The White Plains Library Staff have assembled their picks for the year, featuring literary fiction, audiobooks, fantasy, music, and more. It's a wonderfully wide-ranging list, full of lots of surprises, and should help with your holiday shopping or just some entertainment for yourself. Enjoy!
Below you'll find a list with links to the catalog as well as a blurb on why staff enjoyed it.
Adults
AI Prompt Writing by Emma Grimberg
Whether you’re creating stories, art, or music, this guide shows you how to harness the power of AI prompts to bring your ideas to life in a whole new way.
– Austin Olney, Digital Media Specialist
All Our Yesterdays by Joel H. Morris
Lady Macbeth's origin story. The author has done a tremendous job of weaving what little is known about Lady Macbeth's early life into a story that explains much about the character we know so well from Shakespeare.
-Laura Eckley, Library Director
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
I'm a bit late to the party reading Annihilation, as the copy I read this year is its 10th Anniversary edition, but wow, what a book. The one word I kept coming back to as I was reading it was “unsettling.” It's compulsively readable, eerie, and intriguing. X-Files meets Lovecraft meets a travelogue meets Arrival.
-Joshua Carlson, Librarian III – Manager, Youth Services
Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions by Mario Giordano
Bavarian widow Isolde Poldi has retired to family in Sicily essentially to die. But when her handyman disappears and the police name her as a suspect, she rallies and finds the will to live through a mystery to solve. Narrated by her nephew, a frustrated writer, this novel contains adventure, romance, and over-the-top campy humor.
-Susan Hoover, Adult Services Librarian
A Big Life in Advertising by Mary Wells Lawrence
Plop plop, fizz fizz. Quality is Job 1. I love New York. If these advertising taglines sound familiar, you know the work of Mary Wells Lawrence. Getting her start during the advertising creative revolution of the fifties, Wells Lawrence, who passed away this year, went on to break glass ceilings with the founding of her agency and direction of iconic campaigns. Written with the passion of a trailblazer, her memoir conveys the joy and excitement of working in a creative business.
-Susan Hoover, Adult Services Librarian
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
Super interesting and weird book about Greta who lives in a run-down almost uninhabitable house with her friend Sabine, and a bunch of bees, in Hudson, NY. For work she transcribes the sessions of a sex therapist in town, and becomes infatuated with one of his clients who she calls ‘Big Swiss.’ One day out and about Greta recognizes Big Swiss’ voice and … what could possibly be wrong with that?
-Gabi Rodriguez, Librarian I Children’s Services
The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson
Erik Larson is a master storyteller and his newest work does not disappoint. The Demon of Unrest chronicles the events of the siege and shelling of Fort Sumter and the election of Abraham Lincoln. History comes to life as the Nation breaks apart with the formation of the Confederacy and slowly slides towards Civil War. Fans of US history, Civil War buffs, and lovers of non-fiction will really enjoy Larson's latest offering.
-Tim Baird, Manager of Adult Services
Find the Item Here
From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough
Narrated by Riley Keough and Julia Roberts
A month before she unexpectedly died, Lisa Marie Presley asked her daughter to help write her memoir. The audiobook, narrated by Riley Keough and Julia Roberts, is a riveting, wrenching story of love, loss, and generational addiction, beautifully told.
-Karyn De Luca, Adult Services Librarian
James by Percival Everett
James, a re-imagining of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's point of view, won the National Book Award earlier this month. This shift in perspective made James a meaningful book with a lot of room for discussion. It was also difficult to put down, because I don't remember much of Huckleberry Finn from tenth grade and there were so many suspenseful moments throughout. I was anxious to find out whether James and Huck would be safe at the end. I also want to shout out Sam Sanders of the podcast Vibe Check (which I would also recommend), who put this book on my radar months ago, shortly after its publication.
-Kat Carroll, YA Librarian
Find the Item Here
Las Madres by Esmeralda Santiago
A story about a family of mothers and daughters told from two different time periods, the 1970s and 2017 both in the Bronx and Puerto Rico. The story focuses on love, trauma, and loss. It reminds me of the resiliency of my people. As a person with Puerto Rican roots, I highly recommend this book.
-Mariel Perez, Outreach Librarian
The Man Who Went Up in Smoke by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
This is the second novel in the Martin Beck series, which Swedish writers Sjowall and Wahloo co-wrote in the 1960s. A great police procedural and good travelogue of Budapest, where the lead character, Inspector Martin Beck, has to go in search of a missing journalist.
-Austin Duffy, Local History Librarian
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
I fear any way I review this will be a disservice to the absolute art of Coates’ writing. These essays invoke Cesar A. Cruz’s famous quote, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” As we continue to battle against censorship and book banning, I will now always look back to Coates' words, “Whatever the attempt to ape the language of college students, it was neither ‘anguish’ nor ‘discomfort’ that these people were trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment.”
-Erika Peiffer- Children’s Librarian
Mister Magic by Kiersten White
The fictional children’s show of the title took me back to my elementary school days of watching Zoom! on PBS Kids (if you know, you know), and I love the elements of adding discussion threads and conspiracy comments throughout the story. Mister Magic gives very big Babadook vibes, perhaps he is a distant relative. This was a super fun horror read!
-Erika Peiffer, Children’s Librarian
On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci
We accompany Dr. Fauci through the making of an astonishing career: a life dedicated to public service and to fighting to keep America as healthy as possible. Health and politics walked hand in hand, making the impossible possible and the avoidable a sad reality. Whether dealing with the AIDS virus, SARS, Ebola, or the COVID-19 epidemic, we see how skillfully Dr. Fauci balances the needs of the NIAID and the ego-driven politicians to keep America healthy in spite of serious personal costs.
-Tata Cañuelas, Librarian 1
Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman
I know I’m late to the game with this one, but when I finally picked it up this year I did not want to put it down. Piper Kerman writes about the circumstances leading up to her one-year prison stay, and goes into detail about her time spent in the Danbury, CT minimum security prison, 10 years after she committed the crime. How she learned where she fit in, found a community, and made friends with people in all walks of life and stages of their sentence.
-Gabi Rodriguez, Librarian, Children’s Services
The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas
A bullet-riddled body in a locked room. Strong female leads. Time travel as a mainstream fact of life. Interwoven plots across characters and time. While I figured out the murder mystery part before its ultimate reveal, the strong characters, the intriguing story and the excellent writing propelled me headlong through time, er, the novel.
-Joshua Carlson, Librarian III – Manager, Youth Services
Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart by Jay Parini
Poet Robert Frost once claimed that his goal was “to lodge a few poems where they'll be hard to get rid of.” Could he have meant in our memory? At public readings, he often recited his poems from memory, and their rhythm and rhyme make them very conducive to memorization. This volume actually contains over sixteen loved poems (including “The Road Not Taken” and “Acquainted with the Night”) that have found their way into the memories of readers over the last hundred years. I'll be memorizing “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which taking place on “the darkest evening of the year,” seems appropriate for the coming winter solstice.
-Susan Hoover, Adult Services Librarian
Running Close to the Wind by Alexandra Rowland
Our scrungly protagonist has accidentally gotten his hands on the most closely-guarded secret of a wealthy and powerful empire and promptly fled into the (grudgingly) safe arms of Captain Teveri, his ex-lover. What follows is a fabulously fun swashbuckling adventure that will delight any Terry Pratchett fans and Tumblr netizens. I have been recommending this book to friends as my Book of the Decade (as in, ten years from now I’m quite certain this will still be the book I enjoyed the most in those ten intervening years) and I can’t think of a better way to explain my sheer delight in reading this book than that.
Erica Roberts, Librarian I, Youth Services
The Scandalous Letters of V and J by Felicia Davin
This is an epistolary novel recording the lives of and conversation between two nonbinary people in a version of 17th century France where magic is infused in our world, both for good and for ill. V and J meet, fall head over heels for each other, and discover that both of them are magical – V enchanted with the possibilities of magic while J is fearful of them due to past experiences. Will the differences that pulled them together also be the thing that tears them apart? This book absolutely enthralled me – the protagonists had compelling voices, the wordbuilding was magical (pun very much intended), the tension was perfectly balanced between me madly flipping pages but also not so stressful that I couldn’t take breaks – and the letters were, indeed, scandalous. (The kind of scandalous that’s brilliantly written.) Additionally, the book teases a sequel that can also be found in our catalog here.
Erica Roberts, Librarian I, Youth Services
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