Category: 2016 Book Challenge

2016 Library Challenge: A Book By An Author Under 30

I had trouble picking books for this challenge because I kept second-guessing how the instructions define “an author under 30.” Are we talking about someone under 30 now? Or does it just mean someone who was under 30 when their book was published? Or maybe under 30 when it was written? It’s a veritable wormhole!

Anyway, I’ve decided to just include a sampler of books from people who are still under 30 and also those from people who are now in their 30s but were under 30 when the book was published.

Incidentally, in much the same way I realized that books over 500 pages tend to come from a couple of different genres, I realized that a lot of these authors write either speculative fiction or historical fiction. Make of that what you will.

As always, if you’re interested in learning more about one of the books, just follow the link to our online catalog.

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2016 Library Challenge: A Book By Your Favorite Author

VARIOUS…Mandatory Credit: Photo by Everett Collection / Rex Features ( 778826a ) Arthur Miller (1915-2005) American playwright won the Pulitzer Prize for DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1948). VARIOUS
FOSSUM

If I asked you who your favorite author is, what would your answer be? Quick! Don’t stop and think about this question too hard.

Was it easy for you to come up with an answer or did you struggle to pick just one favorite author?

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2016 Library Challenge: An Author You’ve Never Read Before (Brooks Blevins)

Ghost of the Ozarks

We’ve been talking about the upcoming Books in Bloom Festival the past couple of weeks. As part of my preparation for attending, I started reading a book that will be the subject of one of the featured talks–Brooks Blevins’s Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South.

This books tells the strange story of Connie Francis, a drifter who was murdered in Stone County, Arkansas, in the spring of 1929 by several local men. That anecdote in and of itself doesn’t really stand out in the annals of true crime, but the fact that several months later Francis testified at his own murder trial does. (No, you didn’t read that wrong. The murder victim testified at his killers’ trial.)

Intrigued?

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2016 Library Challenge: An Author’s First Book

For the month of May, we’re going to be focusing on authors–we’ll be looking at the various author-specific challenges from the 2016 Library Challenge, we’re highlighting authors who’ll be at Books in Bloom later this month, and we even have a display set up at the front of the library to spotlight author’s first novels. So, it only makes sense for us to kick off our focus on authors with a post about reading an author’s first book. I must confess, while I was researching this post, I was really startled to learn some of these books were these authors’ debuts because they already possess such polish.

As always, if you’re interested in any of the books featured in the post, you can learn more about them on our online library catalog.

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2016 Library Challenge: A Book From Your Childhood

Next week kicks off the Children’s Book Council’s annual Children’s Book Week, which champions the benefits and pleasures of reading for kids. That got me to reflecting on some of my favorite books as a child. Perhaps not too surprisingly, I loved reading from an early age–relatives say that as a toddler I could be bribed out of giving people frosty silent treatments with the promise of being read to. However, as difficult as it was for me to pick what books to take to a deserted island, I came up with a list of my 3 favorite books as a child pretty quickly.

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2016 Library Challenge: A Play

“The play’s the thing”–or so Hamlet tells us.

One of the challenges for this year’s reading challenge is reading a play, and I figured this week being the 400-year anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death was the perfect time to discuss this challenge.

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2016 Library Challenge: A Book That Might Make You Cry

Last week, we looked at books that make you laugh, so this time, I figured we might as well look at the exact opposite–a book that might make you cry.

Now, depending on how given you are to crying while reading, this challenge could be really hard or really easy.

I don’t usually cry when reading (or watching movies or actually much in general), even if the scene is very sad, and when I do cry , it’s usually at some odd scene that’s probably not supposed to be the one that makes you cry. So, it’s probably just as well that, rather than crying, I am more likely to respond to sad books by just feeling incredibly hollow and depressed for days afterward. But every now and then, a book will make me sob uncontrollably.

And so to honor sad books, here’s a round-up of books that might make you cry. As always, be sure to check our online catalog for more details.

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2016 Library Challenge: A Funny Book

In what I hope is one of the more enjoyable requirements of the 2016 Library Challenge, participants are asked to read a funny book. We’re celebrating humorous reads all month long at the Berryville Public Library, with a display up front that highlights humorous essays, memoirs, and other things sure to make you laugh (or at least think about the power of a laugh).

We have a lot of great books written by humor writers, including all of David Sedaris’s books and many Dave Barry books, but we also have some others in our collection that you may not be aware of. As always, if you’re interested in any of these books, please check out our online catalog to learn more about availability and to place holds.

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2016 Library Challenge–A Book Over 100 Years Old

Here at the library, we’ve been getting into the spirit of March Madness by making brackets, and that prompted me to start thinking about one of the 2016 Library Challenges: read a book that is over 100 years old. I suspect that for those of you who are participating–and even those of you who are not–reading that challenge either filled you with a palpable sense of dread or it made you positively giddy that you’d be revisiting one of your old favorites. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed from working in the library, as well as taking literature classes, it’s that there are two types of people in the world–there are those who love 19th century literature and those who do not.

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2016 Library Challenge: A Book Over 500 Pages Long

When it comes to recommending 500+ page books, I decided to avoid what is perhaps the most obvious solution to the problem—19th century classics, which regularly top out at well over 500 pages. Instead, I decided to focus on much more recent books that qualify for this category, simply because I’m assuming many readers will already be familiar with a lot of those classics, even ones they’ve never personally read.

In conducting my research, I learned that many contemporary books that are this long fall into one of two categories—literary fiction or fantasy. And, sometimes, they’re literary fiction with fantastical elements or fantasy with literary elements. In any event, I tried to find a little bit of something to appeal to everyone.

As always, follow this link to our online catalog to learn more about any of these books or to place them on hold.

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