Ashland Books @ Noon August 2019 Picks

Author

Notes

Kristin said that she read and enjoyed-ish this title...finding the characters somewhat mind-boggling-ly young and naive.

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print - Hardback

Description

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"At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He's popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne's house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers--one they are determined to conceal. A year later, they're both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her...

2) On writing: a memoir of the craft

Author

King, Stephen

Notes

Carolyn said Stephen King had never really been her thing but that this memoir of writing was definitely her thing. There was some discussion about King's writerly qualities and a story was told about his response after the Rushdie Fatwah...which led to a conversation about both Rushdie and King being out on the book promotion circuit because they have new books coming out. They are linked next!

Formats:

Book, Book - Paperback, eAudiobook

Description

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Twentieth Anniversary Edition with Contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S TOP 100 NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME

Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this special edition of Stephen King's critically lauded, million-copy bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work.

"Long live the King" hailed Entertainment Weekly...

3) Infinite jest: a novel

Author

Wallace, David Foster

Formats:

Book, Book - Paperback, eBook, Kindle

Description

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A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America
Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and...

4) Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Stories

Author

Wallace, David Foster

Notes

Rad liked this book of short stories and wants to read more by this author. Kristin and a few others indicated a fondness for Wallace's work. Kristin mentioned that Infinite Jest is really his magnum opus...and it's linked next!

Formats:

eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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In this thought-provoking and playful short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence.
Wallace's stories present a world where the bizarre and the banal are interwoven and where hideous men appear in many guises. Among the stories are 'The Depressed Person,' a dazzling and blackly humorous portrayal of a woman's mental state; 'Adult World,' which reveals...

5) My life as a rat: a novel

Author

Oates, Joyce Carol

Notes

Pat said she finished this because she wanted to know what happened and not because she was enjoying it. She found it disjointed and depressing.

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Large Print - Hardback

Description

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"My Life as a Rat follows Violet Rue Kerrigan, a young woman who looks back upon her life in exile from her family following her testimony, at age twelve, concerning what she knew to be the racist murder of an African American boy by her older brothers. In a succession of vividly recalled episodes, Violet contemplates the circumstances of her life as the initially beloved youngest child of seven Kerrigan children who inadvertently 'informs' on her...

6) The sympathizer

Author

Nguyen, Viet Thanh

Notes

Claudia loved this one and said that one of the overwhelming takeaways was how smart the author of this book is. She described it as social satire.

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, Book - Hardback, eBook

Description

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The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as six other awards, The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the...

7) Re Jane

Author

Park, Patricia

Notes

Jane was intrigued by the cover of this one. A novel about a protagonist who never quite settles down.

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

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“Re Jane is snappy and memorable, with its clever narrator and insights on clashing cultures.”—Entertainment Weekly
For Jane Re, half-Korean, half-American orphan, Flushing, Queens, is the place she’s been trying to escape from her whole life. Sardonic yet vulnerable, Jane toils, unappreciated, in her strict uncle’s grocery store and politely observes the traditional principle of nunchi...

8) Where the crawdads sing

Author

Owens, Delia

Notes

Carolyn recognized fairy tale tropes in this very popular summer read. While she enjoyed the book she made some very compelling criticisms of the work itself, including a problematic depiction of the African American community.

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print - Hardback

Description

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"Fans of Barbara Kingsolver will love this stunning debut novel from a New York Times bestselling nature writer, about an unforgettable young woman determined to make her way in the wilds of North Carolina, and the two men that will break her isolation open. For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. She's barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase...

9) Furious hours: murder, fraud, and the last trial of Harper Lee

Author

Cep, Casey N

Notes

Cathy talked about this narrative nonfiction about historic murders and insurance fraud. It sounds like a fascinating story for true crime fans as well as fans of Harper Lee. (It almost sounds like she tried to Truman Capote/In Cold Blood the crimes but her work output from the time wasn't fully saved.

Formats:

Audiobook CD, Large Print - Paperback

Description

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This is the stunning story of an Alabama serial killer, Reverend Willie Maxwell, and the true-crime book that Harper Lee worked on obsessively in the years after To Kill a Mockingbird.

10) The Yiddish policemen's union: a novel

Author

Chabon, Michael

Notes

Set in a very large alternate Sitka, Alaska, Rad enjoyed this continuation of his absurdist/magical realism reading kick.

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eBook, Kindle

Description

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In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addled chess prodigy.

11) Broken ground

Author

McDermid, Val

Series

Karen Pirie novels volume 5

Notes

Pat enjoyed this atypical police procedural. I knew series with a new detective from this author solving historical mysteries. So there are modern forensic techniques juxtaposed against historical crimes.

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

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A woman digs up a buried treasure—and a buried body—in the Scottish Highlands: “There are few other crime writers in the same league.”—Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post
Six feet under in a Highland peat bog lies Alice Somerville’s inheritance, buried by her grandfather at the end of World War II. But when Alice finally uncovers it, she finds an unwanted surprise—a body with a bullet

...

12) Retablos: stories from a life lived along the border

Author

Solis, Octavio

Notes

Claudia kicked us off with this memoir from local author/playright Octavio Solis. Told in short flash vignettes of his life, Claudia found this book a good model for memoir writing. Set in El Paso, she was reading it as news of the shooting we in the media.

Formats:

Book, eBook

Description

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"Seminal moments, rites of passage, crystalline vignettes--a memoir about growing up brown at the U.S./Mexico border" --

13) The bluest eye

Author

Morrison, Toni

Notes

As we gathered we all shared Toni Morrison memories. I remember The Bluest Eye specifically being discussed by Cathy, but I'm fairly sure that we each had a different favorite title in mind during the discussion.

Formats:

Book, Book - Hardback, eAudiobook

Description

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The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare...

14) The Martian chronicles

Author

Bradbury, Ray

Series

Brilliance Audio on compact disc

Notes

Bill is still on his re-reading books he loved from childhood kick!

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, Book - Paperback, eAudiobook, eBook

Description

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The tranquility of Mars is disrupted by the earthmen who have come to conquer space, colonize the planet, and escape a doomed Earth.

15) Searching for Sylvie Lee: a novel

Author

Kwok, Jean

Notes

Kristin loved this tale of emigrants from China to both the US and The Netherlands in this book that, at its core, posits that in the end we are ALL unreliable narrators. A lovely character study wrapped around a mystery.

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook

Description

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An Instant New York Times Bestseller!

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick & Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick!

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY New York Times

Time

Marie Claire

Elle

...

16) heart of a dog

This entry no longer exists in the catalog

17) The balcony

Author

Delury, Jane

Notes

From Ahna: A book about coos generations that at one time or another shared a residence in a small village outside Pris within a hundred year span of relationships, regrets, choices, new beginnings in new eras. I'm not sure why the author thought it necessary to jump back an forth in time because I felt confused and tagged with piecing together the connections between families and time periods. Also, I found the insertions of French phrases quite frustrating. I am not a Francophile and don't know the language.

18) Lost roses: a novel

Author

Kelly, Martha Hall

Series

Caroline Ferriday volume 2

Notes

Jane wanted a bit more from this tale of the Russian Revolution.

Formats:

Audiobook CD, Book - Hardback, Book - Paperback, eAudiobook, Large Print - Paperback

Description

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"It is 1914 and the world has been on the brink of war so many times, many New Yorkers treat the subject with only passing interest. Eliza Ferriday is thrilled to be traveling to St. Petersburg with Sofya Streshnayva, a cousin of the Romanovs. The two met years ago one summer in Paris and became close confidantes. Now Eliza embarks on the trip of a lifetime, home with Sofya to see the splendors of Russia. But when Austria declares war on Serbia and...

19) Wayfinding: the science and mystery of how humans navigate the world

Author

O'Connor, M. R

Notes

Nina shared this non fiction title about GPS based in anthropology, neuroscience, and linguistics.

Formats:

Book, eBook

Description

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"At once far flung and intimate, a fascinating look at how finding our way make us human. In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision--especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world...