The Gift of Reading
December 22, 2023
Libraries give the gifts that keep on giving. During this wintry holiday season, give yourself permission to curl up by the fire with one of these books about libraries, librarians, and books. May the season and reading bring you comfort and joy.
The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes
Set in Depression-era America, The Giver of Stars tells the story of five extraordinary women who answer Eleanor Roosevelt’s call for traveling librarians. This brave and resilient team of women set off on horseback across rural Kentucky to offer books, learning, joy, and comfort to people facing despair and scarcity. The women, known as the Horseback Librarians of Kentucky, often experience personal and professional adversity of their own. Based on true events, this is a story about friendship, justice, loyalty, and the power of books and librarians to change people’s lives.
The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray
The Personal Librarian tells the story of Bella de Costa Greene, personal librarian to J.P. Morgan. In her position, Bella becomes a powerful collector and curator, acquiring manuscripts, books, and artwork for Morgan’s world-renowned collection. To maintain her esteemed standing in New York Society, Bella must keep an important secret – she is the daughter of the first Black graduate of Harvard. Because of her light complexion, Bella is passing for white, and to protect her family and her legacy, no one must find out she is not.
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
Doerr’s beautiful and moving novel is, at its core, a story about the power of story. Cloud Cuckoo Land spans centuries and circumstances, delving readers into the worlds of a 15th Century orphan in Constantinople, a village boy and his oxen conscripted into the army laying siege on that orphan’s city, an octogenarian and Korean War veteran rehearsing a children’s play in a library where a troubled teenager, misled by his pain and disappointment, has planted a bomb, and a young girl alone in a vault on an interstellar ship in the not-so-distant future. The thread that weaves these characters and their lives together is the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so he can fly to a fabled utopian paradise. Aethon’s quest is a source of hope, inspiration, and transformation in the lives of Doerr’s characters, and Doerr’s novel offers much the same for readers.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Patrons visit libraries to get many things: books, research materials, technology assistance, meeting spaces, and opportunities to connect with community—to name a few. In Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, patrons are given an infinite number of lives to “read,” and the opportunity to choose what could or should or would have been. When the novel’s dispirited protagonist Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she is presented with endless stacks of lives to live. Which will she choose? And, in her search for a fulfilling life, will Nora discover a life she deems worthy of living?
The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis
In 1913, Laura Lyons and her family live in an apartment tucked deep inside the gilded New York Public Library building, where her husband is superintendent. Happy but restless, Laura finds enjoyment in authoring a recurring article for the library’s newsletter. When she applies and is accepted to the Columbia’s School of Journalism, Laura’s life and what she wants out of it changes. Her studies lead her to a group of radical, bohemian women called the Heterodoxy Club who cause Laura to question her traditional role as wife and mother. Tension intensifies for Laura when rare and valuable books start going missing from the library. Eighty years later, Laura’s granddaughter Sadie lands her dream job at that same library and comes face to face with the legacy and mystery surrounding her grandmother. When books go missing from the collection Sadie is curating, she embarks on a journey to uncover a thief and the story of her grandmother’s past.