Within just 10 short days, the Delaware County District Library Winter Reading Club of 2022-2023 will be coming to a close. As the annual reading challenge wraps up, there are a handful of things you can do to ensure you’re set up for reading success.
First, be sure to fill out your completed bookmark with the titles of the stories you read or the names of the library programs you attended. If you don’t have a copy of the “Check it Out” newsletter with the bookmark inside, download and print your own bookmark from www.delawarelibrary.org/WinterReading.
Second, stop by any DCDL location to drop your bookmark into the prize basket you’d like to win. The four baskets at each location are themed for babies, elementary-aged kids, teens, and adults. However, there are no rules regarding what basket you have to enter to win. If you’re an adult and want to win the baby basket for a grandchild or friend, go right ahead.
Third, you’ll want to make sure you take advantage of the last days of our Personalized Picks service. This twice-a-year opportunity puts you directly in touch with the DCDL librarians to get a handful of book recommendations tailored to your specific reading tastes. Visit www.delawarelibrary.org/Personalized-Picks to fill out the form and let us know what you’re in the mood to read. The service is only open during our Winter and Summer reading clubs, so when the season ends, it’s back to your regular methods of finding new stories.
Finally, if you haven’t discovered the website (or app) Goodreads, I can’t recommend it highly enough as a way to set and reach your reading goals, track your reading, or see what’s new and popular in your friend circles. For those who read a lot, this is one of the best tools to help you indicate what you’ve read, what you want to read, and even what you’re currently reading. You can create your own tags for your “shelves” that mean something to you. For example, I have tags to indicate the ones that I’ve listened to on audiobook and also the ones that I did not finish. While this isn’t necessarily a Winter Reading Club task, you’ll want to go ahead and get started with Goodreads now so you can set up your 2023 reading goals and start keeping track! (Don’t worry, you can still backdate any books you’ve already read this year.)
We’ve got a handful of programs coming up between now and Jan. 31, so don’t forget to take a look online, on the DCDL app, or in the newsletter, then get it added to your bookmark for prizes!
Winter always feels like a good time for a suspense novel or a thriller, since you can use those dark, early evenings to cuddle up and get lost in a book. Here are some of the newest titles on our shelves.
• “River Woman, River Demon” by Jennifer Givhan. Eva Santos Moon has a deep connection with her Chicana heritage and the spiritual practices that go along with it, which she relies on to cope with PTSD-induced blackouts and memory gaps – a condition that gets even worse when her husband is accused of a murder similar to the one that traumatized Eva in her youth. Read it for the well-developed characters, cultural fluency, and pervasive sense of psychological uncertainty.
• “The Flock” by J. Todd Scott. An intricately plotted near-future thriller about climate change apocalypse, the doomsday cults that arose in its wake, and the lengths a determined mother will go to in order to protect her daughter from the burdens of her past. Alternating narrative perspectives keep the suspense high, along with the inclusion of “supplementary” documents throughout, including trial transcripts and contemporary news reports.
• “The Bequest” by Joanna Margaret. Grad student Isabel Henley trades Boston for a university in Scotland only to learn that the renowned scholar who was to be her thesis advisor has just died in a hiking accident. When Isabel’s only friend at the university gets kidnapped, she sets out on an international journey to discover the truth about both incidents. Read it for the informative research and obvious passion that author Joanna Margaret brings to Isabel’s area of study, Renaissance art history.
• “Malice House” by Megan Shepherd. In need of the money, artist Haven Marbury has agreed to illustrate a creepy unpublished manuscript found in her Pulitzer Prize-winning father’s home after his death. As the project progresses, Haven begins to learn things about the house, the nearby town, and her own family that undermine everything she once thought was true. If you don’t mind when the line between thriller and horror gets a little fuzzy, this may be the book for you.
