In August we plunge into nonfiction and novels, movies and music and adventures, fire and water! Here are our recent reads and staff picks for the last bright weeks of summer.
Cindy’s Picks
I have three recommendations for August. Desert Queen is a biography by Jyoti Rajan Gopal that’s lavishly illustrated with a vibrant desert palette by Svabhu Kohli. It’s a beautiful story of a young boy from India who was captivated by dance. He became the drag performer Queen Harish, the “Whirling Desert Queen of Rajasthan”! Desert Queen is a touching (and at times harrowing) story of metamorphosis and self-acceptance.
From author Joshua S. Levy comes The Jake Show, a novel about seventh-grader Jake Lightman, whose parents’ divorce is tearing him in half. His “mother wants him to play the role of ‘Yaakov, a Torah-loving kid who never watches TV.’ His secular father wants ‘Jacob’ to focus on science and math.” As Jake thinks,”There was one thing all versions of me had in common—Yaakov, Jacob, Jake. They were all by the book. No ad-libbing. No improv. This wasn’t reality TV. I couldn’t storm off, scream at the camera, form alliances they’d never expect. This wasn’t a documentary either. The story couldn’t go anywhere, be anything, depending on what I chose to do next. I was a character, not a person. And only people have choices.” But Jake makes two new, awesome friends. When they invite him to go to Camp Gershoni with them for the summer, he knows he has to do it, whether his parents want him to or not.
My final recommendation is from the author of Roll with It: Jamie Sumner. “The problem with letting someone else tell your story is that they always get it wrong…which means the one thing you can never do is let another person speak for you.” Deep Water is the story of 12-year-old, Tully Birch, who wants to brave the waters of Lake Tahoe to break the record for the youngest person ever to complete the famous “Godfather” swim. She’s hoping maybe her mother will come back if she does. This beautiful novel in verse promises to be heart-rending and compelling.
Emily’s Pick
As a kid, I loved reading any Choose Your Own Adventure books I could get my hands on (and seeing if I could find the right path to keep the characters alive), so I was very excited to hear about Peng Shepherd’s All This And More.
Marsh has lost her job, is recently divorced, has failed at dating, and is worried about her changing relationship with her teenage daughter. Then she gets the chance to change her life on an astounding reality TV show that uses a new technology, “quantum bubbling.” Marsh and the bubbly host Talia travel back to key points in her life, where Marsh makes different choices, trying to find the right path to her perfect life. And of course, it’s all streaming live nonstop to a worldwide audience who are commenting about her every move.
Readers follow Marsh’s story down different paths, but things definitely aren’t straightforward. Surprising people and elements keep popping up in every timeline, some changes aren’t sticking, and some relationships are harder to mend. Plus…what about everyone else who gets dragged along with her? The reader can make choices, too. It’s a well thought out and addicting read – I kept wanting to flip ahead and see if I’d made the right choice, and definitely started it all over again once I got to an end!
As I write this, the Park Fire in California is now the fifth largest in the state’s history, and so far this year, wildfires have burned over 3.5 million acres across North America. With these sobering statistics in the air, along with so very much smoke, I’d like to recommend Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, by John Vaillant. In it he chronicles the 2016 Fort McMurray fire in the heart of northern Alberta’s tar sands country. He describes fires that can create their own weather, that require new metrics and new vocabulary, that burn for months. Moving back and forth between the science of fire and the people and events in and around Fort McMurray, Vaillant pens a gripping, horrifying, unforgettable narrative. He also delivers a damning history of science’s awareness that our dependence on burning fossil fuels could affect our planet’s ability to sustain us: and it has. He holds out a few morsels of hope, though: one of them being South Portland’s Clear Skies ordinance, which in 2014 blocked the transportation of tar-sands oil to Portland Harbor. Anyone who talks to me for more than a few minutes stands likely to hear me mention Fire Weather as one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time. Now you’ve heard me too.
Elizabeth’s Picks
Maybe it’s the heat or the thunderstorms this summer—these picks are brought to you by the ocean, sea creatures, the rain, even titles that simply reference water. There are ships at sea, there is drought, there are floods, there are stories of who gets water—water that is safe to drink—and who controls it or can’t control it at all. And there is swimming, science, music, life underwater, fictional futures. Lots to read!
Shark scientist Jasmin Graham’s book Sharks Don’t Sink is a great summer book (and a recent 2×2 Tuesday pick, along with Why We Swim and When the Island Had Fish). Here are a few more titles for kids, teens, and adults that caught my eye. You can also reach out to our library workers for more on a particular subject.
The days are just starting to warm up, and we’re stocking up on great library picks!
We hope you have a chance to answer June’s call to slow down and pick up a book or listen to an album. Here’s a few Staff Picks for June: music we’ve listened to and loved, books we’ve enjoyed, about-to-be-published titles that we’re looking forward to reading this summer.
Cindy’s Picks
The Probability of Everything by Sarah Everett is a middle grade title about a young girl named Kemi, who is enamored with statistics and facts and wants to be a scientist when she grows up. For some reason, I didn’t read the description of the book before downloading it, and I was under the assumption that it was a science fiction title, until. . . it wasn’t. I cannot think of many occasions I have come across an unreliable narrator in middle grade fiction, but this was one of those and it was very well done. Themes related to the Black Lives Matter movement and grief are explored in this beautifully-written surprise of a novel.
Lightfall: The Dark Times (Book 3 of Tim Probert’s beautiful and compelling graphic novel fantasy series) has JUST come out, and I couldn’t be more excited to read it. The lights have gone out in the land of Irpa! Young heroine Bea and her Galdurian friend Cad must help the Pig Wizard to save their world from doom. It’s an epic journey that began two books ago with The Girl and the Galdurian. This series is comparable toKazuo Kibuishi‘s very popular and wondrous Amulet series, both in story AND incredible art.
Emily’s Picks
Anne Ursu’s Not Quite A Ghost is a recent favorite, a ghost story inspired by The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Violet’s family just moved into a new home, and her attic bedroom has ugly floral yellow wallpaper that seems to move when she’s not looking—it even creeps out her cat. Is her new house haunted? Plus, why are her best friends being so weird? And why is she suddenly finding herself so exhausted, hardly able to make it through her days in sixth grade? I haven’t read many books set in the COVID pandemic that ring quite as true as this one, and I highly recommend it.
Other scary stories I’m looking forward to reading this summer and fall are Chuck Tingle’s Hollywood horror story, Bury Your Gays; Colby Wilkens’s ghostly romance set in a Scottish Castle, If I Stopped Haunting You (out in October); and Alyssa Cole’s newest trapped-on-an-island thriller, One Of Us Knows.
Raminta’s Pick
Inuktitut is the language of the central and eastern Canadian Inuit. Elisapie Isaac blends her Inuit culture with popular music, creating a beautiful and ethereal sound. Songs like Heart of Glass, Wish You Were Here, and I Want to Break Free from one of my favorite movie soundtracks (Queen for The Highlander movie), become almost haunting when translated into Inuktitut. I honestly can’t recommend this album enough. The Inuit language is so beautifully layered over horns, guitar, and more showcasing not only Isaac’s love for classic rock, but for her Inuit language. I truly loved listening to this album straight through. I hope you get a chance to listen too.
I don’t have much to blurb about it because I’m still actively reading it (I got the audiobook through ILL), but I’m really enjoying how seamlessly it balances its time among all these competing interests, the rich and the poor, the grifters and the true believers, the workers and the aristocrats. It feels like a very timely read in 2024. I’m a new fan of Mieville—my book club read The City & The City a couple months ago—but I’m fast becoming a devotee. From hardboiled, fantastical detective stories to elegant, occasionally gritty nonfiction, I find myself asking, what can’t this writer do?
Una’s Picks
“Why did I tell you so many stories? Because I wanted the world to make sense to you. I wanted to make sense of the world, for you. I wanted the world to make sense.” ―Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts
“Instantly I was thinking about those Post-it notes stuck all over my house. How had I allowed myself to become so busy? How long had it been since I’d spent a day in the sun, eating sandwiches from a cooler and watching water ripple across the surface of a lake? Why do I so often behave as though there will be unlimited days to sit quietly with my own beloveds, listening to birdsong and wind in the pines?” —Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows
Becca’s Pick
Graphic novel author Chris Sebela knows how to craft a great premise. Crowded, a three-part series about an app like Uber—but for assassination—was incredibly funny and well-plotted. When I came across Godfell, I was immediately intrigued. The basic plot is this: While a long war ravages a planet, a godlike creature falls from the sky and dies. Zanzi, a talented career soldier, defects from the army to make her way home. She soon discovers the shortest route is through the god’s body, among the many groups who have taken up residence inside. Who can claim the god to be theirs? What is the purpose of existence when basic needs are met? Is it really God? The story is quite violent, but the shocking ending is worth it.
Vicky’s Picks
Last fall, my nephew asked me what I thought of The Three-Body Problem. I’d never heard of the landmark science-fiction saga by Chinese author Liu Cixin, but my nephew has good taste, so I checked out the audiobook on cloudLibrary and was transfixed. As I told my nephew, I couldn’t say much about the physics, but the storytelling was amazing. Liu has a deliberate, matter-of-fact style, and Luke Daniels’ narration matched it to a T. The story of a physicist who is so wounded by first the Cultural Revolution and then humanity’s general disregard for the Earth that she invites an alien invasion is wound with the decades-later experiences of a nanomaterials researcher who begins to suffer from hallucinations that involve him in both an immersive VR game and a murder investigation. Even as characters and readers remain embedded in the Chinese setting, the scope expands far beyond our solar system, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
I was hooked, but by the time I finished, the news of the Netflix adaptation had spread, so I needed to wait for the audiobooks of the sequels: The Dark Forest and Death’s End. At 22.5 hours and 29 hours respectively, they are no small commitment, but wow, are they worth the investment in time. P.J. Ochlan takes over the narrating duties, and his delivery is just as well matched to the texts as Daniels’. The books continue to expand the setting: both physically into ever farther reaches of space, and temporally (such that The Three-Body Problem begins to feel intimate by comparison). In both volumes, Liu centers characters readers first meet in the early 21st century who then enter extended hibernation for decades, then centuries, then millennia, ensuring psychological and cultural continuity.
I still haven’t seen the Netflix series—frankly, I’m a little leery—but I can’t stop talking about the books. (Just ask my coworkers.) If you like science fiction and want a totally immersive experience, add yourself to the holds queues. You won’t regret it.
Elizabeth’s Picks
I’m already notorious for sharing approximately 10-20 picks instead of one or two, so I’ll just double down by sharing a pile of picks and some great booklists our staff have created! There’s a lot of books to be excited about this summer.
Check out 2024 Beach Reads for a list of thrillers, literary fiction, romance, and more! I’ve put holds all over the map: on The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye, an action-packed, tender tale of a pirate and her love, Teresa, and her quest for freedom on the seas; All Friends Are Necessary, a West Coast homage to found-family and friendship; Evenings and Weekends, set in a sweltering London; Oye, a Florida family comedy-drama; The Townsend Family Recipe for Disaster, more family dynamics and the search for a missing mac n’ cheese recipe in North Carolina; Catalina, a year in the life of an unforgettable student in Cambridge; The Anthropologists, where a young couple look for home in an unnamed city; and Swift River, a New England mill town summer saga
“African Americans have always used these moments of memory to think about where the community has come from and what we’re pursuing and striving towards, as well as taking the time to pass down history and culture.
Juneteenth is a time to reflect. What does it mean to really celebrate our freedom? What does it mean to be free in moments where freedom is conditional, and freedom is always a challenge? Juneteenth is a moment to think about freedom being conditional freedom and it is something that we must continuously strive and fight for.”
-Angela Tate, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Curator of African American Women’s History
Unidentified At center, a depiction of a parade in celebration of the passing of the 15th Amendment. Framing it are notable anti-slavery forces such as John Brown and Frederick Douglas. (from the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
Juneteenth is also known as Freedom Day, Emancipation Day and Jubilee Day.
On June 19, 1865, Major Gen. Gordon Granger led Union soldiers into Galveston, Texas, with news that the Civil War had ended and slavery was abolished – two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
President Lincoln’s edict had little impact on the people of Texas, since there were few Union troops around at the time to enforce it. But, with the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee in April 1865 and the arrival of Gen. Gordon Granger’s regiment in Galveston, troops were finally strong enough to enforce the executive order. Newly freed people rejoiced, originating the annual “Juneteenth” celebration.
But as Mary Elliott (Curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture) notes, “June 19th freed enslaved people in the rebelling states, it did not free enslaved people throughout the nation. Keep in mind, there were still border states which were still part of the Union. They had not seceded from the Union, and they still maintained slavery. Maryland, for example, was one of them. It took the creation of the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of the Civil War, and the passage of the 13th Amendment to finally end slavery throughout the nation.”
“I like to think of Juneteenth as a celebration of freedom, of family, and of joy that emerged from this cauldron of the war…
Juneteenth is for everyone who believes in freedom, and who believes in creating a new world.”
-Kelly E. Navies, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Museum Specialist of Oral History
Although Juneteenth has been informally celebrated each year since 1865, it wasn’t until June 3, 1979, that Texas became the first state to proclaim Juneteenth an official state holiday.
The National Museum of African American History & Culture has a Juneteenth portal and a digital toolkit where you can read historical documents, watch historical films, find recommended reads, and look through items of historical significance in the collections of the museum.
Check out Portland Public Library’s Juneteenth booklist. This list shares nonfiction and fiction titles related to history, resistance, emancipation, liberation, joy and well-being, and culture. You can find Vanessa M. Holden writing on African American women and resistance, Jesse McCarthy on reparations, and Nicole A. Taylor on years of Juneteenth celebrations.
