NYPL Recommendations

“The music ceased, the whine of the needle on the empty centre of the record so faint it was hardly anything. Still dwelling in his exile, Florian finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in the grass. The sun was slipping away, the evening light becoming dusky. Jessie clambered to her feet when he did, went back with him to the drawing-room, where he lifted the needle off. In the kitchen he put sausages on to fry.” (Love and Summer, p. 61)

But of course it wasn’t finished. It never could be, it never would be, and it never will be.

Welcome back to the Reader’s Den for the final week of our discussion of The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester! The book tells the tale of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), completed in 1928, but as the author notes at the beginning of the epilogue, it can never really be complete, since the English language itself is forever changing.

This past Sunday, I spent the morning in Central Park participating in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. I was not the only librarian there. Turns out, there's a New York Public Library team that walks every year. It was not my first time there, either. This was my third breast cancer walk since moving to New York City three years ago.

So this month, as I asked family and friends for donations, I began thinking about cancer in general. There's a few books that I've read over the last few years that have inspired me to join the fight to end cancer, so I thought I might share a few of these titles with you. While this is by no means a comprehensive list, they are books that will make you think about an issue that affects nearly all of us in one way or another.

With the English-language version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo film due to come out in December of this year, fans of Stieg Larsson who have already seen the Swedish films and read the trilogy may be searching for more. Here is a loosely inspired reading list. For a more comprehensive list of Swedish crime writers, see this blog post on Nordic Whodunits.

Regina Spektor's music, summer nights, and NYC are intertwined inside of me. As the air grows warm, I find myself listening to her music as she sings of summer in the city and selling butterflies on street corners. This summer, I am attending my first American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans. I am bursting with pure joy to visit such a literary and musical city while attending my first professional conference. I have had a few summers in this city, and now I am ready to experience a small slice of another. 

Summer Reading is here! Sign up for Summer Reading at summerreading.org! Find and reserve all books on the NYC Summer Reading book list here:

(Click on winter scenes to enlarge)

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
—Christina Rossetti

As I write this, the temperature is about 60 degrees and winter would seem to be over—although I don’t want to jinx anything by being premature.

Presidents' lives have always been favorite subjects for biographers. Here is a list of the some of the latest examples at the NYPL branches.

Do you have an eReader? Is part of the appeal that it looks like you're living in the future? Have you found yourself wishing for more fantastical books to match your futuristic reading device? 

Look no further.