The Library Director’s 2020 Book List Continued | Arlington Public Library

1) Bad feminist: essays

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Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

"Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink-all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue." In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers...

2) Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street

Author

Melville, Herman

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Description

Regarded as one of the greatest novellas ever written, Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener follows a nondescript law clerk, Bartleby, who takes a stand against the tyranny of modern life and makes an art form out of nonconformity in the process. A must-read for fans of classic American literature.

3) Black swan green: a novel

Author

Mitchell, David

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

A meditative novel of a young boy on the cusp of adulthood follows a single year in the life of thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor as he grows up in what is for him the sleepiest village in Worcestershire, England, in 1982.

4) The fire next time

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Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

Contains a letter to Baldwin's nephew on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Also describes his childhood, views on Black Muslims, and his visions.

5) Girl, woman, other

Author

Evaristo, Bernardine

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Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

"Girl, Woman, Other is a celebration of the diversity of Black British experience. Moving, hopeful, and inventive, this extraordinary novel is a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her black lesbian identity; her...

Author

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Book, Audiobook on CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

The story of six human beings who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. The author follows the course of their lives hour by hour, day by day. The New Yorker Magazine of August 31, 1946 devoted all its space to this story and the immediate repercussions were vast. Almost four decades after the original publication of this book, John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told and records...

7) In the dream house: a memoir

Author

Machado, Carmen Maria

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure:...

8) Just mercy: a story of justice and redemption

Author

Stevenson, Bryan

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama recounts his experiences as a lawyer working to assist those desperately in need, reflecting on his pursuit of the ideal of compassion in American justice.

9) Man's search for meaning

Author

Frankl, Viktor E

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

In this work, a Viennese psychiatrist tells his grim experiences in a German concentration camp which led him to logotherapy, an existential method of psychiatry. This work has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 the author, a psychiatrist labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished....

10) My losing season

Author

Description

The author reflects on his days at a South Carolina military college. He recalls his love of basketball and its value to him as a means of self-expression, and shares experiences that shed new light on his novel "The Great Santini."

11) The nickel boys: a novel

Author

Whitehead, Colson

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood...

12) No visible bruises: what we don't know about domestic violence can kill us

Author

Snyder, Rachel Louise

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

"[The author] explores America's epidemic of domestic violence and how it has been misunderstood, sharing insights into what domestic violence portends about other types of violence and what countermeasures are needed today." "An award-winning journalist's intimate investigation of the true scope of domestic violence, revealing how the roots of America's most pressing social crises are buried in abuse that happens behind closed doors. We call it...

13) Red at the bone

Author

Woodson, Jacqueline

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

"Two familes from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier,...

14) Rule of the bone: a novel

Author

Description

The education of Chappie Dorset, 14, thrown out of the house by his mother for stealing from her to buy pot. He drifts from gang to gang and ends up in Jamaica where he meets his drug-dealing father. A voyage of discovery at the end of which he decides to "get my shit together for the future."

15) The second mountain: the quest for a moral life

Author

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Type

Description

In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to...

16) Slaughterhouse-five, or, The children's crusade: a duty-dance with death

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Formats:

Book, Audiobook on CD, eAudiobook

Description

A fourth-generation German-American is tortured by his memories of the firebombing of Dresden in 1944 which he witnessed while a prisoner or war.

17) Sula

Author

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Type

Description

Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their...

18) The Topeka School: A Novel

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eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A TIME, GQ, Vulture, and WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
Winner

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19) The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

Author

Gladstone, Brooke

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Description

Every week on the public radio show On the Media, the award-winning journalist Brooke Gladstone analyzes the media and how it shapes our perceptions of the world. Now, from her front-row perch on the day’s events, Gladstone brings her genius for making insightful, unexpected connections to help us understand what she calls—and what so many of us can acknowledge having—“trouble with reality.”
Reality, as she...

20) The woman's hour: the great fight to win the vote

Author

Weiss, Elaine F

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, Large Type

Description

Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade. The opposing forces include politicians with careers at stake, liquor companies, railroad magnates, and a lot of racists who don't want black women voting. And then there are the "Antis"--women...