2023 - Winter Staff Reads


Showing 1 - 20 of 112  There are a total of 112 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Again and again"
Star rating for Again and again
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Geno is living out his final days in a nursing home, bored, curmudgeonly, and struggling to connect with his nursing assistant, Angel, who he sees as being different from him in every way possible, and unable to understand him in any way. Perhaps no one really can, since Geno has been telling everyone who will listen that he's not just Geno--in fact, he's lived many past lives, dating back 1000 years, and since that first life in Seville, Spain,...
Book cover for "Always, Clementine"
Star rating for Always, Clementine
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
Clementine is different from other mice: she can calculate the speed of light and she dreams in Latin. The scientists say she's a genius and put her through test after test. Clementine is proud of being a good lab mouse, but she's lonely. Her only snatches of friendship occur during her late-night visits with a chimpanzee named Rosie. When a compassionate lab technician frees Clementine, the mouse discovers an outside world full of wonders: Brussels...
Book cover for "The art of X-ray reading"
Star rating for The art of X-ray reading
Description:
Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made. In THE ART OF X-RAY READING, Clark invites you to don your X-ray reading glasses and join him on a guided tour through some of the most exquisite and masterful literary works of all time, from the Great Gatsby to Lolita to The Bluest...
Book cover for "As long as the lemon trees grow"
Star rating for As long as the lemon trees grow
Average Rating:
2.7 stars
Description:
Eighteen-year-old Salama Kassab, a pharmacy student volunteering at the hospital in Homs, is desperate to find passage on a refugee boat for herself and her pregnant best friend, but first she must learn to see the events around her for what they are--not a war, but a revolution.
Book cover for "Babel, or, The necessity of violence"
Star rating for Babel, or, The necessity of violence
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"From award-winning author R.F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious...
Book cover for "The bandit queens"
Star rating for The bandit queens
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"A young Indian woman falsely rumored to have killed her husband finds a way to make her unfortunate reputation surprisingly useful--but complications arise when other village women seek her help offing their husbands--in this provocative, razor-sharp debut. "The Bandit Queens heralds a prodigious and sophisticated literary talent." Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of Inland. In the five years since her husband's disappearance, Geeta...
Book cover for "The bee sting"
Star rating for The bee sting
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car business is going under--but rather than face the music, he's spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to...
Book cover for "Billy Lynn's long halftime walk"
Star rating for Billy Lynn's long halftime walk
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents -- three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew -- has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America's most sought-after heroes. Now they're on a media-intensive nationwide tour to reinvigorate support for the war. On this rainy Thanksgiving Day, the Bravos are guests of the Dallas Cowboys, slated to be part of the halftime show alongside...
Book cover for "The bird way"
Star rating for The bird way
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
""There is the mammal way and there is the bird way." This is one scientist's pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind. But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries. What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their...
Book cover for "Bliss montage"
Star rating for Bliss montage
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
"A new creation by the author of Severance, the stories in Bliss Montage crash through our carefully built mirages"--
Book cover for "A brief history of equality"
Star rating for A brief history of equality
Description:
The world's leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding. A perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books. It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem...
Book cover for "Broken"
Star rating for Broken
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
When Special Agent Will Trent arrives in Grant County, Georgia, he finds a police department determined to protect its own and far too many unanswered questions about a prisoner's death and about a policewoman's role in the death of Grant County's popular police chief.
Book cover for "Caleb's crossing"
Star rating for Caleb's crossing
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"Once again, the author takes a remarkable shard of history and brings it to vivid life. In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, she has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure. The narrator of the story is Bethia Mayfield, growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans. Restless...
Book cover for "The carbon footprint of everything"
Star rating for The carbon footprint of everything
Description:
"An award-winning, practical (and funny) guide to reducing your carbon footprint. Calculate your carbon footprint: with an item-by-item breakdown. Meet your company's carbon goals: using the latest research. Covid-19 and the carbon battle: understand the new global supply chain. The Carbon Footprint of Everything breaks items down by the amount of carbon they produce, creating a calorie guide for the carbon-conscious. With engaging writing, leading...
Book cover for "The cartographers"
Star rating for The cartographers
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
"From the critically acclaimed author of The Book of M, a highly imaginative thriller about a young woman who discovers that a strange map in her deceased father's belongings holds an incredible, deadly secret--one that will lead her on an extraordinary adventure and to the truth about her family's dark history. What is the purpose of a map? Nell Young's whole life and greatest passion is cartography. Her father, Dr. Daniel Young, is a legend in the...
Book cover for "Cheap land Colorado"
Star rating for Cheap land Colorado
Author:
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"From Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Ted Conover, a fascinating portrait of a group of Americans living off-grid"-- In May 2017 Conover went to Colorado to explore a rural way of life cheaply, on his own land -- and keeping clear of the mainstream. But along with independence and stunning views can come fierce winds, neighbors with criminal pasts, and minimal government and medical services. This is...
Book cover for "A dangerous business"
Star rating for A dangerous business
Author:
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author: a rollicking murder mystery set in Gold Rush California, as two young prostitutes follow a trail of missing girls. Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have:...
Book cover for "The daughter of Doctor Moreau"
Star rating for The daughter of Doctor Moreau
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
From the bestselling author of Mexican Gothic and Velvet Was the Night comes a dreamy reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau set against the backdrop of nineteenth- century Mexico. Carlota Moreau: A young woman growing up on a distant and luxuriant estate, safe from the conflict and strife of the Yucatán peninsula. The only daughter of a researcher who is either a genius or a madman. Montgomery Laughton: A melancholic overseer with a tragic past...
Book cover for "Demon Copperhead"
Star rating for Demon Copperhead
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves,...
Book cover for "Dollars for life"
Star rating for Dollars for life
Description:
Ziegler traces how the antiabortion movement helped to forge and later upend the alliance between conservative Christianity and big business in the modern Republican Party. Beginning with the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Buckley V. Valeo, right-to-lifers fought to gain power in the GOP by changing how campaign spending-and the First Amendment-work. The antiabortion movement helped to revolutionize the rules of money in US politics and convinced...