I could write an entire essay on why I love libraries. I could write an even longer essay why libraries are so important. But those are essays for another day.
Today I’m going to talk about the six books I recently checked out of the library.
I’m so excited to kick off the summer by going to the library, browsing through their entire catalog, and reading as much as I can (even if I do have to work full-time).
But anyway, I love the library, and these are the six book from my latest library book haul.
- Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake
From Goodreads:
Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings.
For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision.
To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that keep him going. Without them, the entire framework of his existence would collapse.
For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability—until the two meet. Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation?
I picked up this book because I’ve seen several people praise Olivie Blake and her books, including Alone With You in the Ether. I also considered checking out Atlas Six, but I’m a mood reader and I think Alone with You in the Ether fits better into my mood. I hope to read Atlas Six one soon, but in the meantime, I’m starting with this one.
- The Summer Seekers by Sarah Morgan
From Goodreads:
Kathleen is eighty years old. After she has a run-in with an intruder, her daughter wants her to move in to a residential home. But she’s not having any of it. What she craves—what she needs—is adventure.
Liza is drowning under the daily stress of family life. The last thing she needs is her mother jetting off on a wild holiday, making Liza long for a solo summer of her own.
Martha is having a quarter-life crisis. Unemployed, unloved and uninspired, she just can’t get her life together. But she knows something has to change.
When Martha sees Kathleen’s advertisement for a driver and companion to share an epic road trip across America, she decides this job might be the answer to her prayers. She’s not the world’s best driver, but anything has to be better than living with her parents. And traveling with a stranger? No problem. Anyway, how much trouble can one eighty-year-old woman be?
As these women embark on the journey of a lifetime, they all discover it’s never too late to start over.
If there’s one thing I love, it’s a book about a summer adventure. I love books about summer, and a book about a group of women chasing the summer adventure? Sign me up!
As soon as I read the title on the spine of this book, I picked up the book. I almost didn’t read the synopsis. I was sold on the title alone.
- Death in her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh
From Goodreads:
A novel of haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is upturned when she finds a cryptic note on a walk in the woods that ultimately makes her question everything about her new home.
While on her normal daily walk with her dog in the forest woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with a frame of stones. “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body”. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to area, having moved her from her longtime home after the death of her husband, and she knows very few people. And she’s a little shaky even on best days. Her brooding about this note quickly grows into a full-blown obsession, and she begins to devote herself to exploring the possibilities of her conjectures about who this woman was and how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and menacing shape. But as we follow her in her investigation, strange dissonances start to accrue, and our faith in her grip on reality weakens, until finally, just as she seems be facing some of the darkness in her own past with her late husband, we are forced to face the prospect that there is either a more innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one – one that strikes closer to home.
A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, ‘Death in Her Hands’ asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both guide us closer to the truth and keep us at bay from it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, only this time the stakes have never been higher.
I’ve only read one Moshfegh book: My Year of Rest and Relaxation and I absolutely loved it. I’m not too familiar with Moshfegh other than the book I’ve read is her most popular book. There are hundreds of people recommending My Year of Rest and Relaxation online, but I haven’t really seen them recommend her other works. Or maybe I’m just on the wrong side of the internet. But either way, when I saw Death in Her Hands, I knew I had to check out the book out of the library and read it.
- Every Summer After by Carley Fortune
From Goodreads:
They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too true. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart.
Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek—the man she never thought she’d have to live without.
For six summers, through hazy afternoons on the water and warm summer nights working in his family’s restaurant and curling up together with books—medical textbooks for him and work-in-progress horror short stories for her—Percy and Sam had been inseparable. Eventually that friendship turned into something breathtakingly more, before it fell spectacularly apart.
When Percy returns to the lake for Sam’s mother’s funeral, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made and the years she’s spent punishing herself for them, they’ll never know whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past.
Told over the course of six years and one weekend, Every Summer After is a big, sweeping nostalgic look at love and the people and choices that mark us forever.
I’m not sure how I came across this book. I could have seen it on social media or just browsing through Amazon or Barnes and Noble. But I’m sure glad I came across it. I’m so excited to read this book. I think it would be a perfect book to read over the summer.
- Paris is Always a Good Idea by Jenn McKinlay
From Goodreads:
It’s been seven years since Chelsea Martin embarked on her yearlong post-college European adventure. Since then, she’s lost her mother to cancer and watched her sister marry twice, while Chelsea’s thrown herself into work, becoming one of the most talented fundraisers for the American Cancer Coalition, and with the exception of one annoyingly competent coworker, Jason Knightley, her status as most talented fundraiser is unquestioned.
When her introverted mathematician father announces he’s getting remarried, Chelsea is forced to acknowledge that her life stopped after her mother died, and that the last time she can remember being happy, in love, or enjoying her life was on her gap year. Inspired to retrace her steps–to find Colin in Ireland, Jean Claude in France, and Marcelino in Italy–Chelsea hopes that one of these three men who stole her heart so many years ago, can help her find it again.
From the start of her journey nothing goes as planned, but as Chelsea reconnects with her old self, she also finds love in the very last place she expected.
I’ve been reading a lot of literary fiction or literary fiction adjacent lately. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not tired of it. I absolutely love literary fiction, but sometimes it’s nice to read a fun book. A book that makes me giggle and feel like I have a crush. I’m hoping that Paris is Always a Good Idea gives me all the giggles.
- The Truth About Tomorrow
From Penguin Random House website:
Macy’s summer stretches before her, carefully planned and outlined. She will spend her days sitting at the library information desk. She will spend her evenings studying for the SATs. Spare time will be used to help her obsessive mother prepare for the big opening of the townhouse section of her luxury development.
But Macy’s plans don’t anticipate a surprising and chaotic job with Wish Catering, a motley crew of new friends, or . . . Wes. Tattooed, artistic, anything-but-expected Wes. He doesn’t fit Macy’s life at all-so why does she feel so comfortable with him? So . . . happy? What is it about him that makes her let down her guard and finally talk about how much she misses her father, who died before her eyes the year before?
Sarah Dessen delivers a page-turning novel that carries readers on a roller coaster of denial, grief, comfort, and love as we watch a broken but resilient girl pick up the pieces of her life and fit them back together.
This is a book I came across the library under the Staff Picks section. I’ve never read a Sarah Dessen novel in my life. Not sure why, really. I suppose it’s because when I was a teen, I was interested in reading fantasy. Now as an adult, I read Sarah Dessen-like books (or at least books I think are like Sarah Dessen books). But I haven’t read a YA novel in such a long time (a conversation for another time). But when I saw The Truth About Forever at the library, there was something about it pulled me in.
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