With the weather turning cooler, I want to highlight some fiction (and one memoir) books in our New and Noteworthy and Current Literature collections to inspire you to curl up with a blanket and hot beverage of your choice.
- The shepherd’s crown by Terry Pratchett. Pick up the final novel of Terry Pratchett’s classic Discworld series and be transported to a comic fantasy world. Learn more about the characters of Discworld on his official website. You might also enjoy this recent post from io9 to help you dive in.
- Almost famous women: stories by Megan Mayhew Bergman. Dig into a collection of short stories about intriguing lesser-known women in history. You’ll find stories about conjoined twins, a cross-dressing oil heiress, a daredevil motorcyclist, and the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron. You can find reviews here and here.
- Furiously happy : {a funny book about horrible things} by Jenny Lawson. Jenny Lawson, also known as The Bloggess, has a written an honest, funny, and inspiring book about her struggles with mental illness. Here’s a description from an Entertainment Weekly review: “Her second book Furiously Happy is a firsthand account of living with mental illness, inflected with the wonderfully strange and frequently inappropriate dark humor you might expect from a woman who opts to put small taxidermied animals on her book covers.”
- Miss Emily by Nuala O’Connor. If you enjoyed Longbourn and Mrs. Poe, you might want to pick up this novel about Emily Dickinson told through the eyes of an Irish maid. As described in this Washington Post review, this “lovely novel, ‘Miss Emily,’ immerses us in the day-to-day drama of a fictional, spirited Irish maid who comes to work for the Dickinsons of Amherst in 1866 and stirs up their reclusive poet-in-residence. Told in alternating chapters by the title character and her maid, it pulls us in from its first limpid lines and then detonates with an explosion of power — much like Emily Dickinson’s poems.”
- Kitchens of the great Midwest: a novel by J. Ryan Stradal will probably make you hungry, but you may also just enjoy this novel about a chef with a once-in-a-generation palate. You can read more about this book here, here, and here.