Jan Bobbett

Next time you’re looking around our library for something interesting, take a look at our Best Sellers cabinet. The doors are open to anyone during established hours, so visit each weekday between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. or whenever a librarian is available. That’s where we keep our most recent purchases. While you’re there, note that on the librarian’s desk there is a complete list of the month’s Best Sellers.

Speaking of the list of available Best Sellers, you might notice that John Grisham’s The Exchange is on the December list twice. One is in regular print, and the other has large print. We’re pleased to offer our patrons both versions when we can.

We update our Best Sellers in the cabinet monthly. Below are some books we have recently added to our Best Sellers cabinet. As always, other books are available without check-out. Choose, read, enjoy, return.

Currently available in Best Sellers (December):

The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger, is a different sort of novel. One reviewer found it an “engrossing and complex beautifully written multi-layered novel that explores the midcentury American life of those scarred by war.” Centering around the murder of a powerful citizen in a small Minnesota town half a century ago, it captures the atmosphere of the period. Like all good historical fiction, the reader gets a great fictional story as well as a sense of the culture—in this case, what Americans were experiencing in that period of American life.

After writing three successful novels, Patrick deWitt created The Librarianist. One of our in-house librarians called it “a bizarre little book.” It features a 71-year-old healthy main character who lives mostly in solitude—until he helps out a resident at a senior center and then volunteers at that center. It’s fun for the reader to follow his encounters with characters once he gets a job at the library. It’s a novel about “quiet decency,” according to one reviewer, who captures the essence of our main character. I’d put it in the genre of “living a simple and decent life” (if that were a genre).

Along a different vein is Emma Rosenblum’s Bad Summer People. Now there’s a title that fits the book. Author Chandler Baker has this to say about it: “Bad Summer People is a great summer page-turner packed with sun-soaked secrets, outrageous scandals, and salacious gossip. Its cast of gloriously terrible one-percenters and the caustic wit dripping from each page make this a perfect rich-people-behaving-badly beach read.” Okay then.

Don’t forget, we also have Tom Lake. It’s a novel by popular author Ann Patchett. If you liked her Bel Canto (2001) as much as I did, you might want to try Tom Lake.

This December we are again displaying some favorite Christmas books. Most are small. Some readers like these so much that they read their favorite one each year. Take a look if you’re interested.

Visit our library and enjoy the “feast.”