Out with the old and in with the new…at least sometimes. Last month, many of our less-popular Recreational Reading books were pulled from the shelves to be “voted off the island,” so to speak. There is only so much room on those little shelves!  However, Library staff were given the opportunity to advocate for holding onto volumes of their choosing.

Among those saved is In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, reviewed by our Director, Sarah Leadley:
“Michael Ondaatje—a gifted poet and novelist—tells the story of working-class immigrants living in Toronto in the early 20th century. The writing is truly astonishing, lyric, and inventive. It’s about history, love, loss, and work. There are extraordinary descriptions of labor conditions in the 1920’s—sometimes tragic, sometimes beautiful, always heroic. The main character, Patrick Lewis, is introduced as a child, living in rural Canada with his logger/dynamiter father. Patrick leaves for Toronto, where he works as a laborer, becomes a searcher for a missing billionaire, and falls in love. The Novel’s title is taken from the Epic of Gilgamesh: “The joyful will stoop to sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion.”

Now that the rest are back home on the shelves, you can see for yourself which ones were rescued! For the next month, these books will have green slips in them to indicate they were saved by staff—and possibly you!

Fiction
So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish by Douglas Adams (“the fourth in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy”)
Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams (the fifth)
Imajica by Clive Barker (which, although I haven’t read it yet, was my personal choice)
England, England by Julian Barnes
Jane and the Unpleasantness of Scargrave Manor by Stephanie Barron (being the first Jane Austen Mystery)
The Complete Stories of Truman Capote
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg (adapted into the award-winning movie Fried Green Tomatoes)
All Together Dead by Charlaine Harris (the seventh in The Southern Vampire Mysteries, the series hit HBO show True Blood is based on)
Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris (the ninth)
Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris (the tenth)
Island by Aldous Huxley
Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi (sequel to Old Man’s War)
The Last Colony by John Scalzi (sequel to The Ghost Brigades)
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (adapted into a movie)
Otherland by Tad Williams
Old School by Tobias Wolff

Non-fiction
Cash by Johnny Cash with Patrick Carr
How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Women Who Eat: A New Generation on the Glory of Food edited by Leslie Miller
The Beluga Cafe: My Strange Adventure with Art, Music, and Whales in the Far North by Jim Nollman
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
Olympic Peninsula: The Grace & Grandeur by Mike Sedam
Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival by Joe Simpson (also a documentary)

Of the saved ones, some are to be relocated in the stacks, but are still being processed (look for these in the online catalog):
The Darling by Russell Banks
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason
Harriet and Isabella by Patricia O’Brien
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth

Feel free to browse around, see what catches your eye!