Librarian's Reading Recommendations

Hoopla Recommendations

Bailey’s Café by Gloria Naylor- In post–World War II Brooklyn, on a quiet backstreet, there's a little place that draws people from all over-not for the food, and definitely not for the coffee. An in-between place that's only there when you need it, Bailey's Cafe is a crossroads where patrons stay for a while before making a choice: Move on or check out? In this novel, National Book Award–winning author Gloria Naylor's expertly crafted characters experience a journey full of beauty and heartbreak.

Make Life Beautiful by Syd and Shea McGee- For the one million-plus followers who turn to Syd and Shea McGee for advice on building a beautiful home and life, Make Life Beautiful will be a behind-the-scenes look into how the couple transformed Shea's small room of fabric samples and big dream of becoming a designer into one of the most successful and fastest-growing interior design businesses in the country.

The Comitted by Viet Thanh Nguyen- The long-awaited new novel from one of America's most highly regarded contemporary writers, The Committed follows the unnamed Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.

Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, Man, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese "aunt," he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But, the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition. The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail.

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