Welcome to Browsing Books!
We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, a multitype system serving all types of libraries. We are here to help you find new books, for yourself or for your library.
This season, we continue to travel around Minnesota, but this time we’re learning about all the fascinating historical sites our state has to offer and giving you a book prompt inspired by each site.
We will share six book suggestions to meet that prompt, to get you started on reading new books. You can also take that prompt and find any other book to meet the challenge!
“Through inspiring exhibits, thought-provoking programs, live performances, and action-packed discovery, the History Center feeds your curiosity about Minnesota’s stories, people, and places.” To celebrate this center, we suggest that you read a book set in a museum.
In our show notes for this episode, we link each book to one of our state’s great independent bookstores: Zenith Books in Duluth, MN. It gives you a description, so you can get more information about the book to help you make a decision about your reading or recommendations.
The Case of the Missing Museum Archives, by Steve Brezenoff and Lisa K Weber
When the plans for the prototype of a failed flying machine go missing from the Air and Space Museum’s archives, Amal’s father, the assistant archivist, is blamed. No one suspects a crime has been committed – except Amal and her friends. With her father’s job on the line, it’s up to them to track down the missing plans and get to the bottom of the museum mystery.
The Animals of Lockwood Manor by Jane Healey
In August 1939, thirty-year-old Hetty Cartwright arrives at Lockwood Manor to oversee a natural history museum collection whose contents have been taken out of London for safekeeping. She is unprepared for the scale of protecting her charges from party guests, wild animals, the elements, the tyrannical Major Lockwood, and Luftwaffe bombs. Most of all, she is unprepared for the beautiful and haunted Lucy Lockwood.
For Lucy, who has spent much of her life cloistered at Lockwood, suffering from bad nerves, the arrival of the museum brings with it new freedoms. But it also resurfaces memories of her late mother and nightmares in which Lucy roams Lockwood, hunting for something she has lost.
When the animals appear to move of their own accord and exhibits go missing, Hetty and Lucy begin to wonder what exactly it is that they might need protection from. And as the disasters mount, it is not only Hetty’s future employment that is in danger but her own sanity. There’s something, or someone, in the house. Someone stalking her through its darkened corridors . . .
Song for the Horse Nation: Horses in Native American Cultures, by National Museum of the American Indian, Emil Her Many Horses, George Horse Capture
The tradition of horses in Native American culture, depicted through images, essays, and quotes. For many Native Americans, each animal and bird that surrounded them was part of a nation of its own, and none was more vital to both survival and culture than the horse.
All the Beauty in the WorldThe Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, by Patrick Bringley
Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.
To his surprise and the reader’s delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.
In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.
The Dug-Up Gun Museum, by Matt Donovan
Matt Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum confronts our country’s obsession with guns to explore America’s deep-seated political divisions and issues linked to violence, race, power, and privilege. Taking its title from an actual museum located in Wyoming, this collection of poems interrogates our country’s history of gun violence, asking questions about our fetishization of weapons, how mass shootings and the killing of unarmed civilians by police have become normalized, and the multitudinous ways in which firearms are ingrained in our country’s culture.
Much like the poet himself, Donovan’s poems are dynamic and constantly in motion as he explores the ways in which capitalism and its relentless stream of content have led to a collective desensitization in the face of violence. In turns harrowing, elegiac, and ironic, set in locations ranging from Cody to Chicago, from Las Vegas to Sandy Hook, The Dug-Up Gun Museum probes America’s failures, bizarre infatuations, and innumerable tragedies linked to guns.
Museum of the Missing: The High Stakes of Art Crime, by Simon Houpt
The past few years have been tough on Edvard Munch. First the Norwegian Expressionist’s iconic painting The Scream was stolen in 1994. Then it was recovered, and a different version was stolen in 2004. It seems that Munch is getting more than his fair share of attention from thieves, but he’s not alone. These days, no artist’s work is safe.
The international police agency, Interpol, currently lists as stolen more than twenty-five thousand works of art. This figure includes sculptures, furniture, clocks, and antiquities, as well as paintings. The number of paintings alone is staggering. Rembrandts, Renoirs, Van Goghs, Picassos. You could fill a museum.
In Museum of the Missing, journalist Simon Houpt investigates the fascinating story of modern art theft. What started as looting of art treasures by invading armies, including the Nazis during World War II, has exploded into a sophisticated international operation. But grand art thefts are only part of this fascinating story. Houpt takes the reader into the backrooms of Scotland Yard, the FBI, and Interpol as crack art-recovery squads mount surveillance operations and elaborate stings. He also leads readers into a tangled underworld of money laundering, drugs, illegal arms trading, and terrorism?where the stakes for both sides are very high.
The stakes for lovers of art are just as high. Many of the world’s stolen masterpieces will probably not be recovered in the foreseeable future. Some may never be seen by the public again. Museum of the Missing offers an extraordinary glimpse of these lost treasures.
CONCLUSION:
Thanks for joining us! We’ll be back next week with a look at the next historic site and the next book prompt!