Heidi Murkoff

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

California

A completely revised and updated edition of America’s pregnancy bible, the longest-running New York Times bestseller ever. With 18.5 million copies in print, What to Expect When You’re Expecting is read by 93% of women who read a pregnancy book and was named one of the “Most Influential Books of the Last 25 Years” by USA Today. This cover-to-cover (including the cover!) new edition is filled with must-have information, advice, insight, and tips for a new generation of moms and dads. With What to Expect’s trademark warmth, empathy, and humor, it answers every conceivable question expecting parents could have, including dozens of new ones based on the ever-changing pregnancy and birthing practices and choices they face. Advice for dads is fully integrated throughout the book. All medical coverage is completely updated, including the latest on Zika virus, prenatal screening, and the safety of medications during pregnancy, as well as a brand-new section on postpartum birth control. Current lifestyle trends are incorporated, too: juice bars, raw diets, e-cigarettes, push presents, baby bump posting, the lowdown on omega-3 fatty acids, grass-fed and organic, health food fads, and GMOs. Plus expanded coverage of IVF pregnancy, multiple pregnancies, breastfeeding while pregnant, water and home births, and cesarean trends (including VBACs and “gentle cesareans”).

What to Expect When You're Expecting

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Gerald W. Haslam

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Literature from the Golden State

Haslam divides the state into five regions, selecting prose and poetry from each that reflects their history, terrain, and culture. Many Califonias features sixty-seven authors ranging from Jack London to Maxine Hong Kingston, making it the most diverse general-interest anthology available.

Many Californias

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D. J. Waldie

A Suburban Memoir

Describing childhood in suburban California, a poignant portrait of growing up in the grid of tract houses and carefully measured streets illustrates the good, the bad, and the difficulties found in being ordinary.

Holy Land

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Dimitri Keriotis

In the same vein as Paul Theroux and Robert Olen Butler, some of these stories take place in foreign countries--Zaire (Congo) and Greece--and center on interactions between a host nation and an American visitor. Others are set in the US in the modes of Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff, focusing on human relationships. Each story reveals a main character's moral center in the face of unexpected events, some of which seem trivial, others vital.

The Quiet Time

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Robert O. Self

Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland

A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar Oakland As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension. American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership. Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America.

American Babylon

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Frances Burnett

Sara's life at Miss Minchin's London boarding school changes drastically when her father dies leaving her penniless.

A Little Princess

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Héctor Tobar

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

ANew York TimesNotable Book for 2011
ABoston GlobeBest Fiction Book of 2011
 
The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves—a twenty-first century, West CoastBonfire of the Vanitiesby the only writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity

WithThe Barbarian Nurseries,Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions.

Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing—unless you count Scott Torres, though you’d never suspect he was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn’t hear, and then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she’s never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable, and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . .

With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience—as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.

The Barbarian Nurseries

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María Amparo Escandón

A Road Novel with Literary License

From the author of L.A. Weather comes “a whimsical, humorous, and passionate mystery that explores the love and hurt of a father and daughter on the run” (Jorge Ramos, News Anchor for Univision). “1,001 nights in a Mexicali women’s prison . . . González and Daughter Trucking Co. is about our compulsion to make events into stories and stories into bridges of understanding.”—John Sayles, Screenwriter and Director Serving a sentence in a prison in Mexico, Libertad González finds a clever way to pass the time with the weekly Library Club, reading to her fellow inmates from whatever books she can find in the prison’s meager supply. The story that emerges, though, has nothing to do with the words printed on the pages. She tells of a former literature professor and fugitive of the Mexican government who reinvents himself as a trucker in the United States. There he falls in love with a wild woman with whom he shares his truck and his life—that is until Joaquín González unexpectedly finds himself alone on the road with a baby girl and González & Daughter Trucking Co. is born. Joaquín and his daughter make the cab of an 18-wheeler their home, sharing everything—adventures, books, truck-stop chow, and memories of the girl’s mother—until one day the girl grows into a woman, and a chance encounter with one man causes her to rebel against another. With her stories, Libertad enthralls a group of female prisoners every bit as eccentric as the tales she tells. In González and Daughter Trucking Co., bestselling author María Amparo Escandón seamlessly blends together these elements into one compelling and unexpected conclusion that will have you cheering for Libertad and filled with joy.

Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Co

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Gene Luen Yang

Jin Wang starts at a new school where he's the only Chinese-American student. When a boy from Taiwan joins his class, Jin doesn't want to be associated with an FOB like him. Jin just wants to be an all-American boy, because he's in love with an all-American girl. Danny is an all-American boy: great at basketball, popular with the girls. But his obnoxious Chinese cousin Chin-Kee's annual visit is such a disaster that it ruins Danny's reputation at school, leaving him with no choice but to transfer somewhere he can start all over again. The Monkey King has lived for thousands of years and mastered the arts of kung fu and the heavenly disciplines. He's ready to join the ranks of the immortal gods in heaven. But there's no place in heaven for a monkey. Each of these characters cannot help himself alone, but how can they possibly help each other? They're going to have to find a way--if they want fix the disasters their lives have become. American Born Chinese is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, an Eisner Award nominee for Best Coloring and a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

American Born Chinese

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Sherman Alexie

Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

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Toni Morrison

Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is haunted persistently by the ghost of the dead baby girl whom she sacrificed, in a new edition of the Nobel Laureate's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 60,000 first printing.

Beloved

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Joan Didion

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: In this "arresting amalgam of memoir and historical timeline" (The Baltimore Sun), Didion--a native Californian--reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history, and ours.

Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to California's ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic's often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California's romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.

Whether she is writing about her pioneer ancestors or privileged sexual predators, robber barons or writers (not excluding herself), Didion is an unparalleled observer, and this book is at once intellectually provocative and deeply personal.

Where I Was From

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Christopher Paul Curtis

The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watson, an African American Family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.

Mara Montano

@mara’s_library

Books Listed

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Heidi Murkoff

What to Expect When You're Expecting

Gerald W. Haslam

Many Californias

D. J. Waldie

Holy Land

Dimitri Keriotis

The Quiet Time

Robert O. Self

American Babylon

Frances Burnett

A Little Princess

Héctor Tobar

The Barbarian Nurseries

María Amparo Escandón; María Amparo Escandón

Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Co

Gene Luen Yang

American Born Chinese

Sherman Alexie

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Toni Morrison

Beloved

Joan Didion

Where I Was From

Christopher Paul Curtis

The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963

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Heidi Murkoff

What to Expect When You're Expecting

Gerald W. Haslam

Many Californias

D. J. Waldie

Holy Land

Dimitri Keriotis

The Quiet Time

Robert O. Self

American Babylon

Frances Burnett

A Little Princess

Héctor Tobar

The Barbarian Nurseries

María Amparo Escandón; María Amparo Escandón

Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Co

Gene Luen Yang

American Born Chinese

Sherman Alexie

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Toni Morrison

Beloved

Joan Didion

Where I Was From

Christopher Paul Curtis

The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963

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