Saturday Staff Summer Picks

This Saturday a few of us who have had many years' experience working at BHPL - please call us the A-team, not old-timers, please - are filling in a few gaps on the "Summer Staff Faves" display bookshelf.

"The Summer Guest" by Alison Anderson is Urmi's favorite. Novelist describes the premise: "After a diary documenting a friendship between a young Ukrainian doctor and author Anton Chekhov is found, Katya Kendall believes it may be the key to saving her struggling publishing house." If you enjoyed "The Optimist's Daughter," "All the Light We Cannot See" or "Napoleon's Last Island" you may enjoy this one as well, according to Novelist.    

I chose "Hypothermia" by Arnaldur Indridason for the display. It's been five years since I read this Icelandic mystery, but I still think about it.  It's haunting and deals with a sinister plot behind a presumed suicide at a lake house, plus the reopening of the cold case of a young couple who went missing one summer day.




"A Backpack, A Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka" by Lev Golinkin is Alice's selection.  It's a wonderful memoir about a boy and his family immigrating from Russia in the 1970s which is both comic and touching.  If you are wondering about the title - Lev's family left with his teddy bear in his backpack, plus eight crates of vodka to grease the bureaucratic wheels for their escape from Russia.

"Villette" by Charlotte Bronte is another one of my picks. Pretend you are a kid on summer break who's been assigned a classic, but this time read the one that's better than Jane Eyre. Gentlewoman Lucy Snowe becomes penniless in England and decides to look for a governess position in a Brussels-like city in Belgium, but soon finds herself teaching English at a girls' boarding school.  This semi-autobiographical novel is almost 700 pages long, so clear your reading calendar.