The Buzz...About Books

Library staff members have selected the best books they read in 2013. This is the first of several blog posts.

Debbie:

Intolerable: a Memoir of Extremes by Kamal Al-Solaylee
• eBook
Quite an insightful memoir. I like how he takes us with him throughout the different countries that he lived in the Middle East.

Fruit by Brian Francis
• eBook
It’s laugh out loud funny, and any book like that deserves to be on a list. It’s nice to read about a gay teenager in small town Ontario that is not all tragic, although full of angst, an encouragement to others that “it does get better.”

Summer School by Domenica de Rosa
What a charming book, and one of those where you are surprised by how good it is. Domenica De Rosa wrote about so many of my favourite subjects in one novel; travel, Italy, Tuscany house, good food, romance, some light comedy, writing, and the publishing industry. It looks light and fluffy on the outside but I was deeply engrossed in it from the start and could not put it down.

Russell:

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• eBook
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)
I really enjoyed Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. It was an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a book. It also contained a heady mixture of the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, etc. etc. Most of the action takes place in a San Francisco bookstore (and a very unusual bookstore, at that) but there are visits to a secret library in New York and the Google campus so the action moves around.

Ellen:

The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• Large Print
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)
A talented baker discovers that a well-liked retired German teacher in her town may have been in charge of the WWII concentration camp whre her grandmother was imprisoned.