Mary Kay Sneeringer from Edmonds Bookshop shared a number of exciting reading recommendations with Friends of the Edmonds Library during our September meeting. You can access these fiction, non-fiction and children’s titles at the bookshop, or, of course, the library! Happy reading!
Recommended Fiction
- Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
- Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles
- Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
- Subduction by Kristen Millares Young
- The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline
- The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
- Jack by Marilynne Robinson (comes out Sept. 27)
- Cold Millions by Jess Walter (comes out Oct. 27)
Great for book clubs: Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo (her new book, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America comes out Dec. 1st), Inland by Tea Obreht, Pilgrimage to Eternity by Timothy Egan, Rules for Visiting by Jessica Francis Kane, My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Recommended Non-fiction
- The Writer’s Library: The Authors You Love on the Books that Changed Their Lives by Nancy Pearl
- Rough House by Tina Ontiveros
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
- What It’s Like to Be a Bird by David Allen Sibley
- The Answer is… Reflections on My Life by Alex Trebek
- For the Love of Europe by Rick Steves
- Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald
Recommended Children’s
- Sweety by Andrea Zuill (ages 3-7)
- Wild Symphony by Dan Brown (ages 3-7)
- Skunk and Badger by Amy Timberlake pictures by Jon Klassen (ages 8-12)
- A Whale of the Wild by Rosanne Perry (ages 8-12)
- I Will Always Write Back by Caitlin Alifirenka & Martin Ganda with Liz Welch (Teens)
- The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty – First book in the Daevabad Trilogy (Teens & adults)
In addition to these recommendations, Friends members shared some of their own favorites.
Friend Favorites
- The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
- Painted Horses by Malcolm Brooks
- Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch
- Maisie Dobbs mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear
I just finished reading A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum and highly recommend it. As much as it is a cliché, I could not put it down. The story offers what it is like to emigrate from Palestine to the United States and try to honor your past and live in a new county along with what it is like to be the children of those immigrants. The author made me care about the characters and also understand why they each made the choices they did. It opened my eyes to a closed Muslim society living in Brooklyn, New York.
If this book interests you, then I also suggest Unorthodox, a Netflix series about a Hasidic Jewish woman who flees to Berlin. The series is loosely based on the life of Deborah Feldman. If you do not have Netflix you can get her books from where else? Our library!
Review submitted by Donna Fraser, FEL Board Member