Thank you to everyone who shared your book recommendations earlier this year! We're feeling especially grateful to have them all here, as COVID-19 has given us the opportunity to catch up with all of the reading we may have missed.
We've already linked to their dedicated page on the Denver Public Library catalog so you can learn more and place an easy (and free!) hold on these favorite titles. While the library is closed, the Libby app is open! Using your library card, you can seamlessly access tons of books, including audiobooks, through this app. Check it out today!
Happy Reading!
| Title | Author | Summary |
| A Gentleman in Moscow | Amor Towles | In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal and is sentenced to house arrest in... a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery. |
| A Woman is No Man | Etaf Rum | Three generations of Palestinian-American women in contemporary Brooklyn are torn by individual desire, educational ambitions, a devastating tragedy, and the strict mores of traditional Arab culture. |
| Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start-Up | John Carreyrou |
The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos--the Enron of Silicon Valley. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier ... There was just one problem: the technology didn't work.
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| Becoming | Michelle Obama |
As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private. A deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations.
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| Buck: A Memoir | M.K. Asante |
Buck is a powerful memoir of how a precocious kid educated himself through the most unconventional teachers: outlaws and eccentrics, rappers and mystic strangers, ghetto philosophers and strippers, and, eventually, an alternative school that transformed his life with a single sheet of paper.
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| Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators | Ronan Farrow |
This is the untold story of the exotic tactics of surveillance and intimidation deployed by wealthy and connected men to threaten journalists, evade accountability, and silence victims of abuse. And it's the story of the women who risked everything to expose the truth and spark a global movement.
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| Circe | Madeline Miller |
Follows Circe, the banished witch daughter of Helios, as she hones her powers and interacts with famous mythological beings before a conflict with one of the most vengeful Olympians forces her to choose between the worlds of the gods and mortals.
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| Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening | Manal Sharif |
A memoir of a women who single-handedly took on the Royal Family in Saudia Arabia on women driving. A portrait of courage, advocacy and life as a women in a conservative Muslim country.
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| Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and Drug Company That Addicted American | Beth Macy |
Chronicles America's more than twenty-year struggle with opioid addiction, from the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, through the spread of addiction in distressed communities in Central Appalachia, to the current national crisis.
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| Educated | Tara Westover |
An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University
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| Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less | Greg McKeown |
The Way of the Essentialist isn't about getting more done in less time. It's about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.
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| How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy | Jenny Odell |
When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as . . . doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process
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| Leadership in Turbulent Times | Doris Kearns Goodwin | This book traces the lives of Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and LBJ and connects how each of them underwent a significant challenge(s) and turned it around to influence their leadership profoundly. |
| Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster | Adam Higginbotham | Draws on twenty years of research, recently declassified files, and interviews with survivors in an account of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster that also reveals how propaganda and secrets have created additional dangers. |
| Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics | Richard Thaler | Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans--predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth--and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world. |
| Olive Kitteridge | Elizabeth Strout | At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her. |
| On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous | Ocean Vuong | A letter from a son to a mother who cannot read... unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam--and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity |
| Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind | Yuval Noah Harari | From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity's creation and evolution...that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human." |
| She Said : Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement | Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey | From the Pulitzer-prize winning reporters who broke the news of Harvey Weinstein's sexual harassment and abuse comes the thrilling untold story of their investigation and its consequences for the #MeToo movement. |
| So You Want to Be a Robot: 21 Short Stories | A Merc Rustad | ...Forget the convention and disregard the binary. Gender? Sexuality? Old words unsuited for new consciousness. The twenty-one stories in this book challenge the imagination as only acclaimed author A. Merc Rustad can. |
| Stolen Girls: Survivors of Boko Haram Tell Their Story | Wolfgang Bauer | One night in April 2014, members of the terrorist organization Boko Haram raided the small town of Chibok in northeast Nigeria and abducted 276 young girls from the local boarding school. The event caused massive, international outrage. Some of the girls were able to escape and award-winning journalist Wolfgang Bauer spent several weeks with them as they recounted their ordeal. |
| The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma | Bessel Van der Kolk | This non-fiction read will enlighten your thinking about trauma- how to recognize it in yourself and others, and how to work towards healing. |
| The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution | Peter Hessler | A memoir/exploration of living in Egypt with his family just as Tahir Square the revolution hit Egypt in 2011 years ago. A fascinating portrait of living in Egypt. |
| The Meritocracy Trap | Daniel Markovits | It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal--that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding--reigns supreme. ... But what if, both up and down the social ladder, meritocracy is a sham? |
| The Name of the Wind | Patrick Rothfuss | A hero named Kvothe, now living under an assumed name as the humble proprietor of an inn, recounts his transformation from a magically gifted young man into the most notorious wizard, musician, thief, and assassin in his world. |
| The Nickel Boys | Colson Whitehead | Follows the experiences of two African-American teenagers at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. |
| The Overstory | Richard Powers | A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. |
| The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life | David Brooks | A combination of social commentary, counter-cultural considerations, and the importance of pursuing passion and purpose in life, and not simply checking the box. |
| The Starless Sea | Erin Morgenstern | Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. |
| The Sympathizer | Viet Thanh Nguyen | Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles. |
| The Water Dancer | Ta-Nehisi Coates | Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. |
| There There | Tommy Orange | Twelve Native Americans came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. A multi-generational, relentlessly paced story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people. |
| Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion | Jia Tolentino | A breakout writer at The New Yorker examines the fractures at the center of contemporary culture with verve, deftness, and intellectual ferocity--for readers who've wondered what Susan Sontag would have been like if she had brain damage from the internet. |
| Where the Crawdads Sing | Delia Owens | For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life--until the unthinkable happens. |
| Whisper Network | Chandler Baker | A timely and powerful read about four women working in corporate America who band together to stop the whispers and speak up about sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. This is part mystery part women's fiction, and part social commentary told through the voices of four women. |