Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.
Hi there! How’s your week going? I hope you all are staying healthy, both mentally and physically. We had a long weekend here in the US, it was Memorial Day on Monday and we had a nice time relaxing in the backyard (although it was quite hot on Monday itself!).
What have you borrowed from your library this week? Share it in the link-up or in the comments below!
Oh I am so excited to get my hands on this one! I don’t usually go for new releases but I would read anything Sittenfeld writes. Here’s a bonus: Judy Blume and Sittenfeld discuss the book!
Rodham – Curtis Sittenfeld
From the New York Times bestselling author of American Wife and Eligible, a novel that imagines a deeply compelling what-might-have-been: What if Hillary Rodham hadn’t married Bill Clinton?
In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Lifemagazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she’s attending Yale Law School, and she’s on the forefront of student activism and the women’s rights movement. And then she meets Bill Clinton. A handsome, charismatic southerner and fellow law student, Bill is already planning his political career. In each other, the two find a profound intellectual, emotional, and physical connection that neither has previously experienced.
In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton.
But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s powerfully imagined tour-de-force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road. Feeling doubt about the prospective marriage, she endures their devastating breakup and leaves Arkansas. Over the next four decades, she blazes her own trail—one that unfolds in public as well as in private, that involves crossing paths again (and again) with Bill Clinton, that raises questions about the tradeoffs all of us must make in building a life.
Brilliantly weaving a riveting fictional tale into actual historical events, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers an uncannily astute and witty story for our times. In exploring the loneliness, moral ambivalence, and iron determination that characterize the quest for political power, as well as both the exhilaration and painful compromises demanded of female ambition in a world still run mostly by men, Rodham is a singular and unforgettable novel.
I’ve still got a few other books from previous library loots going! So the rest of my haul this week are comics.
Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York by Roz Chast
From the #1 NYT bestselling author of Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast’s new graphic memoir–a hilarious illustrated ode/guide/ thank-you note to Manhattan.
A native Brooklynite-turned-suburban commuter deemed the quintessential New Yorker, Roz Chast has always been intensely alive to the glorious spectacle that is Manhattan–the daily clash of sidewalk racers and dawdlers; the fascinating range of dress codes; and the priceless, nutty outbursts of souls from all walks of life.
For Chast, adjusting to life outside the city was surreal–(you can own trees!? you have to drive!?)–but she recognized that the reverse was true for her kids. On trips into town, they would marvel at the strange visual world of Manhattan–its blackened sidewalk gum-wads, “those West Side Story-things” (fire escapes)–and its crazily honeycombed systems and grids.
Told through Chast’s singularly zany, laugh-out-loud, touching, and true cartoons, Going Into Town is part New York stories (the “overheard and overseen” of the island borough), part personal and practical guide to walking, talking, renting, and venting–an irresistible, one-of-a-kind love letter to the city.
I wanted to throw in a super light read – this is a middle grade comic.
Click – Kayla Miller
A debut graphic novel about friendship and finding where you “click” in school.
Olive wants to get in on the act . . .
. . . Any act!
Olive “clicks” with everyone in the fifth grade—until one day she doesn’t. When a school variety show leaves Olive stranded without an act to join, she begins to panic, wondering why all her friends have already formed their own groups . . . without her. With the performance drawing closer by the minute, will Olive be able to find her own place in the show before the curtain comes up?
What did you get from your library this week?
I haven’t gotten anything yet but my library has reopened for contactless pick-up so I’ve placed about 20 holds and am very excited to go and get them. It’s been months since a new book entered my home and pretty soon I am going to have a whole passel of new books and I cannot wait.
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Our libraries have been given official license to open when they are able to find a safe way to conduct business with distancing measures in place, but I’ve fallen in love with my own shelves again anyway, so I’m content to wait. The new Sittenfeld, though, that would be awesome, for sure. And I do enjoy Roz Chast’s stuff too. The middle-grade novel looks nice and sweet for these times, as well. I’ve been reading a few more children’s books in recent weeks, most recently Monica Furlong’s series, beginning with Juniper and now The Wise Child, which are lovely (but I’m missing the third book, so, yeah, back to missing the library, already LOL).
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I’ll be interested to see what you make of Rodham. I sped through it but had some mixed feelings in the end. Enjoy!
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