Staff Picks

Beautifully written and so interesting, this exploration of muscle (both physical and metaphorical) weaves together the clinical, the cultural, and the personal to describe our relationship with "the stuff that moves us." It will make you fall back in love with your own body in motion--and inspire you through the stories of others fully living that relationship.

 

Publisher’s description:

Cardiac, smooth, skeletal--these three different types of muscle in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and allow for motion. Tsui also traces how muscles have defined beauty--and how they have distorted it--through the ages, and how they play an essential role in our physical and mental health.

 

This wonderful book explores the loss of dark skies to light pollution and what we gain when we get back to them. Childs, who embarks on a bike trip from Las Vegas to a truly dark basin north of the city, is a fabulous storyteller and brings in memories of other dark skies he's seen, Native American legends about the role of the sky in creation, the science of how the loss of real dark affects our circadian rhythms, and more. If you can't get to a dark sky, this is the next best thing.

 

Publisher's description:
A night sky is not an absence of light; it is the presence of the universe. In The Wild Dark, master storyteller Craig Childs embarks on a quest to bike from the blinding lights of the Las Vegas Strip to one of the darkest spots in North America. Childs is a fearless explorer of both the natural world and the human imagination, making him the perfect guide to help us rediscover the heavens and to ask: “What does it do to us to not see the night sky?” In a book that is at once an adventure story, a field guide, and a celebration of wonder, Childs invites us to look up and to look inward, eyes wide and sparkling with stars.

Find The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light in our online catalog

 

This short novella caught my eye at #52 on the New York Times Book Review: Best 100 Books--and I read it in one gulp, captivated by the flawed but lovely and unforgettable protagonist. The wildfire he endures will be familiar to most Westerners. So will his paradoxical yearning for both remoteness and connection.

 

Publisher description:

Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West--its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders--this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century--an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.

 

Need a cozy, sometimes creepy, read for the depths of winter (April is the second snowiest month in Colorado)? Agatha Christie has you covered with this assortment of tales, many with a winter setting, some of which feature beloved characters, including Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. Get your cocoa and your blanket ready!

 

An all-new collection of winter-themed stories from the Queen of Mystery, just in time for the holidays--including the original version of "Christmas Adventure," never before released in the United States

 

A dark, atmospheric visit to 17th-century Oxford during the Restoration, this book is a fast read--don't let its size intimidate you. Four unreliable narrators guide the story, each shedding light on the others' biases, misinterpretations, and outright lies. Fun and thought-provoking all at once.

 

Publisher description:

A novel on the way we interpret events to suit our purpose. The protagonists are four people giving evidence in a murder in 17th century England. One blames the crime on too much authority, another on the lack of it. A look at the controversies of the day, from medical experiments to religious freethinking.

 

This lovely meditation on the world of winter--both the natural world of the author's English and Welsh homelands and the inner world of melancholy that he and many others experience during the season--is the perfect read for a January day by the fire with a hot drink.

 

Publisher's description:

Shortlisted for the Wales Creative Nonfiction Book of the Year 2019 Rediscover the light in the dark... 'A treasure of a book, wonderfully attentive in outlook and generous in spirit.' - Amy Liptrot As November stubs out the glow of autumn and the days tighten into shorter hours, winter's occupation begins. Preparing for winter has its own rhythms, as old as our exchanges with the land. Of all the seasons, it draws us together. But winter can be tough. It is a time of introspection, of looking inwards. Seasonal sadness; winter blues; depression - such feelings are widespread in the darker months. But by looking outwards, by being in and observing nature, we can appreciate its rhythms. Mountains make sense in any weather. The voices of a wood always speak consolation. A brush of frost; subtle colours; days as bright as a magpie's cackle. We can learn to see and celebrate winter in all its shadows and lights. In this moving and lyrical evocation of a British winter and the feelings it inspires, Horatio Clare raises a torch against the darkness, illuminating the blackest corners of the season, and delving into memory and myth to explore the powerful hold that winter has on us. By learning to see, we can find the magic, the light that burns bright at the heart of winter: spring will come again.

 

Great characters. A spooky graveyard setting. Questions of sin and redemption. Historical resonance. The transcendent power of love. This book has it all. The "bardo," as some Buddhists call the transitional state between life and death, in Saunders' vision is not very different from our world: a place where people can be so blinded by their own heart's desire that they do not see what is truly good for either themselves or others. It's when they can break out of that narrow view that salvation is possible. I don't know if the "real" Abraham Lincoln was the man both great and good Saunders has created. But I want him to be, because as that he is the best example of how I should live my own small life. This is the power of literature: to give us heroes who are, always and timelessly, worthy of our emulation.

 

Publisher's description: From the seed of historical truth that is the death of President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son Willie, George Saunders spins a story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm ... Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state--called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo--a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul.

 

Fans of Cormac McCarthy's dark novels will relish this exhumation of the Anglo-Saxons violated by Norman invaders in 1066. Its patois of modern and Old English puts readers firmly in their alien world. And when you finish it, you'll ask:  how different are we from people who lived 1,000 years ago?

 

Publisher's description: 

In the aftermath of the Norman Invasion of 1066, William the Conqueror was uncompromising and brutal. English society was broken apart, its systems turned on their head. What is little known is that a fractured network of guerrilla fighters took up arms against the French occupiers. Written in what the author describes as a shadow tongue--a version of Old English updated so as to be understandable to the modern reader--The Wake renders the inner life of an Anglo-Saxon man with an accuracy and immediacy rare in historical fiction. To enter Buccmaster's world is to feel powerfully the sheer strangeness of the past. A tale of lost gods and haunted visions, The Wake is both a sensational, gripping story and a major literary achievement.

 

For fans of Born to Run and other tales of modern adventure as well as anyone who can't do without their own rigorous undertakings, this intriguing book looks at the way doing hard things makes us better people.

 

Publisher's description:

Discover the evolutionary mind and body benefits of living at the edges of your comfort zone and reconnecting with the wild. In many ways, we're more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues?Journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort. Easter's journey to understand our evolutionary need to be challenged takes him to meet the NBA's top exercise scientist, who uses an ancient Japanese practice to build championship athletes; to the mystical country of Bhutan, where an Oxford economist and Buddhist leader are showing the world what death can teach us about happiness; to the outdoor lab of a young neuroscientist who's found that nature tests our physical and mental endurance in ways that expand creativity while taming burnout and anxiety; to the remote Alaskan backcountry on a demanding thirty-three-day hunting expedition to experience the rewilding secrets of one of the last rugged places on Earth; and more. Along the way, Easter uncovers a blueprint for leveraging the power of discomfort that will dramatically improve our health and happiness, and perhaps even help us understand what it means to be human.