What We Are Reading
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib (audio, read by the author)
"I’m not a basketball fan, but it didn’t take long for me to be caught up in the spell of this audiobook due the author’s beautiful and intense poetic/spoken word narration style. I didn’t have his love of the game, but I could absolutely appreciate how central it was to his life and to his community. I could also understand his use of the sport to illustrate various pivotal moments or feelings that are common to every life—the decision to leave a place you love, for example, or how to survive in a harsh world. But, while basketball provides the framework here, this is not a book about the game. It is a memoir about a place, about a culture, about community, about injustice, about a life, and more. It jumps from topic to topic in a way that seems both random and yet is completely organic, smooth even. Kind of like the flow of a game of basketball. Did I find myself at sea at times due to my lack of knowledge about basketball? Yes, but then I got pulled right back in with something that helped me understand and took me to entirely new places. This book is a singular reading experience, like all the best works of literature are."
What's Hot This Month
If you enjoyed
Memorial Days, the powerful memoir by Geraldine Brooks about her grief following the death of her husband, please check out this list of titles you might also enjoy.
Featured Title
There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone
In this unforgettable book, Brian Goldstone tells the story of five families in Atlanta, all with steady full-time employment, each of whom have been faced with a multitude of obstacles in finding housing. As their tales demonstrate, skyrocketing rents, low wages, a lack of tenant rights, and the frequent bureaucratic nightmares that accompany housing assistance programs, have all combined in cities across the US to cause a catastrophic problem that is not included in statistical reports; people being forced into homelessness by a booming economy. With deep reporting and heartbreaking intimate portraits, this book illustrates the breadth of this crisis and makes an urgent call for solutions. If you read and enjoyed
Evicted by Matthew Desmond, the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning book about the housing crisis, then this is a book you don’t want to miss
What's New This Month
The late spring offers a wonderful selection of debut titles such as
Tilt by Emma Pattee, about a woman shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. If she can just make it home, she is determined to change her life.
Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert a debut novel from Bob the Drag Queen, is a story set in a world in which various historical figures have been brought back to life, among them is Harriet Tubman who chooses to tell the story of the enslaved people she led to freedom through Hip Hop.
In nonfiction, Gretchen Rubin returns with
Secrets of Adulthood, which explores simple truths for living with greater clarity and happiness. Meanwhile
The Ride by Kostya Kennedy celebrates the 250
th anniversary of the ride of Paul Revere with a new narrative of the events of April 1775 that reveals a story much more complex and daring than the basic legend learned in childhood.
For More Reading Suggestions:
- Best New Romance Books from NYPL
- 20 Books You Won’t Believe are Debuts from Kirkus
- 45 New and Upcoming Cozy Mysteries from Goodreads
- The March Earphones Awards from Audiofile