Month: April 2022

Celebrate Earth (Read a book about our planet)

Let’s read some fiction or nonfiction celebrating this little blue marble called home. Whether you want to take a deep dive into Climate Change or if you want to take a peek into the future with some speculative fiction bestsellers, here are some suggestions of books that celebrate our beautiful Earth.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

It is no wonder that this bestselling novel won the Pulitzer Prize. A beautifully written and thought-provoking story that brings together nine strangers who are summoned by the trees to save a dwindling forest.

Book / eBook / Audio eBook / Book Club Bag

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

A stand-out and award-winning author in science fiction, this is one of his latest works centered on our climate crisis. Set in the future, it imagines the work it would take to retrofit this world, with its governments and economies, to face the looming interlocked catastrophes of climate change. Opening with a visceral eco-horror it then offers a call-for-action optimistic journey.

Book

A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough

Filmmaker, natural historian, and best-selling author Attenborough recounts a life spent exploring and documenting wild places. Part memoir, part homage to biodiversity, all heart.

Book

Back to Earth by Nicole Stott

NASA Astronaut Nicole Stott offers a unique perspective of this “brilliant blue marble” called home. Using skills for responding to crisis in space, Stott offers eye-opening insights from scientists and changemakers already sparking meaningful change to preserve and protect the splendor of earth’s biodiversity.

Book

Imaginary Borders by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez

A very short but powerful essay from Earth Guardians Youth Director and hip-hop artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez. He explains how his music feeds his environmental activism and vice versa. A quick read that will stick for a long time.

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Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

A stunning and suspenseful novel set in the near future follows Franny as she embarks on a journey to follow the world’s last flock of Arctic terns. Both literary and heart-wrenching.

Book / Audio eBook

The Atlas of Disappearing Places by Christina Conklin

A visually stunning book that combines storytelling, climate science and policy, and beautifully rendered maps to engage and inform readers. Depicting twenty locations across the globe, it offers solutions and inspiration.

Book / eBook

All We Can Save by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine Keeble Wilkinson

A collection of illuminating prose and verse from woman at the forefront of the environmental movement. These wide-ranging diverse voices do not hold back and will inspire and give hope despite the heavy challenges facing us.

Book / eBook

Nature’s Best Hope by Douglas W. Tallamy

Book / eBook / Audio eBook

Of Mice and Main Characters (Read a book from an animal’s point of view)

When thinking of stories written from an animal’s perspective, you may find yourself thinking only of children’s classics like The Wind in the Willows or Charlotte’s Web. Well, there are plenty of options that have all the magic of talking animals along with the sophistication of storytelling for grownups! Take some time to recapture some of the wonders of youth with a book written from the point-of-view of an animal.

Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton

S.T. is a foulmouthed crow who lives with Big Jim and Big Jim’s dog, Dennis. His perfect life of Cheetos and swapped insults with the wild crows ends when Big Jim dies and S.T. is forced to venture out into a world filled with a dangerous new predator – a predator you might describe as a zombie.

Book / Audio eBook

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris

David Sedaris has made a name for himself writing funny, self-deprecating personal essays about his life. In Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, he pivots to modern-day fables featuring animals living everyday lives and facing familiar challenges. The stories may feature woodland animals instead of people, but the wit and wisdom will feel just as relevant.

Book / CD Audiobook / Audio eBook

Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann

A book that opens with a murder is nothing new in mystery, and readers won’t even be surprised by animal detectives. (Savvy dogs and cats have been assisting their sleuth owners for years.) What makes this book unique – and oh-so-much fun – is that the murdered man is a shepherd, and the detectives are his sheep. They’re determined to track down the culprit using the skills they’ve learned from all the books their beloved shepherd has read to them over the years.

Book / Audio eBook

The Tale of Hill Top Farm by Susan Wittig Albert

Beatrix Potter is the beloved author of the Peter Rabbit tales, and in the Cottage Tales series she also happens to have some skill in solving mysteries. In this cozy series Beatrix Potter is joined by a whole squad of animal friends (who talk to each other!) as she solves crime in the charming English countryside.

Book / Audio eBook

The Bees by Laline Paull

If you’re itching for a complex dystopia, look no further than the strictly controlled, hierarchical society of the hive in The Bees. Flora 717 is one of the lowest of bees, working in sanitation and with an unseemly amount of curiosity about the world, but her strength and courage give her opportunities to advance in the hive. But soon she’s questioning the worship of the queen and the very foundation of bee society.

Book / Large Print / eBook / CD Audiobook / Audio eBook

Pug Actually by Matt Dunn

For a swoonworthy love story, join rescue dog Doug the pug on his quest to find true love for his rescuer, Julie. Julie is afraid of a future as a lonely cat lady (and Doug agrees), so she’s staying in a bad relationship. But Doug can see that Tom is her perfect match, and he’s sure he can prove it.

Book / Audio eBook

The Bear by Andrew Krivak

This quiet, spare, and poetic novel is the perfect choice for readers who love literary fiction. It follows a man and his daughter, the last of humanity, as they learn to live in close harmony with nature. When the daughter is left to find her way home alone after a journey, it is a bear who steps in to guide the daughter on her journey.

Book / eBook / Audio eBook

Mort(e) by Robert Rapino

For thousands of years the Colony, a race of intelligent ants, has been building an army with the intent to destroy humanity. Now the time for war has come, and the Colony has enlisted dogs and cats in the fight. Mort(e) is a former housecat turned war hero, but his primary motivation is to find his friend Sheba, a dog, from before the transformation.

Book / Audio eBook

Albert of Adelaide by Howard L. Anderson

Albert the platypus has escaped from the zoo in Adelaide, Australia, and sets out on a quest through the Outback in search of the promised land he calls “Old Australia.” On the way he’ll meet wombats, dingoes, kangaroos, and one Tasmanian devil in this action-packed, unforgettable quest novel.

Book

The Builders by Daniel Polansky

If Quentin Tarantino directed The Wind in the Willows as a revenge western, you’d probably end up with something like The Builders. The Captain, a skilled outlaw whose last job went wrong, is reassembling his crew of deadly animal assassins in an attempt to put things right. These may be animals, but they’re far from cuddly. Have no illusions – this book comes with a body count.

Book / Audio eBook

New This Week

April 26, 2022

This week we’ve got two books that deserve more love, and both are linked to real events from history! The Fervor is a creepy and suspenseful horror novel inspired by the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII. The Mad Girls of New York is a fictionalized account of Nellie Bly’s history-making undercover work in a New York mental hospital.

The Fervor by Alma Katsu

In 1944, Meiko and her daughter Aiko are removed from their home in Seattle and transported to an internment camp in rural Idaho, despite the fact that Aiko was born in the U.S. and Meiko is married to an American Air Force pilot. Everyday life in the camp is difficult enough, but when a mysterious disease that causes violence sweeps through the camp it brings a team of doctors that pose an even more sinister threat.

Book

The Mad Girls of New York by Maya Rodale

In late 19^th century New York City the newspaper business believes that lady reporters are only fit to write about society weddings and entertaining. Aspiring journalist Nellie Bly has greater ambitions and feigns mental illness to become a patient at Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum for Women. Rumors swirl around the asylum’s deplorable conditions and Nellie Bly’s undercover exposé of her time there remains an important work of journalism history.

Book

New This Week

4/19/22

Whether you’re old and cynical or young (or young-at-heart) and inquisitive, we’ve got something for you this week. One is a thriller that puts the unreliable in unreliable narrator, and the other is a charming picture book that helps explain how birds and dinosaurs are related. With adorable illustrations, of course.

Blood Sugar by Sascha Rothchild

Ruby is a perfectly normal therapist who loves animals and has a happy marriage. She has friends and a full life. She’s certainly not a sociopath. The three murders she’s committed were for good reason. Unfortunately, she’s being accused of a fourth murder – one she didn’t commit: her husband’s.

Book / Audio eBook

Tiny Dino by Deborah J. Freedman

Whether you’re looking for a great book to read aloud with a young person in your life, or a fun, science-based book about dinosaurs for read alone time, Tiny Dino has you covered. Come for the colorful illustrations, stay for the fiercest of hummingbirds, kin to dinosaurs!

Book

New This Week

April 12, 2022

It’s a slow week for under-the-radar new releases. (Although there are plenty of big ones, so be sure to check out our featured titles!) So, we’re putting the whole spotlight on one book about a forgotten hero of history.

The Devil’s Half Acre by Kristen Green

Mary Lumpkin lived in the notorious slave prison of a brutal slave owner, forced to bear his children in what was known as The Devil’s Half Acre. When the slave owner died he left the prison to Mary, and in an act that celebrated freedom and education she transformed it into God’s Half Acre, founding what would become Virginia Union University, one of the country’s first Historically Black Colleges and Universities and a path to liberation for thousands of freed slaves. This is a pick for anyone who enjoyed Hidden Figures.

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Mental Health (Read a book to expand your emotional intelligence)

Exercise your emotional intelligence for May (Mental Health Awareness Month) with books full of insight, compassion, and humanity.

Easy Crafts for the Insane by Kelly Williams Brown

Crafting tutorials serve as the backdrop of a life dissolved, then glued back together. Surprising, humane, and utterly unforgettable, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the unexpected, messy coping mechanisms we use to find ourselves again.

Book

Broken (In the Best Possible Way) by Jenny Lawson

“What we really want,” Lawson writes, “is to know we’re not alone in our terribleness…. Human foibles are what make us us, and the art of mortification is what brings us all together.” Another solid collection of humorous musings on everyday life by best-selling author Jenny Lawson.

Book / eBook / CD Audiobook

Black Fatigue by Mary-Frances Winters

This book, designed to illuminate the myriad dire consequences of “living while Black,” came at the urging of Winters’s Black friends and colleagues. Winters describes how in every aspect of life–from economics to education, work, criminal justice, and, very importantly, health outcomes–for the most part, the trajectory for Black people is not improving. An excellent entry-level resource on antiracism for anyone looking to begin but unsure of how to get started.

Book / Large Print / eBook / Audio eBook

Morningside Heights by Joshua Henkin

Moving and deeply felt, Morningside Heights is a warm-hearted story about love in the face of illness, about the support networks that surround us, and about what a marriage means when your partner is no longer the person you fell in love with.

Book / eBook

Seasons between Us by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law

A young girl learning her first lesson of time and space from an alien. A young man offering his life to correct a mistake with a healer. A young woman trying to escape the grip of her dead mother. A middle-aged father dealing with parenthood challenges in a post-apocalyptic world. And many more. In addition to dealing with identities, memories, growing older/aging, and personal relationships, the book also deals with mental health and mental illness.

Book

This Is How I Disappear by Mirion Malle

The road to mental health is not a simple one for Clara, even with support. Malle draws powerful meaning out of even the smallest moments, such as when Clara is alone in bed, searching websites for advice about how to get through this difficult time.

Book

Dear Diary (Read a book with diary entries, letters, etc.)

People often use a diaries, journals and letters to record everyday events, deepest emotions, and darkest desires. Take a peek into the secret lives of these characters through their “private” writings.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen

When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal-if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal-is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum’s hallowed halls.

Book / Audio eBook

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

This funny, poignant, classic love story unfolds through a series of letters between Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and a used-book dealer in London at 84, Charing Cross Road. Through the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they share a charming, sentimental friendship based on their common love for books.

Book / Audio eBook

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

A masterpiece of satire, The Screwtape Letters comprises the correspondence of the worldly-wise devil Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man.

Book / CD Audiobook / Audio eBook

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton discovers her next subject in a book club on Guernsey–a club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Nazis occupying their island.

Book / eBook / CD Audiobook / Audio eBook

The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen by Hendrik Groen, translated by Hester Velmans

Technically speaking, Hendrik Groen is….elderly. But at age 83 1/4, this feisty, indomitable curmudgeon has no plans to go out quietly. Bored of weak tea and potted geraniums, exasperated by the indignities of aging, Hendrik has decided to rebel – on his own terms. He begins writing an exposé: secretly recording the antics of day-to-day life in his retirement home, where he refuses to take himself, or his fellow “inmates,” too seriously.

Book / Audio eBook

These Is My Words by Nancy Turner

A novel based on the author’s own family memoirs, these words belong to Sarah Prine, a woman of spirit and fire who forges a full and remarkable existence in a harsh, unfamiliar frontier. Scrupulously recording her steps down the path Providence has set her upon–from child to determined young adult to loving mother–she shares the turbulent events, both joyous and tragic, that molded her, and recalls the enduring love with cavalry officer Captain Jack Elliot that gave her strength and purpose.

Book / eBook / Audio eBook

The Diary by Eileen Goudge

When the two grown daughters of Elizabeth Marshall discover an old diary of their mother’s in her attic, it comes as a shock to learn that the true love of Elizabeth’s life was not their father. This is the mystery the two daughters must unravel as they stay up late reading the words penned by Elizabeth so long ago.

Book / Large Print / eBook / Audio eBook

Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple

When 15-year-old Bee’s madcap and increasingly agoraphobic mother suddenly disappears before a family trip to Antarctica, Bee compiles a variety of email messages, official documents, and secret correspondence to figure out where—and why—she’s gone.

Book / Large Print / Audio eBook

The Diary of Mattie Spenser by Sandra Dallas

Beginning in 1865, a week after her wedding in Fort Madison, Iowa, Mattie Spenser confides to her diary as she and her new husband travel by Conestoga wagon to the Colorado Territories. The growth of Mattie as a person are all visible in these pages, full of what seems like genuine details of prairie life.

Book / CD Audiobook / Audio eBook

The Martian by Andy Weir

Astronaut Mark Watney is part the first team of explorers to land on Mars. Through a series of tragic events, he’s left behind, stranded and facing certain death. Told mostly through log entries, the story chronicles Mark’s efforts to survive in a hostile and unforgiving environment.

Book / Large Print / eBook / CD Audiobook

Hardboiled and Noir (Read a book of dark and violent crime fiction)

Hardboiled crime fiction is tough, graphic, and unsentimental, while noir crime fiction is quite literally focused on darker themes. From the 1930s to the present, these pulp fiction genres have delivered gritty settings, compromised protagonists, and snappy dialogue.

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett

This classic work of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness, by the author who virtually invented the hardboiled crime novel.

Book / Audio eBook

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

A masterpiece of noir, this novel helped define the genre and introduced the detective Philip Marlowe.

Book / eBook

Black Mask Audio Magazine, Volume 1 by Paul Cain, Hugh B. Cave, and Frederick Nebel

In the 1930s and ’40s, Black Mask was the single most important magazine for the modern mystery field. This audiobook collects a number of its hardboiled detective stories.

Audio eBook

Fearless Jones by Walter Mosley

Paris Minton is minding his own business when a beautiful woman walks in and asks a few questions. Before he knows it, he has been beaten up, shot at, and robbed, and his bookstore has burned to the ground. Now he must get Fearless Jones out of jail to help him.

Book / Large Print / eBook

Noir: A Collection of Crime Comics by Ed Brubaker, Jeff Lemire, et al.

Murder, passion, and criminal enterprise are presented here at their darkest, directly from the most talented writers and artists in crime comics!

Book / eBook

Inherit the Dead by Mark Billingham, Lawrence Block, et al.

A collaborative effort by more than 20 top mystery and thriller authors (C.J. Box, Mary Higgins Clark, Max Allan Collins, John Connolly, Lisa Unger, etc.), this classic noir tale twists and turns down New York’s mean streets and along the Hamptons’ beaches.

Book / Large Print / CD Audiobook

Lost on a Page by David E. Sharp

Joe Slade is a detective with a hot lead and a warm gun. He no longer believes in happy-ever-afters, but the jury’s still out on plot twists. Good thing. He’s about to discover the mother of all twists: Joe Slade is not real. He’s the protagonist of a series of hardboiled mysteries!

Book

Love & Other Crimes by Sara Paretsky

From a master of twisting suspense and compelling plots, a collection of thrilling crime and detective short stories, many featuring legendary detective V.I. Warshawski—including a brand-new V.I. story.

Book / Large Print / eBook / Audio eBook

Razorblade Tears by S.A. Crosby

A Black father. A white father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance. Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though, and he wants to know who killed his boy.

Book / Large Print

Fan Fiction by Brent Spiner with Jeanne Darst

Noir takes a pop culture turn in this novel by Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Data,” Brent Spiner. Featuring characters from Patrick Stewart to Levar Burton to Gene Roddenberry, this story of a mysterious package and disturbing letters from a fan is comic noir.

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New This Week

4/5/2022

This week we’re sharing two books that we think aren’t getting the attention they deserve. One is the fictional story of a woman whose life becomes intertwined with a con artist, and the other is the true story of an American folk hero who canoed solo throughout America’s rivers for more than two decades.

Cover Story by Susan Rigetti

Anyone riveted by recent stories of scammers and con artists like Anna Delvey, the inspiration for the Netflix show Inventing Anna, will want to take a look at Cover Story. It’s the fictional story of NYU student Lora Ricci, who’s saved from her struggles by a glamorous woman who’s not all she seems.

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Riverman by Ben McGrath

This biography of Dick Conant, an outdoorsman who spent decades canoeing solo on America’s rivers, has already been collecting rave reviews from critics. Conant is described as a folk hero who not only performed feats of skill and endurance in his solo canoe, but also charmed people wherever he traveled. The author met Conant just a few months before his canoe washed up without any sign of its owner and felt compelled to collect the stories of the people who knew him and share this remarkable life.

Book / Large Print

GoPro Hero 8 Specialty Checkout Scavenger Hunt!

Specialty Checkout Welcomes GoPro with a Video Scavenger Hunt

We needed a way to launch the GoPro Hero8, which is the newest addition to our Specialty Checkout service. That’s right, you can now check out a GoPro Hero 8 for FREE with your HPLD library card.

To make this more fun (which is totally unnecessary, why would
this need to be MORE fun!?) we’re going to host a little video scavenger hunt.

Check out one of our GoPros, film as much of the list as you
can, and we’ll put you in the drawing for a sweet prize pack.

Also, you can enter with video you take on your own camera,
if you’d like, but the prize pack is slightly less sweet. Still pretty sweet,
though. We’re talking honey versus Honeycrisp apple, here. Plus, this is a
pretty fun list, so maybe you just need something to do on a Saturday. Why
not!?

Underwater footage (uh, be careful if you’re not using the
GoPro you get from the library!)

A bunch of ants doing that thing where they all pile out
onto the sidewalk (what’s up with that?)

A timelapse of something that could be described as “the
splendor of nature.”

Video of something going fast. Could be you, could be a cat
with the zoomies. Whatever you like!

Short re-enactment of a 1-minute clip from your favorite
movie.

Get someone to tell you a joke.

Do a 1-minute cooking show. Remember, the GoPro can be
washed off, so it’s okay if it gets a little dirty!

Do your own carpool karaoke.

Film something happening in or around the library.

Be a tour guide, film a 1-minute video of you showing a
“landmark” and giving a short speech about it. This can be real or made-up.

Attempt a magic trick.

Create a piece of art, color something, draw something, make
something out of clay or cardboard. Film the whole thing in time lapse mode.

To make sure everyone gets a change to check out a GoPro,
we’ll call this contest over on August 1^st.

Submit your entries by sending us a link to your video or videos.