|
|
March in the month we these new picks |
|
|
|
Work in Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest
by James Martin
New York Times Bestseller In this humorous memoir, New York Times bestselling author and podcast host of The Spiritual Life, Father James Martin tells the story of a busboy, dishwasher, caddy, usher, factory worker, bank teller, and corporate tool and, finally, a Jesuit priest.Funny, charming, inspiring and wise--this is a memorable memoir. -- Stephen ColbertWork in Progress is a snapshot of several years--first as a boy, then as a teenager, and finally as a young adult--of being thrown into a series of jobs for which Martin had zero training. He had never set foot in a restaurant kitchen before working as a busboy and dishwasher; never stepped onto a golf course before working as a caddy; and had never seen a factory floor before working as an assembly-line worker. He almost always felt uncomfortable, unsettled, and uneasy. But, like many of us, he needed the money.This coming-of-age story is set in the 1960s and 1970s, a lighthearted tale for readers who enjoy personal narratives, and it's unlike anything Father Martin has written before. As he puts it, This is a spiritual memoir from a different angle ... told 'slant' as Emily Dickinson might say.Each chapter features photos of memories and milestones throughout Father Martin's young life. If you're an aficionado of snafus, you won't be disappointed. He's not the hero of these stories, more a hapless teenager who learns in each job, even the ones he loathes, something about the value of work, about what it means to be an adult, about people, and about life overall.Work in Progress teaches us small but important life lessons such as: work hard and be on time, don't be mean, apologize when you need to, and forgive frequently, ask if you don't know something, don't misuse power, pay attention to those who are struggling, listen and, above all, be kind.Martin shares, My summer jobs, crazy and funny and varied as they were, had something to do with who I am. As we Jesuits would say, the lessons I learned helped to 'form me.
|
|
|
|
How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay: Tips and Tricks That Kept Me Alive, Happy, and Creative in Spite of Myself
by Jenny Lawson
Warm, insightful, and witty, the first book of advice from New York Times bestselling author Jenny Lawson--aka the Bloggess Jenny Lawson is full of contradictions. She's a celebrated author but battles self-doubt, paralysis, and anxiety. She's an award-winning humorist but struggles with treatment-resistant depression. The questions people most often ask her are, How do you do it? How do you keep going even when it feels impossible? How do you keep creating? This book is her answer. In How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay, Jenny shares more than one hundred humorous, heartfelt, and genuine tools and tricks that she relies on to keep her going even when her brain isn't working properly due to depression, anxiety, and ADHD. She also offers tips to stay passionate and focused on creative endeavors, especially when everything around you is saying to give up. With chapters like Wash Your Brain More Than You Wash Your Bra (sleep, you beautiful human), Working on Easy Mode Is Still Working (asking for accommodations is okay!), Celebrate Good Times, Come On! (make it a habit to celebrate the good things), and many more, How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay is a balm and companion, reminding us all that we are not alone. It's for anyone who struggles with self-doubt, guilt, motivation, and mental blocks and wants to rekindle their passion for creating. Funny, simple, empathetic, and full of hope, it will encourage you not to just survive but to find and curate joy in the face of difficult times.
|
|
|
|
Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks
by Benjamin Hale
The damndest mixing of true crime, memoir, and maybe (?) ghost story I've ever read. The original Harper's article gave me the shivers, and this deeper dive is going to have me looking over my shoulder on every hike. Unputdownable. -- Patton Oswalt With the immediacy and extraordinary feeling for people and place of Under the Banner of Heaven and Say Nothing, a compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in the same Arkansas woods twenty-three years apart and the strange circumstances connecting them.This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley--Benjamin Hale's cousin--got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state's history. Her disappearance--and her account, after she was found, of the imaginary friend she met in the woods--would eventually become connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, murder, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.Enriched by Benjamin Hale's own family history and the lore of the Arkansas Ozarks, Cave Mountain is a gripping story about nature and survival, religion and skepticism, and good and evil. At its center are two young girls, years apart, both in danger in the verdant wilds of northern Arkansas.
|
|
|
|
Traversal
by Maria Popova
From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life. What is life?What is death?What makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? In Traversal, Maria Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with the bewilderment of being alive--our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems--through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wegener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads--the first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue--to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet clearer as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living. By turns epic and intimate--as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to one other--Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.
|
|
|
|
Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief
by Benjamin Stevenson
Ten heists. Ten suspects. A murder mystery only Ernest Cunningham can solve in this delightfully clever and twisty new novel in Benjamin Stevenson's bestselling series--perfect for fans of Richard Osman and Anthony Horowitz.I've spent the last few years solving murders. But a bank heist is a new one, even for me. I've never been a hostage before.The doors are chained shut. No one in or out. Which means that when someone in the bank is murdered, everyone is a suspect.THE BANK ROBBERTHE MANAGERTHE SECURITY GUARDTHE KIDTHE FILM PRODUCERTHE PRIESTTHE RECEPTIONISTTHE PATIENTTHE CAREGIVERMETurns out, more than one person planned to rob the bank today. You can steal more from a bank than just money.Who is stealing what? Are they willing to kill for it? And can I solve the crime before the police kick down the door and rescue us?
|
|
|
|
You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom: A Modern Gothic Horror
by Vincent Tirado
Demons clash with inheritance claims as secrets unfold and violence is unleashed over twelve harrowing hours trapped in a house with the worst thing imaginable: family.When Papi Ramon, the patriarch of the wealthy Abreu family dies, he gives the family one last message in the will: One of you is el bac , the demon that I made a deal with. Get rid of them or you will be damned. Xiomara, the uncontested favorite of Papi Ramon (and therefore the least liked in the family), watches as everyone dismisses this as the joke of a senile old man and demands the lawyer obtain the previous will Papi wrote.While the lawyer drives back to his office, a storm breaks out, forcing the entire family--Xiomara's aunts and uncles and cousins--to remain in the house. And the words of Papi's will hangs over their heads even heavier than the rain clouds. Over the course of the night, scandal after scandal is revealed to the public about the family. Suddenly a tense few hours of surviving her family turns into a vicious night of recrimination, violence, accusations...and murder.Xiomara is faced with an impossible task: uproot a demon and somehow kill it or excise the ghosts that linger within her own family.And the clock is ticking...
|
|
|
|
Lady Tremaine by Rachel HochhauserTwice-widowed, Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley is solely responsible for her two children, a priggish stepdaughter, a razor-taloned peregrine falcon, and a crumbling manor. Fierce and determined, Ethel clings to the respectability her deceased husband's title affords her, hoping it will secure her daughters' future through marriage.
When a royal ball offers the chance to change everything, Ethel risks her pride in pursuit of an invitation for all three of her daughters—only to see her hopes fulfilled by the wrong one. As an engagement to the future king unfolds, Ethel discovers a sordid secret hidden in the depths of the royal family, forcing her to choose between the security she craves and the wellbeing of the stepdaughter who has rebuffed her at every turn.
As if Bridgerton met Circe, and exhilarating to its core, Lady Tremaine reimagines the myth of the evil stepmother at the heart of the world's most famous fairy tale. It is a battle cry for a mother's love for her daughters, and a celebration of women everywhere who make their own fortunes.
|
|
|
|
Life: A Love Story
by Elizabeth Berg
A warm, intimate novel that reminds us of the richness that can be found all throughout our lives--by the New York Times bestselling author of The Story of Arthur Truluv and Open House As ninety-two-year-old Florence Flo Greene nears the end of her life, she writes a letter to Ruthie, the woman who grew up next door to her, describing the items Flo is leaving Ruthie in her will. But as it goes on, telling surprising stories about those little things Flo will leave behind (What could possibly be the worth of a rubber band kept in a matchbox tied up in red ribbon?), an unforgettable portrait of the life she has lived emerges. The letter starts off as an autobiography in things, but it turns out to do much more than that: ultimately, it will transform Flo and those around her. In the time she has left, Flo decides to take herself up on tiny dares. She encourages Ruthie to reconsider her impending divorce by sharing a startling, long-buried secret about her own perfect-seeming marriage. Flo has never had a pedicure before now, and as long as she's going to a beauty parlor, she arranges to have a blue streak put in her hair, too. And as these adventures lead her to make new friends, Flo helps them, too, find the fulfillment that living a full life has led her to understand. Full of Elizabeth Berg's characteristic mix of warmth, humor, and poignancy, Life: A Love Story is a reminder that whatever your circumstances, as long as you're alive, you can keep on investing in life. The joy will inevitably follow.
|
|
|
|
|
|
