Geraldine Brooks

old library edition that has been passed around a lot. cover is a bit rough but pages are great. 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Illinois

A Novel

People of the Book

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Andrea Abreu

Julia Sanches

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

"[A] firecracker of a debut . . . Abreu's novel, in Julia Sanches's sparkling translation, is a revelation, perfectly capturing a festering summer of meltdowns and shrinking horizons."
--The New York Times

My Brilliant Friend meets Blue is the Warmest Color in this lyrical debut novel set in a working-class neighborhood of the Canary Islands--a story about two girls coming of age in the early aughts and a friendship that simmers into erotic desire over the course of one hot summer.

High near the volcano of northern Tenerife, an endless ceiling of cloud cover traps the working class in an abject, oppressive heat. Far away from the island's posh resorts, two girls dream of hitching a ride down to the beach and escaping their horizonless town. 

It's summer, 2005, and our ten-year-old narrator is consumed by thoughts of her best friend Isora. Isora is rude and bossy, but she's also vivacious and brave; grownups prefer her, and boys do, too. That's why sometimes she gets jealous of Isora, who already has hair on her vagina and soft, round breasts. But she's definitely not jealous that Isora's mother is dead, nor that Isora's fat, foul-mouthed grandmother has her on a diet, so that she is constantly sticking her fingers down her throat. Besides, she would do anything for Isora: gorge herself on cakes when her friend wants to watch, follow her to the bathroom when she takes a shit, log into chat rooms to swap dirty instant messages with strangers. But increasingly, our narrator finds it hard to keep up with Isora, who seems to be growing up at full tilt without her--and as her submissiveness veers into a painful sexual awakening, desire grows indistinguishable from intimate violence.

Braiding prose poetry with bachata lyrics and the gritty humor of Canary dialect, Dogs of Summer is a story of exquisite yearning, a brutal picture of girlhood and a love song written for the vital community it portrays.

Dogs of Summer

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Dorothy Strachey

André Aciman

"I read Olivia many, many times, bought it for many of my friends, and consider it the inspiration for Call Me by Your Name." --André Aciman

"Perfectly captures the breathless excitement of adolescent passion." --Sarah Waters, bestselling author of Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet

The classic novel about a teenage girl's infatuation with her headmistress at a boarding school in nineteenth-century Paris

A Penguin Classic

A groundbreaking, passionate, and subtle story of first love, Olivia--based loosely on the author's own life--was first published in 1949 under a pseudonym. It tells the story of Olivia, a sixteen-year-old girl who is sent from England to a Parisian finishing school to broaden her education. Soon after her arrival, she finds herself falling under the spell of her beautiful and charismatic teacher, Mademoiselle Julie, who introduces her to art, literature, and fine cuisine. But Mademoiselle Julie's life is not as straightforward as Olivia imagines. As they grow closer, their relationship is threatened by jealousy and rivalry, and the school year seems destined to end in tragedy.

Olivia

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Victor Davis Hanson

A State of Becoming

Part history, part political analysis and part memoir, Mexifornia is an intensely personal work by one of our most important writers. Hanson is perhaps best known for his military histories and especially his social commentary about America and its response to terror after 9/11, but he is also a fifth-generation Californian who runs a family farm in the Central Valley and has written eloquent elegies on the decline of the small farm, Fields Without Dreams and The Land Was Everything. Like those books, Mexifornia ponders what has changed in California over the last quarter-century. This time, Hanson's concern is how the state, the Southwest more broadly, and indeed the entire nation have been altered by America's hemorrhaging borders, and how our disordered immigration policies are perhaps most harmful to the Mexican immigrants who come seeking a better life.

Mexifornia

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Patricia Engel

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK AND INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A knockout of a novel…we predict [Infinite Country] will be viewed as one of 2021’s best.” —O, The Oprah Magazine Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 from Esquire, O, The Oprah Magazine, Elle, GMA, New York Post, Ms. Magazine, The Millions, Electric Literature, LitHub, AARP, Refinery29, BuzzFeed, Autostraddle, She Reads, Alma, and more. I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country. Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Colombia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the United States are waiting for her. If she misses her flight, she might also miss her chance to finally be reunited with her family in the north. How this family came to occupy two different countries, two different worlds, comes into focus like twists of a kaleidoscope. We see Talia’s parents, Mauro and Elena, fall in love in a market stall as teenagers against a backdrop of civil war and social unrest. We see them leave Bogotá with their firstborn, Karina, in pursuit of safety and opportunity in the United States on a temporary visa, and we see the births of two more children, Nando and Talia, on American soil. We witness the decisions and indecisions that lead to Mauro’s deportation and the family’s splintering—the costs they’ve all been living with ever since. Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engel, herself a dual citizen and the daughter of Colombian immigrants, gives voice to all five family members as they navigate the particulars of their respective circumstances. And all the while, the metronome ticks: Will Talia make it to Bogotá in time? And if she does, can she bring herself to trade the solid facts of her father and life in Colombia for the distant vision of her mother and siblings in America? Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality of the undocumented in America, Infinite Country is the story of two countries and one mixed-status family—for whom every triumph is stitched with regret, and every dream pursued bears the weight of a dream deferred.

Infinite Country

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Sharon Bala

By the winner of The Journey Prize, and inspired by a real incident, The Boat People is a gripping and morally complex novel about a group of refugees who survive a perilous ocean voyage to reach Canada - only to face the threat of deportation and accusations of terrorism in their new land.
 
When the rusty cargo ship carrying Mahindan and five hundred fellow refugees reaches the shores of British Columbia, the young father is overcome with relief: he and his six-year-old son can finally put Sri Lanka's bloody civil war behind them and begin new lives. Instead, the group is thrown into prison, with government officials and news headlines speculating that hidden among the "boat people" are members of a terrorist militia. As suspicion swirls and interrogation mounts, Mahindan fears the desperate actions he took to survive and escape Sri Lanka now jeopardize his and his son's chances for asylum.
            Told through the alternating perspectives of Mahindan; his lawyer Priya, who reluctantly represents the migrants; and Grace, a third-generation Japanese-Canadian adjudicator who must decide Mahindan's fate, The Boat People is a high-stakes novel that offers a deeply compassionate lens through which to view the current refugee crisis. Inspired by real events, with vivid scenes that move between the eerie beauty of northern Sri Lanka and combative refugee hearings in Vancouver, where life and death decisions are made, Sharon Bala's stunning debut is an unforgettable and necessary story for our times.

The Boat People

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Heidi E. Spear

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A Beginners Guide to Healing

Chakras

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Henry David Thoreau

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A man retreats into the woods and discovers the joys of solitude and nature.

Walden

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Stephon Alexander

The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

More than fifty years ago, John Coltrane drew the twelve musical notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane put physics and geometry at the core of his music. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander follows suit, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe. Following the great minds that first drew the links between music and physics-a list including Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Rakim-The Jazz of Physics reveals that the ancient poetic idea of the Music of the Spheres," taken seriously, clarifies confounding issues in physics. The Jazz of Physics will fascinate and inspire anyone interested in the mysteries of our universe, music, and life itself.

The Jazz of Physics

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Ed Morales

The New Force in American Politics and Culture

An “erudite, comprehensive” analysis of Latinx identity in the United States as it relates to American culture, society, and politics (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, author of Racism Without Racists) “Latinx” (pronounced “La-teen-ex”) is the gender-neutral term that covers one of the largest and fastest growing minorities in the United States, accounting for 17 percent of the country. Over 58 million Americans belong to the category, including a sizable part of the country’s working class, both foreign and native-born. Their political empowerment is altering the balance of forces in a growing number of states. And yet Latinx barely figure in America’s ongoing conversation about race and ethnicity. Remarkably, the US census does not even have a racial category for “Latino.” In this groundbreaking discussion, Ed Morales explains how Latinx political identities are tied to a long Latin American history of mestizaje—“mixedness” or “hybridity”—and that this border thinking is both a key to understanding bilingual, bicultural Latin cultures and politics and a challenge to America’s infamously black–white racial regime. This searching and long-overdue exploration of the meaning of race in American life reimagines Cornel West’s bestselling Race Matters with a unique Latinx inflection.

Latinx

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Jesse Leon

A Memoir

In this unflinching and inspiring memoir, Jesse Leon tells an extraordinary story of resilience and survival, shining a light on a childhood spent devastated by sex trafficking, street life, and substance abuse.

"A book for survivors and those who know someone they hope survives, bodhisattvas all."  --Sandra Cisneros, bestselling author of The House on Mango Street

Born to indigenous working-class Mexican immigrants in San Diego in the 1970s, Jesse Leon's childhood was violently ruptured. A dangerous and harrowing encounter at a local gift shop when he was eleven years old left Jesse with a deadly secret. Hurt, alone, and scared for his life, Jesse numbed his pain by losing himself in the hyper-masculine culture of the streets and wherever else he could find it--in alcohol, drugs, and prostitution. Overlooked by state-sanctioned institutions and systems intended to help victims of abuse, neglected like many other low-income Latinos, Jesse spiraled into cycles of suicide and substance abuse.
 
I'm Not Broken is the heartbreaking and remarkable story of the journey Jesse takes to win back his life, leading him to the steps of Harvard University. From being the lone young person of color in Narcotics Anonymous meetings to coming to terms with his own sexual identity, to becoming an engaged mentor for incarcerated youth, Jesse finds the will to live with the love and support of his family, friends, and mentors. Recounting the extraordinary circumstances of his life, Jesse offers a powerful, raw testament to the possibilities of self-transformation and self-acceptance. Unforgettable, I'm Not Broken is an inspirational portrait of one young man's indomitable strength and spirit to survive--against all possible odds.

I'm Not Broken

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Francisco Cantú

Dispatches from the Border

NAMED A TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 BY NPR and THE WASHINGTON POST
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN CURRENT INTEREST
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NONFICTION AWARD

The instant New York Times bestseller, "A must-read for anyone who thinks 'build a wall' is the answer to anything." --Esquire

For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.

The Line Becomes a River

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Paola Ramos

Some pencil marks within the first 30 pages

In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity

Debut author and journalist Paola Ramos travels to near and far corners of the country in search of Latin-X voices that illustrate a growing movement and represent a community of young Latinos that hold more political, social, and cultural relevance today than ever before

Latinos are the youngest demographic in the country, with an estimated 32.5 million millennials and Gen Zers across the country. Ten out of six Latinos are millennials or younger and, every single year, one million Latinos turn eighteen. Latin-X- How a New Movement is Changing the Country will take millions of young Latinos-including the author herself-on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment, shedding light on the voices that have been brewing yet overlooked for years. From Afro-Latinos to Trans-Latinos, border town Latinos to the young Cuban-Americans in Miami, this book will give life to the cryptic term 'Latin-X'.

Latin-X was a term that originated as a way to be more inclusive towards queer and gender non-confirming members of the larger Latino community. However, over the years, the scope of the term has grown, reflecting a movement that is currently underway across the country- fifty-eight million Latinos are in the midst of rediscovering what their diverse identity means. Today, the "X" is an invitation to any Latino that has ever felt left out of the community. LatinX is a term that seeks to transcend demographics, disrupt stereotypes and create a more cohesive community.

This book is also deeply personal to the author, as it is also the first time she will be coming out publicly as a queer Latina. "I am queer, I am Latina, I am Cuban, Mexican and first-generation American," she says, "These are words I have never been ashamed of saying out loud-but there's a difference between passive recognition and really owning one's blood."

Finding Latinx

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Jon Ronson

"From the author of The Psychopath Test and Lost at Sea, an exploration of shame, one of our world's most overlooked forces. Public shaming as a form of social control, such a big part of our lives it feels weird when there isn't anyone to be furious about. Whole careers are being ruined by one mistake. Our collective outrage at it has the force of a hurricane. Then we all quickly forget about it and move on to the next one, and it doesn't cross our minds to wonder if the shamed person is okay or in ruins. What's it doing to them? An examination of human nature and its flaws"--Publisher's website.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed

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Oliver Sacks

Tales of Music and the Brain

The author draws on the individual experiences of patients, musicians, composers, and ordinary people to explore the complex human response to music and how music can affect those suffering from a variety of ailments.

Musicophilia

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Michael Pollan

A Natural History of Transformation

Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Rules, and How to Change Your Mind, explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen in Cooked. "Having described what's wrong with American food in his best-selling The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), New York Times contributor Pollan delivers a more optimistic but equally fascinating account of how to do it right. . . . A delightful chronicle of the education of a cook who steps back frequently to extol the scientific and philosophical basis of this deeply satisfying human activity." —Kirkus (starred review) Cooked is now a Netflix docuseries based on the book that focuses on the four kinds of "transformations" that occur in cooking. Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney and starring Michael Pollan, Cooked teases out the links between science, culture and the flavors we love. In Cooked, Pollan discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements—fire, water, air, and earth—to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. Each section of Cooked tracks Pollan’s effort to master a single classic recipe using one of the four elements. A North Carolina barbecue pit master tutors him in the primal magic of fire; a Chez Panisse–trained cook schools him in the art of braising; a celebrated baker teaches him how air transforms grain and water into a fragrant loaf of bread; and finally, several mad-genius “fermentos” (a tribe that includes brewers, cheese makers, and all kinds of picklers) reveal how fungi and bacteria can perform the most amazing alchemies of all. The reader learns alongside Pollan, but the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships. Cooking, above all, connects us. The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume large quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. Reclaiming cooking as an act of enjoyment and self-reliance, learning to perform the magic of these everyday transformations, opens the door to a more nourishing life.

Cooked

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Susan Cain

The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Demonstrates how introverted people are misunderstood and undervalued in modern culture, charting the rise of extrovert ideology while sharing anecdotal examples of how to use introvert talents to adapt to various situations.

Quiet

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Kiara Imani

Brilliant debut memoir chronicling Kiara Imani's journey to understand the racial trauma experienced by many Black people in America and the underlying effect it has on Black mental health.

Therapy Isn't Just for White People

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Mark Haddon

Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

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Barry Green

Don Campbell

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Delves into the methodology, techniques, and inspiration needed to enliven music making. Includes activities.

Bringing Music to Life

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Jo Oliver

Catherine Finger

Set back by the cruel exploits of her husband and haunted by an evil presence she can't quite grasp, Police Chief Josie Oliver finds herself drawn into the crosshairs of a vicious serial killer. Fighting for her marriage, faith, and fate, Chief Josie is confronted by an Adversary that only God can conquer--if she decides to let Him in.

Alabaster Vases

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Funke Cornelia

Hetty Hyssop and her assistant ghosthunters travel to a seaside hotel to investigate the appearance of one of the most dangerous ghosts in the world.

The Gruesome Invincible Lightning Ghost!

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A timid boy named Tom reluctantly agrees to help professional ghostbuster Hetty Hyssop dispel an IRG (Incredibly Revolting Ghost) from an old house.

Ghosthunters And The Incredibly Revolting Ghost

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Louis Sachar

Humorous episodes from the classroom on the thirtieth floor of Wayside School, which was accidentally built sideways with one classroom on each story.

Browse by categories

Geraldine Brooks

People of the Book

Andrea Abreu; Julia Sanches

Dogs of Summer

Dorothy Strachey; André Aciman

Olivia

Victor Davis Hanson

Mexifornia

Patricia Engel

Infinite Country

Sharon Bala

The Boat People

Heidi E. Spear

Chakras

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

Stephon Alexander

The Jazz of Physics

Ed Morales

Latinx

Jesse Leon

I'm Not Broken

Francisco Cantú; Francisco Cantú

The Line Becomes a River

Paola Ramos

Finding Latinx

Jon Ronson

So You've Been Publicly Shamed

Oliver Sacks

Musicophilia

Michael Pollan

Cooked

Susan Cain

Quiet

Kiara Imani

Therapy Isn't Just for White People

Mark Haddon

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Barry Green; Don Campbell

Bringing Music to Life

Jo Oliver; Catherine Finger

Alabaster Vases

Funke Cornelia

The Gruesome Invincible Lightning Ghost!

Funke Cornelia

Ghosthunters And The Incredibly Revolting Ghost

Louis Sachar

Sideways Stories from Wayside School

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