We had a great time in Season Three!

You can always find these episodes here, on our website. And we share them on the feeds of our other podcasts: Linking Our Libraries or Reading With Libraries. Subscribe to both! When we are not sharing content on the feed, we send out weekly Book Bites. (We don’t want you to get lonely!)

In this episode we spend a little more time chatting about THREE books! Angie: Old in Art School, Mary: Sofia Kahn is Not Obliged, and Lydia: My Name is Asher Lev. Three really different books, all interesting – we suggest you try them all!

Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon “Scottish Highlands, 1945. Claire Randall, a former British combat nurse, is just back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach—an “outlander”—in a Scotland torn by war and raiding clans in the year of Our Lord . . . 1743.

Claire is catapulted into the intrigues of a world that threatens her life, and may shatter her heart. Marooned amid danger, passion, and violence, Claire learns her only chance of safety lies in Jamie Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior. What begins in compulsion becomes urgent need, and Claire finds herself torn between two very different men, in two irreconcilable lives. “

The Boatbuilder, by Daniel Gumbiner ” At 28 years old, Eli “Berg” Koenigsberg has never encountered a challenge he couldn’t push through, until a head injury leaves him with lingering headaches and a weakness for opiates. Berg moves to a remote Northern California town, seeking space and time to recover, but soon finds himself breaking into homes in search of pills. Addled by addiction and chronic pain, Berg meets Alejandro, a reclusive, master boatbuilder, and begins to see a path forward. Alejandro offers Berg honest labor, but more than this, he offers him a new approach to his suffering, a template for survival amid intense pain. Nurtured by his friendship with Alejandro and aided, too, by the comradeship of many in Talinas, Berg begins to return to himself. Written in gleaming prose, this is a story about resilience, community, and what it takes to win back your soul. “

The Library Book, by Susan Orlean ” On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?

Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. “

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love, And Language, by Deborah Fallows

Queens of Innis Lear, by Tessa Gratton

The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker Beartown, by Fredrik Backman Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth, by James M. Tabor The Terror, by Dan Simmons

Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World, by Neil Gaiman