Any Requests?

Categories: Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Nonfiction , Fiction

I knew a regular library user who carried a tiny notebook in his jacket pocket.  It was the latest in a long line of notebooks he had kept over the years, stretching back to when he lived in Shanghai in 1945, neatly recording all of the books he had read since then.

I was always somewhat awestruck by this, but I couldn’t help but feel it was Too Late for me to follow his example, even if I weren’t Too Lazy to keep it up. 

The wonderful LibraryThing, a website that lets you catalog your library and share it, is the modern equivalent (and much more!) of those notebooks, but even that strikes me as Too Exhausting when I look around at all of the books I’d love to add to it.

Still, looking around at all of those books does make me want to share them with you. 

So here’s my question.  What kind of books would you most like me to post about?

Most of my posts are in our Rediscoveries category, all of those great books on the library shelves that you meant to read when you saw that review way back when but never did, or forgot the title of after a friend told you to look for it, or just wonder why didn’t anybody ever tell me about this one before?

There’s just so much wonderful stuff that far too few people have read.  So help me choose what you’d like me to post on.

How about:

• a smalltown novel about law and moral courage that will remind readers of To Kill a Mockingbird, even though it’s narrated by a middle-aged drunk
• a rich science fiction debut set in a future where art and politics and small talk seem to have survived as well as technology, and in which a carved figurine and its secrets set off interplanetary intrigue and religious war
• a tart and unabashedly improbable literary love story, where our hero and heroine meet when she pulls the emergency stop cord on a train in order to rescue a sheep
• a stark but lyrical coming-of-age novel set in rural Scotland, emblematic of a generation that’s being left behind by economic change and of a countryside that’s sliding into ruin
• an inimitable father-son story, bursting with life and originality, about a clumsy, oversized genius of a boy and the man who gave up his own dreams to support him
• a quiet but wrenching philosophical novel set in sixteenth-century Florence, whose narrator is the embodiment of the Renaissance ideal—except for the hideous growth on his face
• an offbeat but unexpectedly captivating New Orleans mystery whose quirky hero speaks of himself only in the third person
• a powerful tale of grief, secrets, and politics, about a widow whose husband may have been a terrorist and not, as she had thought, a man who shared her every conviction and passion

Does any of those tempt you?  If not, what would?  What kinds of books are you looking for?  Tell and I’ll tell all.  (Well, I’ll tell all anyway—stay tuned next week, and I’ll give you the titles for these.  Unless you can name them before then!)