NCW Libraries

"An exhilarating volume that will ratchet up the joy for all reading groups "Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics," writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetime of pleasure reading and decades of editing one of the most distinguished little magazines in the country, The Threepenny Review, to describe a life lived in and through literature....

Mukesh lives a quiet life in the London Borough of Wembley after losing his beloved wife. He worries about his granddaughter, Priya, who hides in her room reading while he spends his evenings watching nature documentaries. Aleisha is a bright teenager working at the local library for the summer. She discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper in the back of To Kill a Mockingbird; it is a list of novels that she has never heard of, and she impulsively decides...

"Frederick Busch has an enduring love affair with great books and with the difficult, and sometimes personally dangerous, work that is required to produce them. For Busch, as he writes of his own career and those of his great elders, there was to be no other recourse save the dangerous profession. Writing out of an experience of risk that is suffused with affection, Busch explores the life a writer leads and its effect on a writer, whether he be Melville,...

Reading great literature well has the power to cultivate virtue. Great literature increases knowledge of and desire for the good life by showing readers what virtue looks like and where vice leads. It is not just what one reads but how one reads that cultivates virtue. Reading good literature well requires one to practice numerous virtues, such as patience, diligence, and prudence. And learning to judge wisely a character in a book, in turn, forms...

"In this book with no pictures, the reader has to say every silly word, no matter what"--

"A series of essays exploring the different books that shaped Gornick throughout her life"-- Provided by publisher.

""The only art I'll ever study is stuff that I can steal from." --David Bowie // Three years before David Bowie died, he shared a list of 100 books that changed his life. His choices span fiction and nonfiction, literary and irreverent, and include timeless classics alongside eyebrow-raising obscurities. // In 100 short essays, music journalist John O'Connell studies each book on Bowie's list and contextualizes it in the artist's life and work. How...

From the Bodleian, the Folger and the Smithsonian to the fabled libraries of Middle Earth and other fictional libraries, Kells explores the bookish places that capture our imaginations. The result is a fascinating and engaging exploration of libraries as places of beauty and wonder, a celebration of books as objects and an account of the deeply personal nature of these hallowed spaces.

"A light-hearted book about books and the people who write them for all lovers of literature. Do you know: Which famous author died of caffeine poisoning? Why Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was banned in China? Who was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature? What superstitions Truman Capote kept whenever he wrote? Who the other Winston Churchill was? A treasure trove of compelling facts, riveting anecdotes, and extraordinary...

Gerald and Piggie discover the joy of being read. But what will happen when the book ends?