Take a visit to some of SyossetRandR’s blog posts appearing in January during the past five years:
2017: MUSEUM PASS PROGRAM NEWS
2016: LATEST ADDITIONS TO BOOK CLUB IN A BAG
2015: BOOKS-TO-FILMS COMING IN FEBRUARY
2014: STEAMPUNK: NOT JUST A SUBGENRE ANY LONGER
2013: QUESTIONS ABOUT BOOKS: 2012, PART 7 (THE END)
We’ll take another nostalgic look at the past five years again in February. Stay warm!
-posted by Sonia, Reference Services
Let us provide you with everything you need for your book club: sets of books exclusively for local book clubs to check out for their discussions. Discussion questions are included in the set, along with biographical and critical material.
The following are titles that have been added to the Book Club in a Bag collection recently. Information on borrowing any of our Book Clubs in a Bag as well as a complete list of all titles available can be found here on the library’s website. Please call 516-921-7161 ext. 239 or stop by Readers’ Services if you have any questions.
Two-Family Houseby Lynda Cohen Loigman
Two women, sisters by marriage who share a two-family brownstone in Brooklyn in the 1950s, form a strong bond when they each give birth minutes apart on the same night, but as the years pass, a deeply buried family secret causes their friendship to unravel.
by Fiona Barton
After Jean’s husband dies, the community wants to know the real truth about the crime he was suspected of—but Jean has secrets of her own.
by Paul Kalanithi
A young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal diagnosis describes his examination into what truly makes a meaningful life.
All summaries from the publishers.
-posted by Evelyn, Readers’ Services
Let us provide you with everything you need for your book club: sets of books exclusively for local book clubs to check out for their discussions. Discussion questions are included in the set, along with biographical and critical material.
The following are titles that have been added to the Book Club in a Bag collection recently. Information on borrowing any of our Book Clubs in a Bag as well as a complete list of all titles available can be found here on the library’s website. Please call 516-921-7161 ext. 239 or stop by Readers’ Services if you have any questions.
by Kent Haruf
Addie Moore and Louis Waters, a widow and widower each living alone, forge a loving bond over their shared loneliness, provoking local gossip and the disapproval of their grown children in ways that are further complicated by an extended visit by a sad young grandchild.
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The story of a South Vietnamese captain — a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America — who returns to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause.
by Aline Ohanesian
Inheriting the family kilim rug dynasty when his eccentric grandfather is found dead, Orhan struggles with will stipulations that leave the family estate to a stranger who holds secrets from the final years of the Ottoman Empire.
by Camron Wright
Sang Ly struggles to survive by picking through garbage in Cambodia’s largest municipal dump. Under threat of eviction by an embittered old drunk who is charged with collecting rents from the poor of Stung Meanchey, Sang Ly embarks on a desperate journeyto save her ailing son from a life of ignorance and poverty.
Let us provide you with everything you need for your book club: sets of books exclusively for local book clubs to check out for their discussions. Discussion questions are included in the set, along with biographical and critical material.
The following are titles that have been added to the Book Club in a Bag collection recently. Information on borrowing any of our Book Clubs in a Bag as well as a complete list of all titles available can be found here on the library’s website. Please call 516-921-7161 ext. 239 or stop by Readers’ Services if you have any questions.
Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
Twenty years after the trial of Tom Robinson, Scout returns home to Maycomb to visit her father and struggles with personal and political issues as her small Alabama town adjusts to the turbulent events beginning to transform the United States in the mid-1950s.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Moving to New York to pursue creative ambitions, four former classmates share decades marked by love, loss, addiction and haunting elements from a brutal childhood.
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
The changing needs of aging parents impact a family gathering during which Abby Whitshank relates how her husband and she fell in love during the summer of 1959 and shared decades of marriage impacted by children and long-held secrets.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
A story of the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family explores the fallout of the drowning death of Lydia Lee, the favorite daughter of a Chinese-American family in 1970s Ohio
All summaries from the publishers.
-posted by Sonia, Reference Librarian
Let us provide you with everything you need for your book club. The library owns sets of books exclusively for local book clubs to check out for their discussions. Discussion questions are included in the set, along with biographical and critical material. A listing of all available Book Club in a Bag sets can be viewed here. Following are the two newest titles available:
“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos.
The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture. From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around the sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house that has always been their anchor.
Summaries from the publishers.
Please contact Readers’ Services, 921-7161, ext 239 or 241 to reserve a book for your Book Club.
End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver
The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult
Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
Syosset School District resident cardholders only.
Request for kits must be made through a library staff member by phone or in person.
You may reserve a kit up to six months in advance.
The loan period is four weeks.
Let us provide you everything you need for a successful book discussion.
– posted by Evelyn, Readers’ Services
Let us provide everything you need for a successful book discussion. We can supply you with 10 copies of the book and a discussion binder. The binder contains discussion questions, biographical information and critical material. Please contact Readers’ Services, 921-7161, ext 239 to reserve a book for your Book Club. A brochure containing a list of all Book Club in a Bag titles is available at the Readers’ Services desk.
These are some of our recent additions:
“A. J. Fikry, the irascible owner of Island Books, has recently endured some tough years: his wife has died, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and his prized possession–a rare edition of Poe poems–has been stolen. Over time, he has given up on people, and even the books in his store, instead of offering solace, are yet another reminder of a world that is changing too rapidly. Until a most unexpected occurrence gives him the chance to make his life over and see things anew.
In 1942 Paris, gifted architect Lucien Bernard accepts a commission that will bring him a great deal of money and maybe get him killed. But if he’s clever enough, he’ll avoid any trouble. All he has to do is design a secret hiding place for a wealthy Jewish man, a space so invisible that even the most determined German officer won’t find it. He sorely needs the money, and outwitting the Nazis who have occupied his beloved city is a challenge he can’t resist.
But when one of his hiding spaces fails horribly, and the problem of where to hide a Jew becomes terribly personal, Lucien can no longer ignore what’s at stake. The Paris Architect asks us to consider what we owe each other, and just how far we’ll go to make things right.
In this striking literary debut, Carol Rifka Brunt unfolds a moving story of love, grief, and renewal as two lonely people become the unlikeliest of friends and find that sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost someone until you’ve found them.
1987. There’s only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus, and that’s her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June’s world is turned upside down. But Finn’s death brings a surprise acquaintance into June’s life—someone who will help her to heal, and to question what she thinks she knows about Finn, her family, and even her own heart.
(All summaries from the publishers.)
– posted by Evelyn, Readers’ Services
Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
One of The New York Times’s Ten Best Books of the Year
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
An NPR “Great Reads” Book, a Chicago Tribune Best Book, a Washington Post Notable Book
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.
The Art Forger – B.A. Shapiro
Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—still the largest unsolved art theft in history—one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work, she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece—the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years—may itself be a forgery. The Art Forger is a thrilling novel about seeing—and not seeing—the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.
The Rosie Project – Graeme Simsion
A socially awkward genetics professor who has never been on a second date sets out to find the perfect wife, but instead finds Rosie Jarman, a fiercely independent barmaid who is on a quest to find her biological father.
All summaries from the publishers.
Let us provide everything you need for a successful book discussion with Book Club in a Bag. We can supply you with 10 copies of the book and a discussion binder. The binder contains discussion questions, biographical information and critical material. Please contact Readers’ Services, 921-7161, ext 239 to reserve a book for your Book Club.
– posted by Evelyn, Readers’ Services
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