Shelter-in-Place Must Reads From Dominican Librarians

A favorite section of Dominican’s Alemany Library is dedicated to books recommended by our librarians for leisure reading. Many members of our Dominican community enjoy settling into an armchair or a bean bag chair in the cozy ground-floor reading room to get lost in a book. We asked them for some reading recommendations during this shelter-in-place period. Here are their selections:

Gary Gorka, University Librarian Dry by Neal Schusterman and Jerrod Schusterman I am going to recommend a book I didn’t read, but my 13-year-old daughter Elyse just finished. A thrilling, realistic, and ultimately uplifting adventure tale of a Northern California family and their friends as they struggle to survive a widespread — wait. Well, this sure isn’t escapist literature, is it? Actually it is. My daughter was swept away to a different world to watch how heroic (and not-so-heroic) teenagers deal with an unexpected but terrible California drought. It will definitely help your teenagers put their minds on something else, even if that something else is suddenly-all-too familiar. Elyse found it empowering and exciting and it even helped her appreciate her family a little — a great accomplishment at this age.

Kenneth Fish, Coordinator of Interlibrary and Consortia Lending

Knockemstiff

by Donald Ray Pollock A collection of loosely interconnected short stories that the reader assembles as they go along. At times violent and always gritty, each character feels like someone known from your hometown. That poor soul. That family from the other side of the tracks,and so on. The author — the king of the wrong side of the tracks himself — makes these characters come to life, befriending you long enough to steal your wallet, then disappear into the night like a bad dream. Definitely the best of the worst. Nnekay FitzClarke, Reference and Instructional Librarian

Little Fires Everywhere

by Celeste Ng A pulpy page turner that highlights the trials and tribulations among four women of varying economic status. The book starts with a mysterious fire but ends with a deep dive into the racial and political landscape of our country. It is currently a series on Hulu, if you would like to follow up the book with a visual companion.

Ethan Annis, Head of Access and Technical Services, Librarian

Evicted, Poverty and Profit in the

American City by Matthew Desmond This Pulitzer Prize winning book chronicles two landlords' experiences and the plight of eight poor Milwaukee families as they constantly struggle to find housing. Evicted provides an intimate view of poverty in this country. Families often pay 70-80 percent of their income to live in dangerous slums where there are holes in the windows and sewage on the floors. Tenants are too scared to complain and fear retaliation. These stories show that the uncertainty and fear that many middle class and wealthy Americans are experiencing due to the coronavirus epidemic is experienced every day by Americans who are living in poverty. In addition to winning a Pulitzer Prize, Evicted was named one of The New York Times top 10 books of 2016. If you want an intimate, engaging, readable, thoroughly researched book that shows how our country treats its most vulnerable, I wholeheartedly recommend Evicted.

The Broken Earth Trilogy

by N. K. Jemisin As the coronavirus unfurls, I cannot help thinking about N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. The setting of Jemisin's trilogy is a planet that sometimes has a “fifth season.” These are periods when the planet becomes inhospitable to life due to climatic or geological events or plagues. During a fifth season, communities and empires are unprepared and cannot adapt to breakdown. The humans in Jemisin's world are divided into rigid castes, and some humans, called orogenes, have the power to harness geological energy to stop earthquakes and move mountains. Although the orogenes are powerful, they are brutally oppressed, feared, and treated like slaves. The trilogy follows the lives of several oregenes before and during a fifth season. As the society breaks down, normally hidden social/power structures in the society become visible. As the Coronavirus tears through different countries today, we see these different social/ power structures in our world too. For three consecutive years, each book in the trilogy won the Hugo Award; an honor never before achieved by another author. A lengthy article on Jemisin was featured in the January 27, 2020 issue of The New Yorker magazine. From the perspective of world building, the trilogy is a fictional masterpiece, and so much more. It highlights the racism we have in the US today and our structural inequalities from a perspective that is inaccessible through non-fiction.