Staff Picks - LibGuides at Boulder Public Library

Kaley S. recommends The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley

02/22/2025

Boulder Library

adult fiction, literary fiction, psychological fiction, biographical fiction, .Kaley S.'s reviews

This beautifully written coming-of-age tale had me hooked on every word. I greatly enjoyed being inside the mind of this young, curious, creative boy as he is having a life-altering summer without even being aware of it and learning lessons in the most painful of ways.

Publisher's description:

Summering with a fellow schoolboy on a great English estate, Leo, the hero of L. P. Hartley's finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. But when his friend's beautiful older sister enlists him as the unwitting messenger in her illicit love affair, the aftershocks will be felt for years. The inspiration for the brilliant Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Go-Between is a masterpiece—a richly layered, spellbinding story about past and present, naiveté and knowledge, and the mysteries of the human heart.

Find The Go Between in our online catalog.

Stella recommends Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center

05/27/2024

Boulder Library

adult fiction, literary fiction, self-actualization, .Stella's reviews

Let's think of three good things that happened to you today, I'll go first. I finished reading Happiness for Beginners. I loved the characters and their story arcs. I get to share their stories with you. If you like rom-coms and getting lost, this is the book for you.

Publisher's description:
A year after getting divorced, Helen Carpenter, thirty-two, lets her annoying, ten years younger brother talk her into signing up for a wilderness survival course. It's supposed to be a chance for her to pull herself together again, but when she discovers that her brother's even-more-annoying best friend is also coming on the trip, she can't imagine how it will be anything other than a disaster. Thus begins the strangest adventure of Helen's well-behaved life: three weeks in the remotest wilderness of a mountain range in Wyoming where she will survive mosquito infestations, a surprise summer blizzard, and a group of sorority girls. Yet, despite everything, the vast wilderness has a way of making Helen's own little life seem bigger, too. And, somehow the people who annoy her the most start teaching her the very things she needs to learn. Like how to stand up for herself. And how being scared can make you brave. And how sometimes you just have to get really, really lost before you can even have a hope of being found.

Find Happiness for Beginners in our online catalog.

Emma recommends Sourdough by Robin Sloan

05/06/2024

Boulder Library

adult fiction, fantasy, literary fiction, cooking, technology, .Emma's reviews

This book was a breeze to read thanks to an approachable invitation into the culinary world, some quirky, magical realism, and a woman who challenges herself to believe there is more to life. There is no way you will guess the ending of this bizarre and truly gripping tale of bread, robots, and joy.

Publisher’s description

Lois Clary is a software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers close up shop, and fast. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her―feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. Lois is no baker, but she could use a roommate, even if it is a needy colony of microorganisms. Soon, not only is she eating her own homemade bread, she’s providing loaves daily to the General Dexterity cafeteria. The company chef urges her to take her product to the farmer’s market, and a whole new world opens up. When Lois comes before the jury that decides who sells what at Bay Area markets, she encounters a close-knit club with no appetite for new members. But then, an alternative emerges: a secret market that aims to fuse food and technology. But who are these people, exactly?"

Find Sourdough in our online catalog.

Featured Title: Tremor by Teju Cole

10/19/2023

Boulder Library

adult fiction, literary fiction, .Brett's reviews, lived experiences, racism, BIPOC, Black, featured titles

Award-winning author Teju Cole returns to fiction twelve years after his breakthrough debut, Open City. Praised by Kirkus Reviews as "a provocative and profound meditation on art and life in a world of terror," this unconventional novel is recommended for fans of Hell of a Book, by Jason Mott.

Publisher's description:

Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.

A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis.

We're invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories: stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.

Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst "history's own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles," but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.

Find Tremor in our online catalog.

Featured Title: The List by Yomi Adegoke

10/05/2023

Boulder Library

adult fiction, literary fiction, thrillers, .Brett's reviews, family life, lived experiences, BIPOC, Black, featured titles

As an award-winning journalist for an online magazine, British Nigerian author Adegoke experienced the #MeToo movement firsthand. Her new novel complicates the initially simple narrative, interrogating the ethics of the movement and the potential weaponization of anonymous internet accusations.

Publisher's description:

Recommended by The New York Times - Vogue - People - NPR - Cosmopolitan - Rolling Stone - Publishers Weekly - The Sunday Times - and many more!

In this sensational, page-turning debut novel, a high-profile female journalist's world is upended when her fiancé's name turns up in a viral social media post--a nuanced, daring, and timely exploration of the real-world impact of online life, from award-winning journalist and internationally bestselling author Yomi Adegoke.

Ola Olajide, a celebrated journalist at Womxxxn magazine, is set to marry the love of her life in one month's time. Young, beautiful, and successful--she and her fiancé Michael are considered the "couple goals" of their social network and seem to have it all. That is, until one morning when they both wake up to the same message: "Oh my god, have you seen The List?"

It began as a crowdsourced collection of names and somehow morphed into an anonymous account posting allegations on social media. Ola would usually be the first to support such a list--she'd retweet it, call for the men to be fired, write article after article. Except this time, Michael's name is on it.

Compulsively readable, wildly entertaining, and filled with sharp social insight, The List is a piercing and dazzlingly clear-sighted debut about secrets, lies, and the internet. Perfect for fans of Such a Fun Age, Luster, and My Dark Vanessa, this is a searing portrait of these modern times and our morally complicated online culture.

Find The List in our online catalog.

Featured Title: This is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara

09/21/2023

Boulder Library

adult fiction, literary fiction, short stories, .Brett's reviews, family life, Colorado author, Asian, featured titles

Last year, Colorado author Vauhini Vara's debut novel The Immortal King Rao captivated readers and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Hear her speak this Friday at JLF Colorado, then don't miss her haunting new story collection coming next week. Publisher's Weekly gives it a starred review, saying, "Vara invigorates with emotional insights, whimsy, and a precision with language. It’s a remarkable achievement."

Publisher's description:

Pushing intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty, Vauhini Vara explores the nature of being a child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbor, or lover, and the relationships between self and others. A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor, who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And, in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible's specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found? The characters in This Is Salvaged, unmoored in turbulence, are searching fervently for meaning, through one another.

Find This is Salvaged in our online catalog.

Featured Title: The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt

07/27/2023

Boulder Library

adult fiction, literary fiction, .Brett's reviews, humorous fiction, featured titles

A master of quirky and likable characters, the author of French Exit presents a moving study of character and interpersonal relations. Slate columnist Laura Miller calls deWitt "a 21st-Century Mark Twain," filling his books with eccentrics who each get to share their story. For fans of Amor Towles.

Publisher's description:

Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he's known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.

Behind Bob Comet's straight-man façade is the story of an unhappy child's runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian's vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob's experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsize players to welcome onto the stage of his life.

With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert's condition. The Librarianist celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity.

Find The Librarianist in our online catalog.

Altea recommends Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

07/16/2023

Boulder Library

adult fiction, literary fiction, racism, .Guest Post, .Teen Picks, Asian

R. F. Kuang's books never cease to amaze me! Yellowface follows June, an aspiring best selling author, as she steals Athena Liu's drafted story after her accidental death. June edits the draft, rebrands herself completely, and publishes the book, which becomes a major success along with its controversy. Yellowface highlights many topics such as how identity impacts experience, cultural appropriation, and the modern social climate. The plot is unlike any I have ever read and the character development leaves you on the edge of your seat as June makes her life-altering decisions. Kuang leaves you questioning society and the source of inspiration for writers.

- Altea, twelfth-grade teen volunteer

Publisher's description:

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena's a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn't even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena's novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song--complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn't this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That's what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree. But June can't get away from Athena's shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June's (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface takes on questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation not only in the publishing industry but the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society. R. F. Kuang's novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

Find Yellowface in the library's online catalog.

Jiyu K. recommends The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

07/03/2023

Boulder Library

adult fiction, literary fiction, teen, teen fiction, .Guest Post, .Teen Picks

J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, originally written in serial form from 1945 to 1946, explores a teenager’s struggle to find his identity while spending a weekend alone in New York City. The main character Holden’s lack of self-assurance and his second-guessing nature are made clear as he wanders from place to place in New York and hesitates to strike up conversations with old acquaintances. Holden’s awkwardness, when he finally finds the courage to call the people he knew, is shared by the reader. His yearning to present a tougher exterior is contrasted to his actual internal vulnerability, and this internal conflict creates a clash of two versions of Holden, one that narrates with crass words and another that expresses his longing to see his sister and friends again. For instance, when Holden calls Faith Cavendish, a girl he knew through another acquaintance, late at night, he tries to make his voice deeper to appear more adult-like as he asks her if she’d like to have a cocktail with him. She asks if he couldn’t meet up tomorrow, but he refuses. His desire to connect with someone is clearly demonstrated in this encounter, which also shows his wish to be more mature through his attempts to deepen his voice. With hindsight, readers reflecting on the reasons for Holden’s indecision can find parts of their own conscience in Holden, and ultimately, his hesitation and vulnerability make him human. One note of warning: this book contains expletives that may be difficult to read for some.

-Jiyu K., eighth-grade teen volunteer

Publisher's description:

A 16-year old American boy relates in his own words the experiences he goes through at school and after, and reveals with unusual candour the workings of his own mind. What does a boy in his teens think and feel about his teachers, parents, friends and acquaintances?

Find The Catcher in the Rye in our online catalog.

Featured Title: The Celebrants by Steven Rowley

05/31/2023

Boulder Library

adult fiction, literary fiction, .Brett's reviews, family life, gay, LGBTQIA+, featured titles

The author of the hit summer novel The Guncle returns with a heartfelt riff on The Big Chill, in which five college friends make a pact to gather and celebrate each other in times of crisis. This Indie Next pick is featured on tons of Most Anticipated lists and is Today's book club pick for June.

Publisher's description:

It's been a minute--or five years--since Jordan Vargas last saw his college friends, and twenty-eight years since their graduation when their adult lives officially began. Now Jordan, Jordy, Naomi, Craig, and Marielle find themselves at the brink of a new decade, with all the responsibilities of adulthood, yet no closer to having their lives figured out. Though not for a lack of trying. Over the years they've reunited in Big Sur to honor a decades-old pact to throw each other living "funerals," celebrations to remind themselves that life is worth living--that their lives mean something, to one another if not to themselves. But this reunion is different. They're not gathered as they were to bolster Marielle as her marriage crumbled, to lift Naomi after her parents died, or to intervene when Craig pleaded guilty to art fraud. This time, Jordan is sitting on a secret that will upend their pact. A deeply honest tribute to the growing pains of selfhood and the people who keep us going, coupled with Steven Rowley's signature humor and heart, The Celebrants is a moving tale about the false invincibility of youth and the beautiful ways in which friendship helps us celebrate our lives, even amid the deepest challenges of living.

Find The Celebrants in our online catalog.