Friends of the Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries

What did I read, you ask?  My summer reading list played out thusly:

• Collected Millar: The Master at her Zenith: Vanish in an Instant, Wives and Lovers, Beast in View, An Air that Kills, The Listening Walls by Margaret Millar
• Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama, translated from the Japanese by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul
• Selected Poems by Derek Walcott, edited by Edward Baugh
• Without A Hero: Stories by by T. Coraghessan Boyle
• The Road to Wellville by T. Coraghessan Boyle
• The Women: a Novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle

I’m about halfway through The Women A Novel, and when I’m done with that, it’s off to Robert Lowell and autumnal reading…

The University of California publishes wonderful summer reading lists for their incoming students (found at http://reading.berkeley.edu).  This summer’s list for the class of 2021 is grouped together under the heading “What Can We Change in a Single Generation?”  Selected by students, faculty, these titles ask that question in a number of ways, and on this early August day there’s still time to work through a summer reading list:

• A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg
• Forked: A New Standard in American Dining by Saru Jayaraman
• Borderwall as Architecture by Ronald Rael
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• The Study Qu’ran: A New Translation and Commentary by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
• Nonsense the Power of Not Knowing by Jamie Holmes
• Hag-seed: The Tempest Retold by Margaret Atwood
• Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee
• Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook
• Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy by Kevin Bales
• Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert Putnam
• Paying The Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream by Sara Goldrick-Rab
• Making Sense of Science: Separating Substance from Spin by Sara Goldrick-Rab
• The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono
• Why I Write Books by George Orwell
• Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Brown
• Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
• Design When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Social Innovation by Ezio Manzini

Interlibrary loan those we don’t have!  Happy California dreaming and reading…

This time a listening list.  Turning again to NPR, who, back on July 24th, published their 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women list (the link is to the top ten).  It covers pop, rock, country, R & B, and jazz albums.  To cut to the chase (or to spoil the suspense, depending on how you look at it), Joni Mitchell’s Blue takes the top spot, while I could quarrel with that (and with Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love being buried somewhere in the mid-forties), this is an heroic undertaking, a thoughtful compilation (with well written notes for each record), and lots of good suggestions for something to either put on the turntable or fill the iPhone headphones on a summer afternoon or evening.

Every week the Wall Street Journal has been publishing a summer reading list.  On July 22nd, it went like this:

• The Creative Spark by Agustín Fuentes
• Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony by Kevin Laland
• The Trial of Adolph Hitler by David King
• Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy by Paul Cantor
• Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Paul Kean
• A Mind At Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
• Person’s Unknown by Susie Steiner
• Dream Colony by Walter Hopps
• Why? What Makes Us Curious by Mario Livio

You’ll need Interlibrary Loan to connect with our reading friends at the WSJ, but remember, ILL is an easy option (requiring but a little patience)…happy reading!

Writing in “Library Babel Fish,” her occasional column for Inside Higher Education on July 20th (today!) Librarian par excellence Barbara Fister describes her interest in crime fiction.  It’s a lovely short piece on a reader’s life, a taste inherited from her mother that has propelled her through the labyrinthian libraries of crime writing, of police procedurals.  She provides a short list of titles that are on her mind now:

• The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler
• Lockdown by Laurie King
• The Dry by Jane Harper
• Bluebird Bluebird by Attica Locke

Two of the three titles not the the SLU Libraries are available through the Canton Free Library, and even the illusive Bluebird Bluebird can be tracked down through Interlibrary Loan.  Happy reading!

Cleaning in my office last Friday I came upon the type of document one comes upon cleaning one’s office (if one is a librarian).  It is titled “Joshua Foer on Memory: The Best-Selling Author and 2006 Memory Champion Picks Five Unforgettable Books About the Art of Remembering.”  I must confess to not knowing really anything about Mr. Foer, but he’s picked five very interesting books about the physiology and cultural significance of memory:

• The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates
• The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture by Mary J. Carruthers
• Memory in Oral Traditions: the Cognitive Psychology of Counting-Out Rhymes, Ballads, and Epic by David C. Rubin
• Metaphors of Memory by Douwe Draaisma
• The Mind of a Mnemonist by A. R. Luria translated from the Russian by Lynn Solotaroff

The one title we don’t have by Draaisma is available through ConnectNY.  I might also add the 1805 version of The Prelude by William Wordsworth.  Memory and its relation to how we build our personalities was of central importance to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, and The Prelude articulates their collective study with the most eloquence.  But not the 1799 Prelude, not the 1850 Prelude, the 1805 Prelude, trust me.

Full disclosure, I have only been the Upper Peninsula of Michigan a few times, but as a long time fan of Jim Harrison’s writing I have a fondness for the place.  Well, for the idea of the place…much of Harrison’s work is set in his native UP and the quintessential Jim Harrison hero–an angst-ridden native of Northern Michigan estranged from a love he is not entirely over on the cusp of a mid-life crisis hard drinking male–is one of the great heroic types in contemporary American literature.  In paddling across that Lake Superior otherwise known as the Internet, I came across this list of 2017 Bestsellers from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and I couldn’t resist.  So here, without further ado, are the top UP books of 2017:

• The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
• Exit Strategy: A Nick Mason Novel, The Second Life of Nick Mason, and A Cold Day In Paradise by Steve Hamilton
• The Things We Do that Make No Sense: Stories by Adam Schuitema
• A Really Big Lunch by Jim Harrison with an introduction by Mario Batali
• 100 Things to Do in the Upper Peninsula Before you Die by Kath Usitalo
• Goat Fish and Lover’s Knot by Jack Driscoll
• LaRose: A Novel by Louise Erdrich
• The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway

I must confess to being a little unsure why the Hemingway collection makes the list, and while all the titles not in the SLU Libraries are attainable through Interlibrary Loan, give your favorite Interlibrary Loan office a little time to chase down the Kath Usitalo title!  Happy reading…

Ah, to put down one’s money and take up a book–JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management has published their summer reading list.  It’s quite a list, and, would be, a fine group of non-fiction books to spend whatever time it took (away from one’s ticker tape) to read:

• Climate of Hope by Michael Bloomberg & Carl Pope
• Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson
• Madame President: the Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf by Helene Cooper
• The Photo Ark: One Man’s Quest to Document the World’s Animals by Joel Sartore,  foreword by Harrison Ford
• The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and more Creative by Florence Williams
• One Buck at a Time: An Insider’s Account of How Dollar Tree Remade American Retail by Macon Brock (with Earl Swift)
• A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haas
• Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas by Steven Poole
• Unforgettable The Bold Flavors of Paula Wolfert’s Renegade Life by Emily Kaiser Thelin
• Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World by Rachel Ignotofsky

Titles not in ODY can be easily borrowed through Interlibrary Loan, the Interlibrary Loan Office is open all summer long.

The Washington Post (picking a major American newspaper somewhat at random) has published its list of summer reading books.  The list features all genres, among the fiction recommend on the list is:

• American War by Omar El Akkad
• Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
• A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates
• Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid
• Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel by George Saunders
• The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
• No One is Coming To Save Us: A Novel by Stephanie Powell Watts
• Not A Sound by Park Row
• Saints for All Occasions by J Courtney Sullivan
• Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki

All of the titles not held by the SLU Libraries are available through the Canton Free Library.