficial. When they tell you to “love your body,” they’re hoping you will cultivate a healthy appreciation for your physical appearance, your shape and contours. They do not expect, for example, that you’ll develop an affectionate intimacy with your spleen. But Giulia Enders, a German physician and the author of Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ (2014), champions the latter sort of body positivity, increasingly hard to imagine as our days swarm lousy and lousier with screens and memes, AI hallucinations and spambot promises of machine-mediated “optimization.” Upon realizing how many of her patients were frustrated with their bodies for not “functioning like machines” or “looking like dolls,” Enders felt called to write Organ Speak as an intervention on the side of the flesh. She saw that, too often, people’s bodies were experienced by them as a source of chronic dissatisfaction, viewed with distrust, even hostility. Which seemed a shame, she thought, for the human body is truly a wonder. Each chapter of Organ Speak spotlights a different bodily structure or system – lungs, skin, muscles, immune system, brain – to resuscitate a due reverence for the intricate and interconnected workings of these vital parts. Enders sees the human body as a kind of microcosm for the biospheric “superorganism” and proposes that, by contemplating the viscera that compose us, we can glean insights for how to conduct ourselves in our own role as the constituents of an interdependent whole, members of communities both human and larger-than-human.
For explorers of that weird misted mystic realm where biology and philosophy cross paths.
When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard is forest ecology’s answer to Jane Goodall, celebrated for her pioneering research into the arboreal relationships facilitated by the “wood wide web,” the twining of hair-like fungal hyphae that sprawls beneath the forest floor, stitching trees and other plants together in a vast interwoven lace. Without these networks, and the communication and collaboration they make possible, there would be no forests; these complex ecosystems could not survive. Such was the subject of Simard’s previous book, Finding the Mother Tree, and though she dips into that fertile ground again in her latest work, her present focus takes us treading onto unhappier territory: the stricken barrens left behind by the logging industry. In When the Forest Breathes, Simard writes about her research into the desolation wrought by clearcutting, which undermines forests’ regenerative potential, as well as her years of activism as she worked alongside scientists, environmentalists, and indigenous communities to stop this injurious practice. Yet the book is by no means a cheerless read, for as sorrowfully as she grieves the damage done, and as fierce as she is in her disgust for the corporate greed behind the ongoing destruction, no extremity of despair or horror can dampen the radiance of Simard’s awe for forest worlds, for the rich congregation of lives that compose them: the lichens, moss, ferns, spiders, squirrels, bears, and, of course, the trees, like spires questing into earth and sky in one breath, greening the light.
For fans of forests, woodlands, glades, thickets, and copses.
A thorough and engaging historical account exploring the mass hysteria, accusations, and executions that took place during the witch trials of 1692. In The Witches, Schiff examines all aspects of the community at that time, including the social, political, and religious tensions of Puritan New England.
-Samantha, Development
