Coffee with Books Suggested Titles

Our first Coffee with Books was today and it was a lot of fun. We met to discuss books we've really enjoyed, as well as books that are new and trending. We thought we would share some of the titles that were discussed.  We will meet quarterly, so look for our next meeting in the Fall newsletter!

Newer Titles:

All our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai | Fiction

Involves time travel and a futuristic 2016 that looks nothing like the one we are living in today. An endearing comedy about family and friendship.

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout | Fiction

A book about some of the side characters in My Name is Lucy Barton, a collection of short stories of the tragedies and redemptions of people living in small town, Amgash, Illinois.

Beartown by Fredrick Backman | Fiction

Can a junior hockey team hold a community together, and what are the secrets that can tear it apart?

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah | Biography

Noah's unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles | Fiction

A wealthy Count is ordered under house arrest in an attic room at a hotel in Moscow in 1922. His reduced circumstances bring him into a world of emotional discovery.

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance | Nonfiction

A former Marine & Yale Law Graduate offers an account of growing up in a poor Appalachian town, which also offers a broader look at the struggles of white working class.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders | Fiction

A fictional account of Lincoln’s reaction to his son, Willie’s death. A story of familial love and loss filled with humor and history, told in a unique format.

Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner | Mystery

The search for a wealthy missing student from Cambridge and the dedicated police detective who seeks to find her.

News of the World by Paulette Jiles | Fiction 

In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, is paid $50 to deliver an orphan kidnapped by Native Americans to her family in San Antonio.

The Nix by Nathan Hill | Fiction

Samuel's estranged mother is arrested for throwing rocks at a Congressman. Samuel goes on a quest to find out about her past and who she really is.

The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge | Fiction

Historic and suspenseful.  What happened to Marina’s H.P. Lovecraft obsessed husband?

Older Titles: 

The Cuckoos Calling by Robert Galbraith | Mystery

Detective and army veteran Cormoran Strike investigates a supermodel's suicide with the help of his new assistant, Robin.

Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans | Fiction

Great Expectations meets Oliver Twist. What is illegal but not immoral? What makes a family?

Destiny of the Republic by Candace Millard | Nonfiction

This account of President James Garfield’s assassination brings back to roaring life a tragic but irresistible historical period.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safron Foer | Fiction

Follow nine-year-old Oskar Schell as he navigates New York City on a quest to unlock the secrets of a mysterious key and its connection to his father, who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center.

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls | Biography

This memoir by Jeannette Walls recounts the unconventional, poverty-stricken upbringing Walls and her siblings had at the hands of their deeply dysfunctional parents.

Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly | Fiction

Inspired by the life of a real World War II heroine, this debut novel reveals a story of love, redemption, and secrets that were hidden for decades. 

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris | Biography

A humorous and irreverent memoir. A commentary on life in the rural south as well as what it is like to be an American living abroad in France.

Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifta Brunt | Fiction

A moving story of love, grief, and renewal as two lonely people become the unlikeliest of friends and find that sometimes you do not know you have lost someone until you have found them.

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier | Fiction

This book about fossils and friendship tries to answer that question, 'What do women do who don't find the Mr. Darcy of the Jane Austen novels?'

Restless by William Boyd | Fiction

Eva’s life as a spy during World War II is interwoven with the story of her daughter Ruth’s existence as a single mother in Oxford, teaching English as a second language in the summer of 1976.

Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart | Biography

An Iowa co-ed works in New York City during the summer of 1945.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki | Fiction

From Japan to the Pacific Northwest, a teenager and a writer seek to find what it means to be home.

 

How the Library Can Help Your Small Business

It's National Small Business Week, so we wanted to show you how the Lake Forest Library can help your small business.

We have a plethora of databases that can be helpful in running your small business from instructional video subscriptions to directories and more. Learn more about some of our favorite services below. In order to access these databases from home, you'll have to have your Lake Forest Library card number.

Business Source Elite: This database provides access to full-text coverage of top business, management and economics journals and periodicals. These valuable publications cover topics such as accounting, banking, finance, international business, marketing, sales and more. You can access this database from your computer at home or by downloading the EBSCOhost Mobile app.

Lexis Nexis: Use Lexis Nexis to access company and investment information, and business insights. Search through legal cases (in library only), and see news stories from hundreds of major sources, both foreign and domestic. 

Lynda.com: Access online tutorials from the industry leader in technology training from any computer with an internet connection. Topics range from Microsoft Office to Adobe Creative Cloud. You can even learn to build a website using HTML 5 and CSS in Lynda.com's built in web developer environment. 

 Reference USA: A business directory searchable by company name, executive name, business type, sales volume, number of employees, year established, geographic area, and more. Most company profiles include executive lists, links to subsidiaries/parent companies, a list of competitors, links to recent news articles about the company, and links to stock information and SEC reports. Search criteria can be combined to create company lists in either full or brief format.

Regional Business News: A database of business journals, newspapers and news-wires covering metropolitan and rural areas of the United States. Full text of most titles, but abstracts for some.

Sorkins Directory of Business and Government: Profiles of companies and organizations in the Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City metropolitan areas. Searchable by company, person’s name, industry, location, phone number, or a combination of terms. Includes titles and names of company executives, industry codes, and narrative descriptions. Mini-profiles called “Prospects” are also available.

Wall Street Journal: Editions from 1984- present. Search by keywords and dates or select entire issues by date for browsing. 

Many people who work from home find the Library to be a beautiful space to get away from home for the day and work in another location. The Library is a free, open, and stimulating place to work. The Friends Reading Room is a great place to work if you need complete silence, while the computer area on the west side is nice if you need to speak quietly or work in a small group. We do ask that patrons take phone calls in the Lobby, but only to keep the noise level down for other patrons working in the Library.

The Media Lab could be a very useful space for your business needs. With access to the full Adobe suite, Garage Band, Final Cut Pro, Blendr, Sketchup, photo scanners, iMovie and more the possibilities are endless. Learn more about the Media Lab here.


Here are a few examples of how the Media Lab could help your small business:

• Create 3D models with Blender and SketchUp
• Use inDesign to design a new business card
• Edit photos for marketing purposes using Photoshop
• Use Adobe Premiere or iMovie to create promotional videos
• Create motion graphics and visual effects using Adobe After Effects.

The Library has been doing a lot more adult programming lately with some workshops that could help you with your small business. We recently had classes on writing and a workshop on publishing. There's a photography class this Saturday that could help you take better images for marketing. We also have new technology classes every quarter. This quarter we are teaching Digitizing Video and Organizing Files. In the summer we will have classes on Google Drive and iPhone Photography. We are also planning a series of small business workshops for Winter 2017-2018. 

Read-Alike Monday: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

A lot of people have been talking about The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks again, since the movie starring Oprah is set to come out soon. Since we loved this book and we know many of you did, we're offering some suggestions on what to read next if you liked this book.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks is buried in an unmarked grave. Her family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. The story of the Lacks family is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

READ-ALIKES:

The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Cost of Defeating Disease by Meredith Wadman  The epic and controversial story of a major breakthrough in cell biology that led to the conquest of rubella and other devastating diseases. 

Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using tissue extracted from an aborted fetus from Sweden, produced safe, clean cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a devastating German measles epidemic, his colleague developed the vaccine that would one day wipe out homegrown rubella. The rubella vaccine and others made with those fetal cells have protected more than 150 million people in the United States, the vast majority of them preschoolers. The new cells and the method of making them also led to vaccines that have protected billions of people around the world from polio, rabies, chicken pox, measles, hepatitis A, shingles and adenovirus. 

Meredith Wadman's masterful account recovers not only the science of this urgent race, but also the political roadblocks that nearly stopped the scientists. She describes the terrible dilemmas of pregnant women exposed to German measles and recounts testing on infants, prisoners, orphans, and the intellectually disabled, which was common in the era. These events take place at the dawn of the battle over using human fetal tissue in research, during the arrival of big commerce in campus labs, and as huge changes take place in the laws and practices governing who "owns" research cells and the profits made from biological inventions. It is also the story of yet one more unrecognized woman whose cells have been used to save countless lives. 

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington  The first comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between Africans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the way both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without a hint of informed consent--a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and a view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. New details about the government's Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, and private institutions. This book reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit.

Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande  In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge. Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is--uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human. Complications is a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee  Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. 

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” 

The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive—and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease. 

Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

New and Noteworthy Middle Grade Fiction

We’re being showered this April with great debut novels, the latest in popular series, along with the newest from favorite authors.

 Bad News . Book 3 in the Bad Books series (Bad Magic, Bad Luck) Thirteen-year-old Clay, a boy who no longer believes in magic, tags graffiti on his classroom wall and, as punishment, is sent to a camp for wayward kids located on a volcanic island, where eccentric campmates abound, a ghost walks among the abandoned ruins of a mansion, and a dangerous force threatens to erupt with bad magic.   In the latest entry, Clay and the Secret Series Allies confront the white-gloved members of the mysterious Midnight Sun cabal.

 

   Lost in a Book by Jennifer Donnelly.  In conjunction with the new Disney live action Beauty & the Beast, an original story taking place during Belle’s time at the Beast’s castle.  Smart, bookish Belle, a captive in the Beast's castle, has become accustomed to her new home and has befriended its inhabitants. When she comes upon Nevermore, an enchanted book unlike anything else she has seen in the castle, Belle finds herself pulled into its pages and transported to a world of glamour and intrigue. But what about her friends in the Beast's castle? Can Belle trust her new companions inside the pages of Nevermore? Belle must uncover the truth about the book, before she loses herself in it forever.

 

 Journey Across the Hidden Islands   Award-winning fantasy writer Durst has created an action packed story with an Eastern flavor.  When twin princesses Seika and Ji- Lin travel to pay respects to their kingdom's dragon guardian, unexpected monsters appear, and tremors shake the earth. The Hidden Islands face unprecedented threats, and the old rituals are failing. With only their strength, ingenuity, and flying lion to rely on, can the sisters find a new way to keep their people safe?

 

Saturdays at Sea   Finishes up the series starring the ever changing Castle Glower and Princess Celie that began with Tuesdays at the Castle.  After traveling to the seaside kingdom of Lilah's betrothed prince, Lulath, Celie and her companions are busy training griffins, enjoying wedding festivities, and finishing construction of a grand ship built from parts of the Castle. But on their maiden voyage, the Ship steers them far off course into uncharted waters.

 

Baseball Genius  and Fair Ball by Derek Jeter & Paul Mantell.  Derek Jeter may not be out on the diamond but he is putting his experience to work in several novels about baseball, co-authoring with veteran children’s sports novelists.  In Baseball Genius, an average kid with an above average talent for predicting baseball pitches tries to help his favorite player out of a slump.  In Fair Ball, Jeter continues with a series containing a fictionalized version of himself as a youngster living and loving baseball.

  65-Story Treehouse   How’s your division?  This hilarious, goofy series uses multiples of 13 for each title, beginning with The 13-Story Treehouse.  So we’re at number…5!  A treehouse like no other provides the setting for outrageous antics.

   

Horizon   Debut middle grade series with a companion online game by popular teen writer Westerfeld (Uglies).  When Aero Horizon 16 crashes in the Arctic, eight children emerge from the wreckage to find themselves alone and surrounded, not by ice, but by a mysterious and deadly jungle full of carnivorous plants and predatory birds--the other five hundred people from the plane are gone, not necessarily dead, but taken by something that lives in the jungle.

 

Speed of Life  This debut novel by real life advice columnist Weston garnered 4 starred reviews.  Sofia lost her mother eight months ago, and her friends were 100% there for her. Now it’s a new year, and they’re ready for Sofia to move on.  Problem is, Sofia can’t bounce back, can’t recharge like a cell phone. She decides to write Dear Kate, an advice columnist for Fifteen Magazine, and is surprised to receive a fast reply. Soon, the two are exchanging emails, and Sofia opens up and spills all, including a few worries that are totally embarrassing. Turns out even advice columnists don’t have all the answers, and one day, Sofia learns a secret that flips her world upside down.