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Staff Favorites 2016

From children's books to biographies, science fiction to Pulitzer Prize winning novels, here are the favorite books read by the Silas Bronson Library staff in 2016.

 

Note: Links to eBooks and Downloadable Audiobooks work may not work in Internet Explorer.

 

Biography

 

 

 

John Lewis, March

This graphic novel is a first-hand account of Congressman John Lewis' lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation.

 

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Book (Volume 1)
Book (Volume 2)

 

 

Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person

The instant New York Times bestseller from the creator of Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal and executive producer of How to Get Away With Murder shares how saying YES changed her life. “As fun to read as Rhimes’s TV series are to watch” (Los Angeles Times).

 

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Book
CD Audiobook
eBook

   
   

 

Children's Books

 
   

 

 

Holly Black, The Bronze Key

Book 3 of the New York Times bestselling series that defies what you think you know about the worlds of good and evil.

 

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Book

 

Steve Jenkins & Robin Page, Flying Frogs and Walking Fish

Explore unusual animal locomotion through incredible art and fascinating facts from the Caldecott Honor-winning team Steve Jenkins and Robin Page.

Reading Level: K - Grade 3

 

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Book

 

 

 

 

Andrea Davis Pinkney, A Poem for Peter: The Story of Jack Ezra Keats and the Creation of the The Snowy Day

A celebration of the extraordinary life of Ezra Jack Keats, creator of The Snowy Day. Illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher.

Picture Book.

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Book

 

 

 

 

 

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Based on an original new story by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne, a new play by Jack Thorne, this is the eighth story in the Harry Potter series and the first official Harry Potter story to be presented on stage.

 

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Book
eBook

   
 

Fiction

 

 

 

Robyn Carr, The Life She Wants

#1 New York Times bestselling author Robyn Carr brings together a poignant novel with a rich tapestry of characters. A moving story that will leave the reader laughing and crying, as two friends confront their pasts and move towards their futures.

 

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Book

 

 

 

 Colin Cotterill, I Shot the Buddha

The latest installation in the Dr. Siri mystery books set in Laos and Thailand during the late 1970s.

 

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Book

 

 

 

Catherine Coulter, Insidious

FBI agents Savich and Sherlock must discover who is trying to murder eighty-six-year-old Venus Rasmussen, a powerful, wealthy society icon. They soon find out that the danger may be closer than expected...

 

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Book
CD Audiobook

 

 

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the novel focuses on a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

 

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Book
Large Print Book
CD Audiobook
eBook
Downloadable Audiobook

 

 

 

 

 

Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

The #1 New York Times Bestseller, USA Today Book of the Year (2015), now a major motion picture starring Emily Blunt. The debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives.

 

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Book
Large Print Book
CD Audiobook
eBook
Downloadable Audiobook

 

 

Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

The story follows Hetty "Handful" Grimke, a Charleston slave, and Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Grimke family. The novel begins on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership over Handful, who is to be her handmaid.

 

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Book
CD Audiobook
eBook

 

 

 

 

 

Karen Kingsbury, Brush of Wings 

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Karen Kingsbury comes the third novel in an unforgettable series about divine intervention and the trials and triumphs of life for a group of friends. Part of the Angels Walking Christian fiction series.

 

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Book
Large Print Book

 

 

Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

The long-awaited sequel to the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

 

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Book
Large Print Book
eBook
Downloadable Audiobook

 

 

Charles Monagan, Carrie Welton

The fictionalized life of a Waterbury legend. Eighteen-year-old Carrie Welton is restless, unhappy, and ill-suited to the conventions of nineteenth-century New England. When she is presented with an opportunity to escape is a socially approved manner, she leaps at the chance.

 

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Book

 

 

Walter Mosley, Charcoal Joe: An Easy Rawlins Mystery

Walter Mosley’s indelible detective Easy Rawlins is back, with a new detective agency and a new mystery to solve in L.A. during the late 1960s.

 

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Book
CD Audiobook

 

 

James Patterson, 15th Affair

Filled with the pulse-pounding intrigue that has made James Patterson the world's #1 bestselling writer, 15th Affair is an emotionally charged story that proves all is fair in love, war, and espionage.

 

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Book
CD Audiobook
eBook
Downloadable Audiobook

 

 

Jodi Picoult, Small Great Things

A woman and her husband admitted to a hospital to have a baby requests that their nurse be reassigned - they are white supremacists and don't want Ruth, who is black, to touch their baby. The hospital complies, but the baby later goes into cardiac distress when Ruth is on duty. She hesitates before rushing in to perform CPR.

 

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Book
eBook

   
 

Non-Fiction

 
   

 

 

Ta-Nahisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States” (The New York Observer).

 

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Book
CD Audiobook
eBook

 

 

Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America

In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg upends history as we know it by taking on our comforting myths about equality and uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash.

 

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Book
CD Audiobook

 

 

Sandeep Juahar, Intern: A Doctor's Initiation

A cardiologist offers an account of his internship and residency at a busy New York City hospital, detailing the brutal hours in a medical establishment that seems to place patients' concerns last, as well as his own experiences on the other side as a patient himself.

 

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Book


 

Janet Maher, Waterbury Irish: From the Emerald Isle to the Brass City

Detailed research and oral histories from living descendants bring to light the remarkable Waterbury Irish legacy

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Book

 

J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.

 

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Book
eBook
Downloadable AudioBook

 

 

 

Science Fiction/Fantasy

 
 

Pierce Brown, Morning Star

The conclusion of the Red Rising trilogy. Born a lowly Red in the mines of Mars, Darrow lost his beloved wife to the treacherous Gold overlords. Vowing to fight for the future that his wife believed in, Darrow joins a secret revolutionary group.

 

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Book

   

Teen/Young Adult

 
 

Wolfgang Herrndorf, Why We Took the Car

Mike Klingenberg is a troubled fourteen-year-old from a disfunctional family in Berlin who thinks of himself as boring, so when a Russian juvenile delinquent called Tschick begins to pay attention to him and include Mike in his criminal activities, he is excited--until those activities lead to disaster on the autobahn.

 

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Book