Staff Picks

In Wintering, Katherine May suggests that you embrace your winter. She encourages the active acceptance of sadness and difficult times--she does not just mean the cold season of winter. This quote truly sums up the spirit of Wintering, which May sees as "a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider".

 

Publisher description:

Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a breakup, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. This book explores how she not only endured this painful time but embraced the singular opportunities it offered. A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May's story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas. May invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times, modeling an active acceptance of sadness and finding nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season. An intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down.

 

Repairing your clothing beautifully brings so much joy. It is your most cherished garments that show wear: small holes; fabric worn thin; rips, or tears. Textile and clothing designer Hikaru Noguchi shares her techniques and tips to mend visibly and intentionally.

 

Publisher's description: 

Mend, rethink, transform, recreate! Mending your favorite fabric items-from jeans to sweaters to sofa covers-becomes a true art form in Stylish Mending. In this book, mending guru Hikaru Noguchi shows you her entire range of valuable techniques--from embroidery and patching to darning and felting--that are just challenging enough for experienced menders. Noguchi's basic rules of mending are that the repair should suit the fabric and its user, and that there are lots of creative ways to create beautifully customized repairs-some subtle, others making a statement. She provides 13 techniques that show you how to: Apply creative repairs to both knitted and woven fabrics; Use yarn, floss, ribbon, and fabric to reinvent well-loved garments; Make understated repairs that add just a touch of contrast, color, or texture; Use visible mending techniques for bold repairs; Darn with felt to add body and dimension to a repaired item; Match your repairs to the damage, the fabric, and the wearer; Maneuver through tricky places like inseams and underarms; And more! The 13 illustrated lessons and over 300 color photos in this book provide detailed examples for all the basic techniques. Lots of variations plus plenty of tips and examples (67 in all) provide you with all the guidance you need to rethink and repair beautifully. The stunning photos will inspire you to get creative on that fraying neckline or worn elbow!

 

Bonnie Tsui takes a deep dive into all aspects of swimming, from being a means to survival to a source of exercise and well-being. She shares her own passion, which is to swim in the open water of the San Francisco Bay. As a reader who loves to swim, I thoroughly enjoyed Why We Swim.

 

Publisher's description:

Bonnie Tsui looks at our love affair with the water, from evolution to mythology, from survival and well-being, from community swim clubs to competitive races, and she goes around the world to explore its significance in many cultures.

 

 

 

If you want to learn or re-learn how to stitch and embroider, this book is a super introduction. Designer Hope Brasfield offers craft as a way to reduce stress alongside creating and making. Satisfying Stitches has step-by-step tutorials and some really fun projects to get you started.

 

Publisher's description:

With Satisfying Stitches, you'll learn to create beautiful embroidery designs and discover how creative stitching can relieve stress and provide a sense of accomplishment.

 

If you want to learn or re-learn how to stitch and embroider, this book is a super introduction. Designer Hope Brasfield offers craft as a way to reduce stress alongside creating and making. Satisfying Stitches has step-by-step tutorials and some really fun projects to get you started.

 

Publisher's description: 

With Satisfying Stitches, you'll learn to create beautiful embroidery designs and discover how creative stitching can relieve stress and provide a sense of accomplishment. 

 

At Aleisha's summer job at her local library she discovers a crumpled reading list that begins with "Just in case you need it!" She is in need of a title to recommend to a new patron, so she tentatively tries the first novel. A story of connection through books and generations and cultures.

 

Publisher's description: 

Working at the local library, Aleisha reads every book on a secret list she found, which transports her from the painful realities she's facing at home, and decides to pass the list on to a lonely widower desperate to connect with his bookworm granddaughter.

Find The Reading List in our online catalog.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine's Woman of Light is an intergenerational saga that spans the late 1800s in the Lost Territories of the southwest to the 1930s in Denver. The main protagonist Luz endeavors to understand how her Indigenous Chicano family thrived and how they were threatened.

 

Publisher's description:

1890: When Desiderya Lopez, The Sleepy Prophet, finds an abandoned infant on the banks of an arroyo, she recognizes something in his spirit and brings him home. Pidre will go on to become a famous showman in the Anglo West whose main act, Simodecea, is Pidre's fearless, sharpshooting wife, who wrangles bears as part of his show. 1935: Luz "Little Light" Lopez and her brother Diego work the carnival circuit in downtown Denver. Luz, is a tea leaf reader, and Diego is a snake charmer. One day, a pale-faced woman in white fur asks Luz for a reading, calling her by a name that only her brother knows. Later that night at a party downtown, Luz sees Diego dancing with this pale-faced woman, which results in a brawl with the local white supremacist group. Diego leaves town for cover and Luz is left trying to get justice for her brother and family.

 

If you a looking for a fun and fast paced mystery, try this. "The Thursday Murder Club," four friends who live at the Coopers Chase Retirement Community, are investigating another unsolved murder. I highly recommend the audiobook; the reader brings out the British humor and irony to the full.

 

Publisher's description:

Trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club are concerned. A local news legend is on the hunt for a sensational headline, and soon the gang are hot on the trail of two murders, ten years apart. To make matters worse, Elizabeth is paid a visit in which she's presented with a deadly mission: kill or be killed. While Elizabeth grapples with her conscience (and a gun), the gang and their unlikely new friends--including TV stars, money launderers and ex-KGB colonels--unravel a fresh mystery. But can they catch the culprit and save Elizabeth before the murderer strikes again?

 

Viola Davis vividly shares the childhood trauma alongside the moments of joy growing up in a tightly connected family experiencing extreme poverty. Education and discovering acting offered the teenage Davis new horizons. I highly recommend listening to the audiobook, which is read by the author.

 

Publisher's description: 

"In my book, you will meet a little girl named Viola who ran from her past until she made a life-changing decision to stop running forever. This is my story, from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stage in New York City, and beyond. This is the path I took to finding my purpose but also my voice in a world that didn't always see me. As I wrote [this book], my eyes were open to the truth of how our stories are often not given close examination. We are forced to reinvent them to fit into a crazy, competitive, judgmental world. So I wrote this for anyone running through life untethered, desperate and clawing their way through murky memories, trying to get some form of self-love. For anyone who needs reminding that a life worth living can only be born from radical honesty and the courage to shed facades and be...you.