NEXT LITERARY SALON - Wednesday, November 4 @ 4:30pm
This month only, join us the 1st Wednesday of the month to share favorite books, authors, or series. Literary Salon is a no-rules book club where you bring whatever you're reading to a round of interested listeners. You are welcome to come and be a listener, too. Twelve people shared the following 14 titles and one series  in October. Please join us at the next Lit Salon on Wednesday, November 4 at 4:30pm. Check lopezlibrary.org or email Beth for current information.

Recommendations
Among the Birds: Field Notes from Cascadia
by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

A delight for devoted birders, curious nature lovers, and casual backyard watchers alikeAmong the Birds is an enchanting celebration of the Pacific Northwest's birds, brought to life by New York Times bestselling author and naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Listeners join Haupt on a wandering journey through the region's avian world, drifting intuitively among species, much like you encounter birds on a neighborhood amble, forest trail, or windy shoreline. More than seventy feathered residents and seasonal visitors make an appearance, connected through experience, memory, and the serendipity of daily life outdoors. Haupt's signature voice--lyrical, curious, gently humorous, and deeply observant--infuses each vignette with delight and insight. She blends personal moments with natural history, offering a closer look at the habits, habitats, and captivating quirks of birds such as Steller's Jay, Anna's Hummingbird, Merlin, Black Oystercatcher, American Dipper, Caspian Tern, and many more.
Our Noble Selves
by Kate Atkinson

A thrilling tale of post-World War II London, where the peace proves as tricky to navigate as the past, from the #1 international bestselling author of Life After Life. Atkinson] boasts an immaculate prose style, a dry wit and a taste for narrative legerdemain. This splendid historical farce proves her versatility as well. --The Wall Street Journal When crime correspondent turned war reporter Harry Flynn returns to Britain from Singapore in 1945, he takes a quiet job with the Festival of Britain, a government-funded endeavor aimed at celebrating the nation's creativity, grit, and ingenuity. There, he joins a team of misfits and eccentrics as they help to ready the Festival for launch. When a Frenchwoman goes missing, Flynn becomes the central suspect in her disappearance--and possible murder. He was the last person to see her alive, yet he has no memory of the evening they spent together. As evidence against him mounts, Flynn begins to wonder if he might actually be to blame. To make matters worse, he is surrounded by people who have their own secret agenda. There may be a carnival atmosphere in London as the country attempts to throw off the drab privations of war, yet beneath the frivolity there is also a worthy attempt to hold up a mirror to both its history and its future. With her unique voice and her skill at conjuring the past, Kate Atkinson turns her light on a nation reconstructing its image and the lengths to which some might go to manipulate the outcome. Witty, brilliantly plotted, and with an unforgettable cast of characters, Our Noble Selves paints a vivid portrait of a former empire struggling with its identity in the aftermath of war.
There Are Rivers in the Sky
by Elif Shafak

From the Booker Prize finalist, author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two great rivers, all connected by a single drop of water. - Make place for Elif Shafak on your bookshelf [and] in your heart. You won't regret it.--Arundhati Roy, winner of the Booker Prize In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives. In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur's only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur's world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains. In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family's ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time. In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything. A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, which remanifests across the centuries. A source of life and harbinger of death, rivers--the Tigris and the Thames--transcend history, transcend fate: Water remembers. It is humans who forget.
Reader recommends author talk on YouTube: "Hope Is a Muscle"
Hollywood, Ending
by John Green

#1 bestselling author John Green makes his much-anticipated return to fiction with a behind-the-scenes Hollywood love story about finding someone to trust in an untrustworthy world.Wise, tender and engaging. --People, Book of the Week Sharply relevant in today's landscape of constant attention and the pressure of a public life. --TODAY, Reading Picks for Fall Green's storytelling is astute, empathic, and magnetizing. --Booklist, starred review For rising talents Kai Laramie and Juniper Castillo, being cast in the buzzy biopic Andy Warhol Never Gets Old is the opportunity they've both been waiting for. They're on the verge of breaking out, and maybe even falling in love. Soon, the movie is blowing up, and so are their lives--in exciting, but also terrifying, ways. John Green artfully blends a behind-the-scenes Hollywood love story with an unflinching examination of the insatiable attention economy. Told through dual points of view, the novel brilliantly juxtaposes the on-screen study of Warhol's life at the dawn of celebrity culture with the intimate struggles of two young people figuring out who they are, both together and alone. Tender, heartbreaking, and shrewdly funny, this is a story as only Green can tell it. Hollywood, Ending is a deeply observed novel about the tension between a public and a private life, and the audacity to pursue the kind of love we all deserve.
Everything is tuberculosis : the history and persistence of our deadliest infection
by John Green

The author tells the story of Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, sharing the scientific and social histories of tuberculosis, the world's deadliest disease, and how humanity's choices can shape the disease'sfuture
What Moves the Dead
by T. Kingfisher

From T. Kingfisher, the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones, comes What Moves the Dead, a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic The Fall of the House of Usher. When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves. Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all--
A Night in the Lonesome October
by Roger Zelazny

Under cover of the murky London gloom, a knife-wielding gentleman named Jack prowls the midnight streets with his faithful watchdog Snuff--gathering together the grisly ingredients they will need for an upcoming ancient and unearthly rite. For soon, after the death of the moon, black magic will summon the Elder Gods back into the world. But Snuff and his master are not alone. All manner of participants, both human and not, are about with their ancient tools and their animal familiars in preparation for the dread night. It is brave, devoted Snuff who must calculate the patterns of the Game and keep track of the Players--the witch, the mad monk, the vengeful vicar, the Count who sleeps by day, the Good Doctor and the hulking Experiment Man he fashioned from human body parts, and a wild-card American named Larry Talbot--all the while keeping Things at bay and staying a leap ahead of the Great Detective, who knows quite a bit more than he lets on. Some have come to open the gates. Some have come to slam them shut. As the hour approaches--let the Game begin...
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
by Alexandra Fuller

In Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller's endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller's debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.
The Correspondent
by Virginia Evans

Sybil is seventy-three years old, in the winter of her life. Sybil has always made sense of the world through writing letters and through this epistolary novel we see how she comes to terms with her past and present and learns forgiveness--
Music Against the Night
by Yiyun Li

Figures of the past find new life in Yiyun Li's thrillingly imagined saga following two musicians as they mature, study, travel, love, grieve, and, above all, chase their ambitions. In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a young musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field, an awkward and sensitive child, is preternaturally gifted, and his family has visions of him becoming the next Mozart. His talent takes him far--to England, France, and then Russia, where he becomes a famous pianist and composes dreamy, languorous melodies that enchant the night air. John calls them nocturnes, but the prodigy who immortalizes them is Chopin. Oceans away in Pondicherry, in French India, Adelaide Percheron has a startling rise of her own. Orphaned at a young age, she is raised by her imperious, enterprising grandmother. Her cousins give her the name Percherette, an impish reminder that despite their shared relations, Adelaide is not one of the crowd, owing to her parents' differing ancestry. Without a connection to aristocracy or the luxury of riches, only marriage seems to offer prosperity--until she sets her sights on a pianoforte. Driven by her secret love of music and a desire to see the world, Percherette engineers her exodus, escaping to Paris and later to Moscow, as Napoleon's army sets out to conquer the continent. Peopled by rival prodigies, irate tutors, begrudging guardians, and the true-to-life masters of the trade, Yiyun Li's magisterial, polyphonic novel depicts two aspiring musicians--destined to be husband and wife--in pursuit of success. Their struggles unfold amid political and artistic upheaval and pit them against the forces of their time. As John and Adelaide each try to chart a path between talent and genius, success and legacy, profit and passion, they must decide what, and even who, is worth sacrificing along the way. Drawing inspiration from the past but finding entirely new forms, Music Against the Night comes to life with the sweep and dimension of the Romantic era and a deep understanding of the demands of living and of art.
Reader highly recommends; also recommended by Ann Patchett.
Deep Fitness: The Mindful, Science-Based Strength-Training Method to Transform Your Well-Being in Just 30 Minutes a Week
by Philip Shepherd

An empirically-based strength-training program that's simple, quick, and maximizes results while increasing enjoyment--
Fire Into Ice: Charles Fipke & the Great Diamond Hunt
by Vernon Frolick

True Story of Charles Fipke, the mining exploration geologist who discovered diamonds in Canada. Fire Into Ice follows Charles Fipke in his exotic travels through the fast-paced, cutthroat world of mineral exploration - from the jungles of New Guinea to the savannas of South Africa to the rain-forests of the Amazon to the Arctic tundra. This amazing true story culminates in Fipke's staking of the Etaki diamond claim in Canada's Northwest Territories.
One Day at Teton Marsh
by Sally Carrighar

In One Day at Teton Marsh, Sally Carrighar tells the story of a single day at a marsh in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, based on the hours she spent watching the various animals who call the Teton marshes home. It is through the perspectives of those animals--otter, trout, osprey, mosquito, scud, mink, hare, merganser, moose, leech, frog, snail, swan, and beaver--that the events of the day are told. Carrighar effortlessly weaves together the perspectives of these critters and, through her descriptions of the natural beauty of the marsh, brings it to life for the reader. A powerful tribute to the hidden complexities of the natural world, One Day at Teton Marsh is a must-read for nature lovers everywhere.

 
Fantasy Series
Meet the author at FANCON, Sunday, Oct 18 @ the Library
Two-Fer: GRIM Times (Issue One)
by Lisa Cram

Welcome to GRIM Times! Sand Reap is the nicest Galactic Reclamation Immigration Marshal (GRIM) you hope to never meet. When Sand teams up with an ex-assassin, sparks fly and people die. Will you be next?
Issue Two: Switch-a-Roo; Issue Three: Ka-Booom
It Can't Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis

In It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis crafts a chilling tale of a populist demagogue who rises to power in America, transforming the nation into a fascist dictatorship. This classic novel serves as a timeless warning about the fragility of democracy and the dangers of complacency in the face of tyranny.