NEXT LITERARY SALON - Wednesday, August 12 @ 4:30pm
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 and one series in July. Please join us at the next Lit Salon on Wednesday, August 12 at 4:30pm. Check lopezlibrary.org or email Beth for current information.

Recommendations
God Help the Child
by Toni Morrison

At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride's mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.
The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness
by Thom Hartmann

Progressive radio host Thom Hartmann reveals how and why neoliberalism became so prevalent in the United States and why it's time for us to turn our backs to it. While America is at a crossroads regarding its economic future, many of us don't fully understand how we got here. In this powerful and accessible book, Thom Hartmann demystifies neoliberalism and explains how we can use this pivotal point in time to create a more positive future. This book traces the history of neoliberalism-which applies to a set of capitalistic philosophies favoring free trade, financial austerity, and deregulation-up to the present. Hartmann explains how neoliberalism was sold as a cure for wars and the Great Depression. He outlines the impact that it has had on America, looking at different sectors, including healthcare, unemployment, and education. Hartmann highlights how America can go one of two ways: continue going down the road to neoliberal oligarchy, as supported by the GOP, or choose to return to FDR's Keynesian economics, raise taxes on the rich, reverse free trade, and create a more pluralistic society--
Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class -- And What We Can Do about It
by Thom Hartmann

Our founding fathers worked hard to ensure that a small group of wealthy people would never dominate this country--they'd had enough of aristocracy. They put government to work to ensure a thriving middle class. When the middle class took a hit, beginning in the post-Civil War Gilded Age and culminating in the Great Depression, democracy-loving leaders like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower revitalized it through initiatives like antitrust regulations, fair labor laws, the minimum wage, Social Security, and Medicare. So what happened? Air America Radio host Thom Hartmann shows that over the last twenty-five years, we've witnessed an undeclared war against the middle class. The so-called conservatives waging this war are only interested in conserving--and steadily increasing--their own wealth and power. Hartmann shows how, under the guise of freeing the market, they've systematically dismantled the programs set up by both Republicans and Democrats to protect the middle class and have replaced them with policies that favor the only the privileged few. But the middle class is the very thing that makes America great. Thomas Jefferson himself believed that our very democracy depends upon our ability to play referee to the game of business, protecting labor and the public good. It is both our right and our responsibility, Jefferson wrote, to control overgrown wealth from becoming dangerous to the state. We must not stand by while our democracy becomes a corporatocracy, serving an elite group of billionaire CEOs. There is another way. Thomas Jefferson knew how to build a middle class. Franklin Roosevelt knew how. We've done it before and we can do it, again. Following Hartmann's commonsense proposals, we can recreate a prospering middle class that will ensure that our public institutions are not turned into private fiefdoms, meet people's basic needs--for education, health care, a living wage--and keep America strong,
The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

This is one gorgeous read. --Stephen King A sprawling magic show. . . . We are taken on a wild ride that executes its hairpin bends with breathtaking lurches. --The New York Times Book Review Anyone who enjoys novels that are scary, erotic, touching, tragic and thrilling should rush right out to the nearest bookstore and pick up The Shadow of the Wind. Really, you should. --Michael Dirda, The Washington PostI still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetary of Forgotten Books for the first time... Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer's son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author's other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax's books in existence. Soon Daniel's seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona's darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.
John of John
by Douglas Stuart

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Oprah Daily, and VogueDouglas Stuart brilliantly weaved a layered, compelling and yet so intimate a story of identity, what it means to belong, and the courage to claim your own truth.--Oprah WinfreyOne of 2026's literary triumphs.--Boston GlobeFrom the Booker Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a vivid, moving novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a father's expectations and a son's desires. Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides to find that little has changed except for him. He returns to the windswept croft and the two pillars of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and lay preacher in the local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian whose steady warmth helped Cal weather the sudden departure of his mother.Cal privately wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son's long hair, strange clothes, and seeming unwillingness to be Saved. But Cal isn't the only one in the croft house who is keeping secrets. As lambing season turns to shearing season, the threads holding together the community together become increasingly frayed, and nothing will remain as it was before.John of John is a singular novel about duty, passion, and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that cements Douglas Stuart's reputation as one of our greatest novelists working today.
The Blackhouse (Lewis quadrilogy #1)
by Peter May

From acclaimed author and dramatist Peter May comes the first book in the Lewis Trilogy--a riveting mystery series set on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. When a grisly murder occurs on the Isle, Edinburgh detective and native islander Fin Macleod is dispatched to investigate. As he unravels the murder, Fin is forced to confront the tragic events of the past that shaped--and nearly destroyed--his life.

#2 - The Lewis Man
#3 - The Chessmen
#4 - The Black Loch
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.
Saturn Run
by John Sandford

The year is 2066. A Caltech intern inadvertently notices an anomaly from a space telescope--something is approaching Saturn, and decelerating. Space objects don't decelerate. Spaceships do. A flurry of top-level government meetings produces the inescapable conclusion: Whatever built that ship is at least one hundred years ahead in hard and soft technology, and whoever can get their hands on it exclusively and bring it back will have an advantage so large, no other nation can compete. A conclusion the Chinese definitely agree with when they find out. The race is on, and an remarkable adventure begins--an epic tale of courage, treachery, resourcefulness, secrets, surprises, and astonishing human and technological discovery, as the members of a hastily thrown-together crew find their strength and wits tested against adversaries both of this earth and beyond. What happens is nothing like you expect--and everything you could want from one of the world's greatest masters of suspense-- Provided by publisher.
Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir

A lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this incredible new science-based thriller from the number-one New York Times bestselling author of The Martian.Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the Earth itself will perish.Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, he realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Alone on this tiny ship that's been cobbled together by every government and space agency on the planet and hurled into the depths of space, it's up to him to conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.And thanks to an unexpected ally, he just might have a chance.Part scientific mystery, part dazzling interstellar journey, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian - while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.NOTE: To accommodate this audio edition, some changes to the original text have been made with the approval of author Andy Weir.
Contraduction
by Dan Barker

In a quiet and unassuming way, Contraduction is utterly brilliant. Every page has a thought so deep and unexpected that it stops you in your tracks, as you not only realize, That's a different, really interesting way to think about the world, exactly the opposite of how I normally view things but also, And it is absolutely equally valid (and enriching) to adopt this opposite way of thinking. I loved this book. - Robert Sapolsky, author of Behave and Determined. An ingenious word for an invaluable concept. Sharp, clear, and timely. - Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and the author of The Blank Slate and Rationality Both a delightful read and a penetrating argument: Barker has invented an invaluable new concept, and puts it to work with clarity, wit, and above all conclusiveness. A must-have book! - A. C. Grayling, author of The History of Philosophy and The God Argument I am completely down with the concept of contraduction. It fills a need. False pattern recognitions pose a real danger to our survival. Well done! - Ann Druyan, author (with Carl Sagan) of Cosmos, Contact, and Demon Haunted World I love it when brilliant ideas are conveyed clearly and soundly. That's why I love this book. Dan Barker has provided a much-needed explication of a common fallacy that needs to be understood and rebutted. It is an engaging, enlightening, and insightful book.-Phil Zuckerman, author of Society Without God and What it Means to be Moral With Contraduction, Dan Barker gives us a new word-and a new way of looking at things. I thoroughly enjoyed this! So much to think about-and it made me laugh. What else could I ask for? - Kate Cohen, contributing columnist for the Washington Post and author of We of Little Faith I love how Dan Barker offers us a new word to help us understand how to think rationally in a fun, simple way. I will never look at my reflection in the mirror the same! - Bailey Harris, author of My Name is Stardust Barker has really created something mega with this book. WOW, what an absolutely awesome mind bender [mind fuck] contraductions are, while at the same time seeming very obvious. I give Contraduction 50 hell-yeahs! [fuck-yeahs!] (outta 50). - Zeke Piestrup, director of Apocalypse Later and Satan's Guide to the Bible Dan Barker's approach reminds me of Douglas Adams' famous Intelligent Design analogy about the rain puddle that fits me rather neatly. A simple shift of perspective can be invaluable in our understanding, and Dan's fresh angle gives us plenty to consider. Simply put, I've never read anything quite like Contraduction, and that's a good thing. - Seth Andrews, Author of Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason Contraduction is a delight and lights the way through complexity. Pound for pound, Dan Barker's best book. - Ed Buckner, Author (with Michael Buckner) of In Freedom We Trust: An Atheist Guide to Religious Liberty A clarifying vision of the most baffling aspects of reality: from the simplest, such as our reflection in a mirror, to the most complex, such as time, evolution or the very existence of life. - Manel Salido, founder of Razón o fe and the author of Fascinaos!: [Be Fascinated!] Una respuesta a las grandes preguntas.
Suzanne and Gertrude
by Jeb Loy Nichols

In this unforgettable novel, Suzanne has arranged her life to suit her solitariness, living quietly on her untended hill farm. Her days are a word-shy negotiation, caught between indifference and uncertainty. Into this world comes Gertrude, a wandering donkey. Together they form an unlikely alliance; each protecting the solitude of the other.

... a tale of intermittent griefs and wonderments. How do we live, not just with each other, but with memories, with impermanence, with the inevitable melancholy of being?

Suzanne and Gertrude is a spare novel with a profound impact.