|
|
Join us the 2nd 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. Eight people shared the following 10 titles in May. Please join us at the next Lit Salon on Wednesday, June 10 at 4:30pm. Check lopezlibrary.org or email Beth for current information. |
|
|
|
Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow
by Joyce Sidman
Discover the hidden world of the meadow in this unique combination of poetry riddles and science wisdom. Beginning with the rising sun and ending with twilight, this book takes us on a tour through the fields, encouraging us to watch for a nest of rabbits, a foamy spittlebug, a leaping grasshopper, bright milkweed, a quick fox, a cruising hawk, and more. Rich illustrations. Great for all ages.
|
|
Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South
by Beth Macy
The true story of two African-American brothers who were kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks, and whose mother endured a 28-year struggle to get them back. The year was 1899 and the place a sweltering tobacco farm in the Jim Crow South town of Truevine, Virginia. George and Willie Muse were two little boys born to a sharecropper family. One day a white man offered them a piece of candy, setting off events that would take them around the world and change their lives forever. Captured into the circus, the Muse brothers performed for royalty at Buckingham Palace and headlined over a dozen sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. They were global superstars in a pre-broadcast era. But the very root of their success was in the color of their skin and in the outrageous caricatures they were forced to assume: supposed cannibals, sheep-headed freaks, even Ambassadors from Mars. Back home, their mother never accepted that they were gone and spent 28 years trying to get them back. Through hundreds of interviews and decades of research, Beth Macy expertly explores a central and difficult question: Where were the brothers better off? On the world stage as stars or in poverty at home? TRUEVINE is a compelling narrative rich in historical detail and rife with implications to race relations today.
|
|
|
|
|
The Country Commonplace Book
by Miranda Mills
The Country Commonplace Book is a seasonal touchstone packed full of quotes, book lists, artwork, recipes, and observations on the natural world to keep close at hand and to accompany you throughout the year. Historically, commonplace books have been types of journals used to record favorite passages from books or poetry, anecdotes, extracts from letters, proverbs, lists, shared recipes, quotes, prayers, and lyrics, and they have been kept for centuries. Commonplacing has seen a recent revival and can now be seen more as a highly personal anthology--a joyful place where the keeper can develop a deeper sense of self by selecting fragments of language that feel meaningful and reflect their tastes, beliefs, and values. In this book, delve into blogger, Instagrammer, and YouTuber Miranda Mills' ultimate commonplace book, a carefully curated guide to the seasons with the very best selection of quotations, reading lists, recipes, reflections, and much, much more. Connect deeper with yourself and your creative impulses as you explore everything each season has to offer--and even be inspired to create your own personalized commonplace book.
|
|
Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries
by Nicholas Lemann
Compulsive, shattering, if not fundamentally disruptive, Returning emerges as one of the most important and searingly honest family sagas of our time. Nicholas Lemann, a veteran New Yorker correspondent, grew up in New Orleans, the son of German Jews in a world of gilded privilege. Yet in contrast to his parents’ generation, which always sought to downplay their religious background, Lemann was intrigued by his roots, ... Searchingly asking what it is about antisemitism that allows it to flourish after two thousand years, Lemann uses his own family saga as a springboard to address some of the most urgent questions of our time. Through its nuanced combination of biography and philosophy wrapped into a family history, Returning ultimately becomes one of the most memorable statements about Jewish life in the twenty-first century.
|
|
|
|
|
Slow Gods
by Claire North
My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself ling my story, there are certain things I should perhaps lie about. I should make myself a hero. Pretend I was not used by strangers and gods, did not leave people behind. Here is one truth: out there in deep space, in the pilot's chair, I died. And then, I was reborn. I became something not quite human, something that could speak to the infinite dark. And I vowed to become the scourge of the world that wronged me. This is the story of the supernova event that burned planets and felled civilizations. This is also the story of the many lives I've lived since I died for the first time. Are you listening?--Provided by publisher.
|
|
Whipping Star
by Frank Herbert
Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinary, is a born troublemaker who has naturally become one of the Bureau of Sabotage's best agents. His assignment is to locate and stop Mliss Abnethe, a psychotic but wealthy human female who has bound a Caleban into a contract that could spell disaster for all sentient beings.
|
|
|
|
|
Kiss Her Goodbye: A Frankie Elkin Novel
by Lisa Gardner
#1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner returns with the 4th installment in her bestselling Frankie Elkin series, in which Frankie is called to Tucson, Arizona, to find a missing Afghan refugee, whose friend suspects she is in grave danger--before it is too late. A young mother haunted by war, determined to make a fresh start. But sometimes, the sins of the past aren't so easy to escape. Recent Afghan refugee Sabera Ahmadi was last seen exiting her place of work three weeks ago. The local police have yet to open a case, while her older, domineering husband seems unconcerned. Sabera's closest friend, however, is convinced Sabera would never willingly leave her three-year old daughter. At her insistence, missing persons expert Frankie Elkin agrees to take up the search through the broiling streets of Tucson. Just in time for a video of the young mother to surface--showing her walking away from the scene of a brutal double murder. Frankie quickly notes there's much more to the Ahmadi family than meets the eye. The father Isaad is a brilliant mathematician, Sabera a gifted linguist, and their little girl Zahra has an uncanny ability to remember anything she sees. Which given everything that has happened during the girl's short life, may be a terrible curse. When Isaad also disappears under mysterious circumstances and an attempt is made on Zahra's life, Frankie realizes she must quickly crack the code of this family's horrific past. Someone is coming for the Ahmadis. And violence is clearly an option. When everything is on the line, how far would you go to protect the ones you love? Frankie is about to find out.
|
|
The Last Movement
by Robert Seethaler
An intimate portrait of genius, love, and betrayal at the end of Gustav Mahler's life. In the spring of 1910, Gustav Mahler--wrapped in a wool blanket--sits on the deck of the Amerika, sailing back to Europe. The ocean around him is gray and endless, the air sharp with wind and steel. Not yet fifty, Mahler is already a legend: in Vienna and New York, audiences fight for tickets to see the restless, small man who commands the most stubborn orchestra in the world. Yet his fame is shadowed by illness. His body is failing, his wife Alma has fallen in love with another man: the young architect Walter Gropius. Mahler has begged, humiliated himself, tried everything to keep her. Nothing worked, except the certainty of his approaching death. Alma has stayed, tending to him with care, perhaps to ease his final passage. On board, Mahler reflects on life, art, and above all, love. Finalist for the Deutscher Buchpreis and one of the most acclaimed German novels of recent years, Robert Seethaler's The Last Movement is a haunting, tender portrait of a great artist confronting his farewell to life.
|
|
|
|
|
The 1619 Project : a new origin story
by Nikole Hannah-Jones
This ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began on the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery reimagines if our national narrative actually started in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of 20-30 enslaved people from Africa.
|
|
The Bone Thief
by Vanessa Lillie
In the hours before dawn at a local summer camp, Bureau of Indian Affairs archaeologist Syd Walker receives an alarming call: newly discovered skeletal remains have been stolen. Not only have bones gone missing, but a Native teen girl has disappeared near the camp, and law enforcement dismisses her family's fears. As Syd investigates both crimes, she's drawn into a world of privileged campers and their wealthy parents--most of them members of the Founders Society, an exclusive club whose members trace their lineage to the first colonists and claim ancestral rights to the land, despite fierce objections from the local tribal community--
|
|
|
|
Lopez Island Library
2225 Fisherman Bay Rd
Lopez Island, Washington 98261
360-468-2265www.lopezlibrary.org |
|
|
|