May Adult Reading Challenge
-
The Virgin Suicides
In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters—beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys—commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death.
-
Nobody's Child
Nobody's Child traces the legal definition of "insanity" back to its inception in Victorian Britain nearly two hundred years ago, from when our understanding of the human mind was in its infancy, to today, when questions of race, class, and ability so often determine who is legally "insane" and who is criminally guilty. Vinocour explains how "competency" and "insanity" are creatures of a legal system, not of psychiatric reality, and how, in criminal law, the insanity defense has too often been a luxury of the rich and white.
-
Someday, Maybe
Here are three things you should know about my husband:
- He was the great love of my life despite his penchant for going incommunicado.
- He was, as far as I and everyone else could tell, perfectly happy. Which is significant because...
- On New Year's Eve, he died.
And here is one thing you should know about me:
- I found him.
- Bonus fact: No. I am not okay.
-
The Midnight Library: A GMA Book Club Pick
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, with one that tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. What if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? In The Midnight Library, Nora Seed finds herself faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist. She must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place. -
The Emotionally Healthy Child
Healy is an expert on teaching skills that address the high sensitivity, big emotions, and hyper energy she herself experienced growing up. Three simple steps are key — Stop, Calm, and Make Smarter Choices. While not always easy, these steps are powerful, and Healy shows readers exactly how to implement them. Children move from acting out or shutting down, experiencing frequent physical symptoms such as head- and stomachaches, or hurting themselves or others, to recognizing they are being triggered, feeling their emotions, and using mindfulness strategies to respond from a calmer place.
-
Madness
In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity.
-
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them all imprisoned.
-
A Little Life
A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma.
-
Permission to Come Home
Permission to Come Home takes Asian Americans on an empowering journey toward reclaiming their mental health. Weaving her personal narrative as a Taiwanese American together with her insights as a clinician and evidence-based tools, Dr. Jenny T. Wang explores a range of life areas that call for attention, offering readers the permission to question, feel, rage, say no, take up space, choose, play, fail, and grieve. Above all, she offers permission to return closer to home, a place of acceptance, belonging, healing, and freedom. For Asian Americans and Diaspora, this book is a necessary road map for the journey to wholeness.
. -
The Haunting of Alejandra
Alejandra no longer knows who she is. When Alejandra visits a therapist, she begins exploring her family’s history, starting with the biological mother she never knew. As she goes deeper into the lives of the women in her family, she learns that heartbreak and tragedy are not the only things she has in common with her ancestors. Because the crying woman only Alejandra can see was with them, too. She is La Llorona, the vengeful and murderous mother of Mexican legend. And she will not leave until Alejandra follows her mother, her grandmother, and all the women who came before her into the darkness.
-
Solutions and Other Problems
Solutions and Other Problems includes humorous stories from Allie Brosh’s childhood; the adventures of her very bad animals; merciless dissection of her own character flaws; incisive essays on grief, loneliness, and powerlessness; as well as reflections on the absurdity of modern life.
-
The Madwomen of Paris
After being dragged into the Salpêtrière asylum screaming, covered in blood, and suffering from amnesia, Josephine is diagnosed with what the nineteenth-century Parisian press has dubbed “the epidemic of the age”: hysteria. Josephine's true ally at the Salpêtrière is Laure, a lonely ward attendant. Soon, Josephine’s memory returns, and with it images of a gruesome crime she’s convinced she’s committed. Ensnared in Dr. Charcot’s hypnotic web, she starts spiraling into seeming insanity, prompting a terrified Laure to plot their escape together.
-
Losing Our Minds
Drawing on her extensive knowledge of the scientific and clinical literature, Foulkes explains what is known about mental health problems—how they arise, why they so often appear during adolescence, the various tools we have to cope with them—but also what remains unclear: distinguishing between normality and disorder is essential if we are to provide the appropriate help, but no clear line between the two exists in nature. Providing necessary clarity and nuance, Losing Our Minds argues that the widespread misunderstanding of this aspect of mental illness might be contributing to its apparent prevalence.
-
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.
-
Because We Are Bad
As a child, Lily Bailey knew she was bad. By the age of 13, she had killed someone with a thought, spread untold disease, and spied upon her classmates. Only by performing a series of secret routines could she correct her wrongdoing. But it was never enough. She had a severe case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and it came with a bizarre twist. Anyone who wants to know about OCD, and how to fight back, should read this book. Immerse yourself in a new world.
Most Checkouts Last Month - For Adults
-
Broken Country (Reese's Book Club)
Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved and who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.
-
Beautiful Ugly
Author Grady Green calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge, his wife has disappeared. A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible – a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.
-
The Women
The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.
-
Everything Is Tuberculosis
In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone with whom he became fast friends. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.
-
Tom Lake
In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
-
The Texas Murders
Texas Ranger Rory Yates protects his home state wearing a five-pointed silver badge and carrying a Sig Sauer. When a native woman disappears on the summer solstice, clues point to a cold case. Yates, a quick-draw champion, partners with expert archer Ava Cruz of the Tigua Tribal police. The investigation leads to the edges of Texas's most unforgiving landscape.
-
The Frozen River
Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town's most respected gentlemen--one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth.
-
Battle Mountain
The campaign of destruction that Axel Soledad and Dallas Cates wreaked on Nate Romanowski and Joe Pickett left both men in tatters, especially Nate, who lost almost everything. When Joe gets a call from the governor asking for help finding his son-in-law, who has gone missing in the Sierra Madre mountain range, he enlists the help of a local, a rookie game warden named Susan Kany. As Nate and fellow falconer Geronimo Jones circle closer to Axel and Dallas, Joe and Susan follow the nearly cold trail to Battle Mountain.
-
Nobody's Fool
Sami Kierce, a young college grad, wakes up one morning covered in blood with a knife in his hand. Next to him is the dead body of his girlfriend, Anna. Twenty-two years later, Kierce, now a private investigator, is a new father who's working off his debts by teaching wannabe sleuths at a night school when he recognizes a familiar face at the back of the classroom: Anna. As soon as Kierce makes eye contact with her, she bolts. He knows he must find this woman and solve the impossible mystery that has haunted his every waking moment since that terrible day.
-
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.
-
The Wedding People
It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She’s immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself.
-
The Crash
Tegan is eight months pregnant, alone, and desperately wants to put her crumbling life in the rearview mirror. So she hits the road, planning to stay with her brother until she can figure out her next move. But she doesn't realize she's heading straight into a blizzard. She never arrives at her destination. Stranded in rural Maine with a dead car and broken ankle, Tegan worries she's made a terrible mistake. Then a miracle occurs: she is rescued by a couple who offers her a room in their warm cabin until the snow clears. Tegan believed she was waiting out the storm, but as time ticks by, she comes to realize she is in grave danger. And now she must do whatever it takes to save herself--and her unborn child.
-
Paranoia
At every death scene, Bennett says a prayer over the victim. But recently, too many of the departed have been fellow cops. "I want you to look at these deaths on special assignment," NYPD Inspector Celeste Cantor says. "Report only to me." Bennett excels as a solo investigator. But he's chasing a killer who feeds on isolation... and paranoia.
-
Now Or Never
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The latest Stephanie Plum novel from #1 New York Times bestseller and “the most popular mystery writer alive” (The New York Times) Janet Evanovich.
She said yes to Morelli. She said yes to Ranger. Now Stephanie Plum has two fiancés and no idea what to do about it. But the way things are going, she might not live long enough to marry anyone. While Stephanie stalls for time, she buries herself in her work as a bounty hunter, tracking down an unusually varied assortment of fugitives from justice. With timely assists from her stalwart supporters Lula, Connie, and Grandma Mazur, Stephanie uses every trick in the book to reel in these men. But only she can decide what to do about the two men she actually loves. Stephanie’s keeping a secret from them that is the biggest bombshell of all. -
To Die for
This time it's not Travis Devine's skills that send him to Seattle to aid the FBI in escorting orphaned, twelve-year-old Betsy Odom to a meeting with her uncle, who's under federal investigation. Instead, he's hoping to lay low and keep off the radar of an enemy-the girl on the train. But as Devine gets to know Betsy, questions begin to arise around the death of her parents. What he finds points to a conspiracy bigger than he could've ever imagined.