Beach Bag 2011

^-A ⁺A

Recommended summer reading, selected by the Library staff

Sometime this summer vacation, you're going to need to leave your nearest and dearest behind.  No. You may not hop the next fast freight to anywhere else.  You'd never hear the end of it.  Instead, grab a title or two from this list suggested by the staff of the Alachua County Library District.

Somebody has read and enjoyed each title enough to suggest it.  Remember, that while most of these suggestions are in print format, many of these titles are also available in audio, downloadable audio, Playaway, or ebook formats.  When you finish your book – or books – you'll be fit to talk to again.  Don't worry that some of the titles are over in the young adult area – they're good reads.

 

FICTION

Jump to NONFICTION

A Mercy by Toni Morrison.

A slave woman gives up her daughter to a relatively humane farmer to save her from a worse fate.  This one act of sacrifice sets many things in motion for the daughter and the men and women around her in pre-Revolutionary America.

 

Rainwater by Sandra Brown. 

Why won't an antiques dealer sell a particular pocket watch?  Travel back in time to Depression-era Texas where a woman takes a Mr. Rainwater in as a boarder during a time of magic and tragedy.

 

The Weather Warden Series by Rachel Caine. 

Joanne Baldwin has the power to control the weather, but she faces more serious forces than just unpredictable weather. This series is fast-paced, and though parts may seem frivolous, the action is so quick that its hard to find the time to question the reality of the series’ premise. Just relax and enjoy the weather

 

Rachel Morgan Bounty Hunter Series by Kim Harrison. 

Rachel Morgan is a witch down on her luck, who takes a job as a bounty hunter after being fired from the government agency in charge of policing the supernatural. With her friend Ivy (a vampire struggling against her baser nature) and the pixy Jenks, Rachel finds more adventure than she bargained for when she sets up shop as a detective in an old cathedral.

 

Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith 

The late creator of the talented Mr. Ripley displays her virtuosity with human folly and wickedness in a collection of short tales that show that she didn't need a novel to create characters both bad and fascinating.

 

The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise by Julia Smart. 

Follow the lives of various people who live in the Tower of London's precincts to care for the Tower and its grounds and for themselves as well.  And then there is this lost penguin and a tortoise who leaves his unhappy home for a while.

 

The Radleys by Matt Haig. 

He's a doctor and she's an artist, but their kids aren't sparkly and speedy.  The Radleys are doing their best to be totally blood-abstinent vampires and ordinary British subjects until their daughter has to fight off a would-be rapist, a wicked uncle turns up to teach blood-drinking, and the UK anti-vampire squad has to be mobilized.

 

Genghis:  Birth of An Empire by Conn Iggulden. 

Temujin wasn't all that promising a boy, but he grew up to be Genghis Khan who was feared by all who heard of him.  Book 1 in a series.

 

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross. 

When Alice Pepin is found dead at her kitchen table, her computer programmer husband David is the prime suspect.  The detectives find that the Pepin family's tragedies parallel their own private lives in the past and the present.

 

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. 

The ability to taste the emotions of the person who cooked your food can be more of a curse than a blessing as Rose Edelstein discovers.  Still, in time she reconciles herself to her peculiar talent and to the others in her family who have unusual capabilities.

 

The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller. 

The young wife of a college professor observes the life of her neighbor, the tough wife of a former senator as famous for his philandering as for his politics and begins to look at her own in a new way.

 

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X Stork.

Marcelo Sandoval has Asperger’s Syndrome but is high functioning. His father is an ambitious attorney who wants his son to learn to negotiate the “real world” and makes him work in the law firm's mail room for the summer. While working there he encounters an ethical dilemma. Marcelo needs to figure out the grayness of right and wrong in the “real world” and where his loyalties lie...with his father and the law firm or with himself.

 

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan.

A lightly dark and introspective but ultimately comedic book about high school, relationships, being gay, being straight, finding yourself and surviving the teen years…with a gay musical thrown in for good measure! 

 

You Killed Wesley Payne by Sean Beaudoin.

In the style of a 1950s pulp mystery, hard-boiled, seventeen-year-old private investigator Dalton Rev transfers to Salt River High to solve the death of a dead student. He has his hands full trying to outwit the police, negotiate the school's social hierarchy, and get paid.

 

Shot Through Velvet by Ellen Byerrum. 

When Rod Gibbs is found murdered and blue in a dye vat, Lacey Smithsonian has to solve her seventh Crime of Fashion mystery.

 

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon.

Four horses to run four races to pull off a simple, reasonably profitable scam shouldn't it?  Then it turns into something a lot worse on the backwater track of Indian Mound Downs, West Virginia.

 

The Hunger Games Series by Suzanne Collins. 

In a future dystopian America, teens are forced to fight to the death in entertainments broadcast to the nation.  The teens are tough, smart survivors--some of them.

 

Sweeping Up Glass by Caroline Wall. 

In Depression-era Kentucky, Olivia takes care of her grandson William and her mentally ill mother.  Then William's mother comes back to take the boy to Hollywood to make him a star.

 

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. 

Henry fell in love with Keiko in 1942 in elementary school, but she was Japanese, and he was Chinese.  The bittersweet story alternates between their childhood story then and his life 40 years later.

 

When the Thrill Is Gone by Walter Mosely. 

Leonid McGill's job as a PI is difficult enough, and his complicated family life isn't helping.  Then a billionaire's beautiful wife wants him to protect her from her husband, and a very dangerous bad man asks him for a favor it would be a very bad idea to refuse. 

 

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosely.

Ptolemy Grey gets a second chance at life at the age of 91, but the experimental procedure will kill him before he sees 92.  Even so, he has enough time to solve and avenge a contemporary murder and possibly settle a score from his own youth before dementia and death close down on him forever.

 

The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan.

After Julius Kane’s experiment at the British Museum unleashes the Egyptian god Set, he disappears into a sarcophagus. His desperate children, Carter and Sadie, embark on a dangerous quest to save him, defeat Set—and discover the truth about their family. The 1st volume in the Kane Chronicles series.

 

Rot and Ruin by Jonathan Maberry. 

A zombie story with a heart--we're just not saying whose.

 

Side Jobs by Jim Butcher. 

Some of Harry Dresden's shorter adventures.  Need we say more?

 

Though Not Dead by Dana Stabenow. 

Kate Shugak's case deals not only with the present time, but the Alaskan past that shapes what people are doing there today.

 

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown. 

When your scholarly dad names you after Shakespearean heroines and pretty much ignores you in childhood, you're going to be a little off.  When all three of you can't deal with life and decide to go home and nurse your ailing mother, you're going to have to face things eventually.  Watch what Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia do when they have to face things and each other after all these years.

 

Kitty Goes to War by Carrie Vaughn. 

Coyotes and werewolves and soldiers, oh my!

 

The Full Cupboard of Life by Alexander McCall-Smith. 

Falling in love and getting married is quite a bit like reading in the newspaper one morning that you’ve been volunteered—without your knowledge and against your will—to do a parachute-jump for charity.  And you don’t know the first thing about parachutes. #5 in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series.  The audiobook version is read by Lisette Lecat, whose South African accent adds to the richness of the story.

 

Room by Emma Donoghue. 

Jack and his ma spend the first 5 years of his life cooped up in a 12X12 shed.  They escape and try to adjust to a real world complete with a 24-hour news cycle that tries to devour them.

 

 

NONFICTION

Jump to FICTION | Back to TOP

CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap:  Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD by Edward Hallowell. 

Feeling a little like you're the quarry in a high-speed chase?  Strangling in stuff? Hallowell knows how you feel and can offer you some ideas that just may help.

 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. 

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, died of cervical cancer.  Before she died, some of her cells were taken for medical experiments without her family's knowledge or consent.  Known as the HeLa line, they have been used in medical advances from polio vaccines to AIDS treatments.  Skloot details both the medical advances the cells made possible and how eventually awareness of what the cells had done for all people came to help her family come to terms with Mrs. Lacks's untimely death.

 

The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean. 

Science is not dull if done correctly, and the people who discovered the elements in the periodic table did it correctly, even if they were a little unhinged personally.  There are stories of politics, crime, profit, and human folly on small and large scales here, and even the most determined non-scientist can find fun and information.

 

Here's Looking at Euclid:  A Surprising Excursion through the Astonishing World of Math by Alex Bellos. 

Yes, it's about math, and no, you shouldn't run the other way.  British journalist Bellos explores the side roads and practical applications of math, including the history of Sudoku, why not all gamblers make money, and how mathematicians do what they do and why they love it.  It may not send you back to math class, but that urge to scream and flee when you see an equation will go away.

 

The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us about What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian. 

If you took a Turing Test could you tell the difference between a human being and a computer?  Could you select the most human computer and the most human human?  Christian participated in the 2009 Turing Test in England and along the way found out more than he thought he would about how we interact with machines and what it means to be human.

 

Temple Grandin

A dramatized version of the life of an autistic girl who was able to use her condition to become an expert in animal behavior.  You might also find Thinking in Pictures, her autobiography, interesting.

 

True Compass by Edward Kennedy. 

He buried all of his brothers and very nearly destroyed his career and family through his passions and his ego.  In time, he became the patriarch of America's most famous political family and a respected statesman in his own right.

 

 

 

 

The Art of Eating In:  How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove by Cathy Erway. 

It may be cheaper to eat in than out, but how do you get a date if you don't eat out?  This memoir with recipes will give you an idea of how.

 

Inside the Outbreaks:  The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service by Mark Pendergrast. 

Tells the story of the Epidemic Intelligence Service that tracks down everything from outbreaks of food poisoning at church picnics to pandemics that kill millions using science, statistics, and pure nerve.

 

About a Mountain by John D'Agata. 

A tale of the politics and passions surrounding the proposal to entomb radioactive waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain, which may be the least suitable mountain in the area for storing nuclear waste.

 

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes:  Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession by David Grann. 

A collection of Grann's New Yorker essays on crimes, obsessions, and people who are just plain strange.

 

On the Altar of Freedom:  A Black Soldier's Civil War Letters from the Front by James Henry Gooding. 

Gooding serves in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, immortalized in the movie Glory.  His letters tell the story from the point of view of the soldier in the ranks.

 

I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections by Nora Ephron. 

Funny, pithy essays from one of the Boomer generation's premier wits.

 

Jump to FICTION | Jump to NONFICTION | Back to TOP