December comes with many fabulous lists. There is the 2023 Ohio Holiday Lights Trail, a list of 70 locations all over Ohio that have some of the best light displays you can find. Head to ohio.org to see the ones that you can experience right here in Central Ohio. Retailers will promote their “Best Toys of the Season” lists. (I can already attest that the flying orb ball will cause more frustration than fun. Save yourself.) And you can always bet on the annual New York Times best books of the year list. The editors’ choices aren’t always the most popular, but they do leave an impression on the reader. Read through to the end to catch a few of the titles chosen.
I love using lists to help me find my next read. “20 of the Best Cozy Mysteries” can help get me out of a reading slump. However, lists lack that personal touch that can hit on the things I love most about a book or writing style.
Back again for the ’23-24 winter season is the Delaware County District Library’s Personalized Picks service. This twice-a-year service allows DCDL cardholders to have a librarian send a curated list of books straight to their inbox, based on their reading preferences. It is open now through January 31 to help readers complete their Winter Reading Club goals.
The simple form to fill out is located at www.delawarelibrary.org/Personalized-Picks. It asks users to be specific and use descriptive words and terms. I always advise to stick with 1 topic per form submission. For example, I might mention that I loved my most recent read “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. My favorite aspect of it wasn’t that it was based in Japan or included time travel, but that it used magical realism – a writing technique that portrays fantastical events in an otherwise realistic tone. It brings fables, folk tales, and myths into contemporary social relevance. I especially enjoy when there is no reason or attempt at an explanation of the magic – it simply “is.”
Once the Personalized Picks form is filled out, a DCDL librarian will take into consideration all the answers and email a list of recommended titles. The form may be filled out more than once, but the service will pause on February 1 until it returns during Summer Reading Club. In the meantime, our librarians and staff are always happy to give recommendations when patrons stop by the reference or circulation desk.
As promised, here are some of the titles of the year, as chosen by the New York Times Books Staff.
• “The Bee Sting” by Paul Murray. Avoiding the fact that his once-lucrative car business is going under, Dickie Barnes struggles to be a good person while his family falls apart, wondering if a single moment of bad luck can change the direction of a life and if there’s still time to find a happy ending.
• “Chain-Gang All-Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The star of a popular, but controversial for-profit program in the private prison industry that basically turns prisoners into gladiators contemplates freedom.
• “Eastbound” by Maylis de Kerangal. Aliocha, a Russian conscript on a packed Trans-Siberian train decides to desert and runs into an older French woman, who agrees to hide him in her first-class sleeping car, making her an accomplice to a hunted deserter.
• “The Best Minds” by Jonathan Rosen. An acclaimed author investigates the forces that led his closest childhood friend, a paranoid schizophrenic with brilliant promise who defied the odds and graduated from Yale Law School, to kill the woman he loved, in this exploration of the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.
• “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs” by Kerry Howley. The acclaimed author of “Thrown” looks at post-privacy America by focusing on the story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, who served more than four years in prison for leaking a classified report.
• “Fire Weather” by John Vaillant. In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. It was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. This book is a suspenseful account of one of North America’s most devastating forest fires – and a stark exploration of our dawning era of climate catastrophes.
If you have a question that you would like to see answered in this column, mail it to Nicole Fowles, Delaware County District Library, 84 E. Winter St., Delaware, OH 43015, or call us at 740-362-3861. You can also email your questions by visiting the library’s web site at www.delawarelibrary.org or directly to Nicole at [email protected]. No matter how you contact us, we’re always glad you asked!
