Call Number: PS3557 .O35926 M45 1997

By Arthur Golden

Recommended by Karlen

From Barnes & Noble website:

An epic on an intimate scale, Memoirs of a Geisha takes the reader behind the rice-paper screens of the geisha house to a vanished floating world of beauty and cruelty, from a poor fishing village in 1929 to the decadence of 1940s Kyoto, through the chaos of World War II to the towers of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where the gray-eyed geisha Sayuri unfolds the remarkable story of her life.

NOTE: We also have the 2006 movie version on DVD at the Montante Family Library.

Call Number: PS3566 .I372 M9 2005

By Jodi Picoult

Recommended by Karlen

What happens when your child becomes terminally ill with cancer? Sara and Brian Fitzgerald conceive a third child that will be a genetic match. After 13 years of donating parts of her body to keep her older sister alive, Anna decides she has had enough and files a lawsuit against her parents in order to be free to choose what happens to her body. In this riveting family drama, told in multiple first-person points of view, Picoult examines a moral quandary and the complexities of familial love.

Call Number: PS3563 .O8749 M47 2008

By Toni Morrison

Recommended by Karlen

From Publishers Weekly:

Nobel laureate Morrison returns more explicitly to the net of pain cast by slavery, a theme she detailed so memorably in Beloved. Set at the close of the 17th century, the book details America’s untoward foundation: dominion over Native Americans, indentured workers, women and slaves. A slave at a plantation in Maryland offers up her daughter, Florens, to a relatively humane Northern farmer, Jacob, as debt payment from their owner. The ripples of this choice spread to the inhabitants of Jacob’s farm, populated by women with intersecting and conflicting desires. Jacob’s wife, Rebekka, struggles with her faith as she loses one child after another to the harsh New World. A Native servant, Lina, survivor of a smallpox outbreak, craves Florens’s love to replace the family taken from her, and distrusts the other servant, a peculiar girl named Sorrow. When Jacob falls ill, all these women are threatened. Morrison’s lyricism infuses the shifting voices of her characters as they describe a brutal society being forged in the wilderness. Morrison’s unflinching narrative is all the more powerful for its relative brevity; it takes hold of the reader and doesn’t let go until the wrenching final-page crescendo.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

By Mark Haddon

Recommended by Sandy

PZ7.H1165 C87 2004

Mark Haddon’s bitterly funny debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a murder mystery of sorts–one told by an autistic version of Adrian Mole. Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is mathematically gifted and socially hopeless, raised in a working-class home by parents who can barely cope with their child’s quirks. He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his elders and peers.

Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbor’s poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork. Wellington’s owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested. After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves–against the objection of his father and neighbors–to discover just who has murdered Wellington. He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations, and the result–quirkily illustrated, with each chapter given its own prime number–is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Haddon’s novel is a startling performance. This is the sort of book that could turn condescending, or exploitative, or overly sentimental, or grossly tasteless very easily, but Haddon navigates those dangers with a sureness of touch that is extremely rare among first-time novelists. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is original, clever, and genuinely moving: this one is a must-read. –Jack Illingworth, Amazon.ca –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

Recommended by Debbie

PG5039.21.U6 N413 2004

Novel by Milan Kundera, first published in 1984 in an English translation and in a French translation as L’Insoutenable Legerete de l’etre. In 1985 the work was published in the original Czech as Nesnesitelna lehkost byti, but it was banned in Czechoslovakia until 1989. Set against the background of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, the novel concerns a young Czech physician who substitutes a series of erotic adventures over which he thinks he can maintain control for becoming involved in his country’s politics, where he feels he can have no power or freedom. Inevitably, he is drawn into Czechoslovakia’s political unrest. In a parallel vein, he is forced to choose among the women with whom he is involved.

The Secret

By Rhonda Byrne

BF637.S8 B9 2006

Recommended by Debbie

Fragments of a Great Secret have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies throughout the centuries. For the first time, all the pieces of The Secret come together in an incredible revelation that will be life-transforming for all who experience it.

In this book, you’ll learn how to use The Secret in every aspect of your life — money, health, relationships, happiness, and in every interaction you have in the world. You’ll begin to understand the hidden, untapped power that’s within you, and this revelation can bring joy to every aspect of your life.

The Secret contains wisdom from modern-day teachers — men and women who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness. By applying the knowledge of The Secret, they bring to light compelling stories of eradicating disease, acquiring massive wealth, overcoming obstacles, and achieving what many would regard as impossible.

Nigella Bites: From Family Meals to Elegant Dinners–Easy, Delectable Recipes for Any Occasion

By Nigella Lawson

Recommended by Debbie

TX715 .L3773 2002

Nigella Bites–the title is taken from Nigella Lawson’s Style Network cooking show of the same name–is the third book from British Vogue food editor and New York Times food columnist Nigella Lawson, a force of nature all her own. Her other books include How to Eat and How to Be a Domestic Goddess. Fans of the TV show will find all these easy-to-follow recipes familiar, and the book is even designed with pages for note taking at the end of each section.

Nigella Bites is divided into chapters that include “All-Day Breakfast,” “Comfort Food,” “TV Dinners,” “Party Girl,” “Rainy Days,” “Trashy,” “Legacy,” “Suppertime,” “Slow-Cooked Weekend,” and “Templefood.” “Templefood” refers to the “body as a temple,” and Lawson shares what she calls “restorative” recipes, like the raw egg and brandy hangover cure called Prairie Oyster. Hot and Sour Soup and Gingery Hot Duck Salad are also present and accounted for.

It’s all self-referential. Lawson (her chapter introductions are printed in 26-point type for the hard of seeing) holds nothing back about what she likes, how she overindulges, how she works her lifestyle into the kitchen and onto the table. It’s encouragement by example, with a practical twist. You aren’t going to spend hours in the kitchen midweek. That’s a reward you save for the weekend. But there’s plenty of deliciousness to be had midweek as well, and Lawson’s there to help you along your way.

No More Dead Dogs

By Gorman Korman

Recommended by Sandy

PZ7.K8369 N6 2000

Here’s one for every reader weary of being assigned novels in which the dog dies. For expressing his true views of Old Shep, My Pal, eighth-grade football hero Wallace Wallace earns a detention that takes him off the team and plunks him down in the auditorium, where his almost equally stubborn English teacher is directing a theatrical version of–you guessed it. To the delight of some cast members, but the loud outrage of Drama Club President, Rachel Turner, Wallace Wallace makes a few suggestions to punch up the production; by the end, it’s a rock musical and the (stuffed) pooch actually pulls through. At least, that’s the plan. Briskly stirring in complications and snappy dialog, Korman adds mystery to the fun with an unknown saboteur, caps the wildly popular play with an explosive (literally) climax, and finishes with Rachel and Wallace Wallace finally realizing that they were made for each other. Except for Old Shep, everyone, even the teacher, comes out a winner.

Hurry Down Sunshine

By Michael Greenberg

Recommended by Debbie

RC516 .G74 2008

Michael Greenberg’s spare, unflinching memoir begins with a bang: “On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad.” Hurry Down Sunshine chronicles the summer when fifteen-year-old Sally experienced her first full-blown manic episode—an event that in a “single stroke” changed her identity and, by extension, that of her entire family. Simply told and beautifully written, Greenberg’s memoir shines a stark light on mental illness, painting a vivid picture of a brain and body under siege—mania as a separate living thing squatting within the patient. As a writer who lives “so much in his head,” Greenberg is particularly anguished by his daughter’s fractured psyche, and his honesty about being both sickened and fascinated by his daughter’s condition is breathtaking: “During the worst moments, I think of her as my disease—the disease I must bear…I am intoxicated with Sally’s madness in both senses of the word: inebriated and poisoned.” So desperate is he to understand her, that he relentlessly researches mental illness (the book is peppered with fascinating insights into drug therapy and anecdotes about writers who struggled with madness), and even goes so far as to sample a full dose of his daughter’s medication. Startling, heart-wrenching, and yet unwaveringly unsentimental, Hurry Down Sunshine is an unforgettable story of a young girl’s descent into madness, told through the eyes of a harried and helpless father trying desperately to bring her back.

Moby Dick

By Herman Melville

Recommended by Ted

PS2384 .M6 2002

In his great whaling epic Melville roamed both the seas, and the secret places of men’s minds. In the alternate playfulness and ferocity of the great white whale he found the perfect metaphor within which to develope his views on life, death and God.

Recommended by Sharon

I Lock My Door Upon Myself  by Joyce Carol Oates
Library Call Number: PS3565.A8  I18 1991 

                 “My self is all to me.  I don’t have any need of you.”

Inspired by Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff’s painting, I Lock My Door Upon Myself (1891), this novella (of the same name) exudes Joyce Carol Oates’ trademark themes: Gothic passions, violence, fateful encounters, and scandal.

Set in turn-of-the-century Upstate New York, this is the story of Edith Margaret Freilicht (“Calla”), a self-absorbed, untamed, beautiful redhead who leaves her husband and children for another “outcast”, a “giant of a black man” named Tyrell Thompson.

Together, Calla and Tyrell embark on a visionary quest that tragically ends in disaster on the Chautauqua River.

Recommended by Karlen

From Library Journal

Oates, one of America’s most distinguished and prolific writers, has triumphed again with this deftly crafted, highly imaginative novel about a girl gang called Foxfire and its leader, Legs Sadovsky. Legs is many things: a female Robin Hood, a Marxist revolutionary, a highly intelligent naif, an incredibly bold, indestructible heroine. Legs, who is wise beyond her years, dominates Foxfire with her superiority. But Legs is not a writer; that responsibility she delegates to Maddy Wirtz, who becomes the official chronicler of Foxfire’s history. Later in life, in search of elusive truth, Maddy returns to her notebooks and relives her Foxfire days of the 1950s, a decade she and her female contemporaries (of all ages) experienced through violence, fear, and oppression. The forces that gave rise to Foxfire and the bonds that kept it together raise many interesting questions about gender, social status, and sexuality. As in any Oates novel, these multiple themes intertwine to create a richly textured piece.

Copyright © 1993 Library Journal, Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Library Call Number – PS3565 .A8 F69 1994

Recommended by Karlen

Coetzee retells the tale of Robinson Crusoe (spelled “Cruso” in this novel) with the addition of a woman named Susan Barton on the island. Not satisfied with a retelling, Coetzee spins this tale into metafiction with the addition of Crusoe’s author, Daniel Defoe, as a character in this book that plays with truth and lies. Best when paired with the original Robinson Crusoe.

Library Call Number – PR9369.3 .C58 F6 1987

Recommended by Karlen

This literary classic is a story of shipwreck, self-reliance, isolation, and ultimately, friendship. After toiling for many years on a deserted island, Crusoe meets Friday, whom he rescues from some cannibals. If you liked Tom Hanks in Castaway, you’ll like this original.

Library Call Number – PR3403 .A1 1991

Recommended by Karlen

Janie Crawford, married three times, once widowed and tried for the murder, lives in Eatonville, Florida, during the early twentieth century. This classic work from the Harlem Renaissance was criticized for its use of Black dialect. Later praised for the same aspect, the novel stands out as one of the few works of the time written by and about an African American woman.

Library Call Number – PS3515 .U789 T639 1991

Recommended by Karlen

In this ancient tale—thought to have been authored in the neighborhood of the 8th to 11th centuries A.D.—we meet the quintessential hero, Beowulf, who hears of a monster, Grendel, who has been tormenting and killing the Danes for 12 years. Beowulf sails from Sweden to come to the aid of Hrothgar’s kingdom in Denmark. Beowulf, like all good epic poems, provides many epic tales of heroism, told in recollections around fires and victuals, before the actual present tale of heroism unfolds. Beowulf does battle with Grendel, only to face the wrath of Grendel’s mother. Not done yet, he goes on to face a dragon as well. This is a classic adventure story. Once you’re done reading, check your local video store for Robert Zemeckis’s 2008 computer animated film version!

Library Call Number – PR1583 .R56 2007