home Engineering Library, Resources and Services Reading Revelry: December 2024

Reading Revelry: December 2024

Howdy everyone!

We hope everyone has had a wonderful semester! For post-finals reading, we have two books to recommend this month. Want other recommendations? Go back to the previous Reading Revelries! Have a book you want to recommend for a future Reading Revelry? Contact Amanda May at asmx67@umsystem.edu. 

 

We hope everyone has a fabulous winter break! 

Our picks for December: 

 

One Day in December: Reese's Book Club: A Novel

One Day in December by Josie Silver

Laurie is pretty sure love at first sight doesn’t exist anywhere but the movies. But then, through a misted-up bus window one snowy December day, she sees a man who she knows instantly is the one. Their eyes meet, there’s a moment of pure magic… and then her bus drives away. 

Certain they’re fated to find each other again, Laurie spends a year scanning every bus stop and cafe in London for him. But she doesn’t find him, not when it matters anyway. Instead they “reunite” at a Christmas party, when her best friend Sarah giddily introduces her new boyfriend to Laurie. It’s Jack, the man from the bus. It would be. 

What follows for Laurie, Sarah and Jack is ten years of friendship, heartbreak, missed opportunities, roads not taken, and destinies reconsidered. One Day in December is a joyous, heartwarming and immensely moving love story to escape into and a reminder that fate takes inexplicable turns along the route to happiness. 

 

Small Things Like These [Book]

 

 

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan 

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. 

home Engineering Library, Resources and Services Reading Revelry: November 2024

Reading Revelry: November 2024

Howdy! This month’s Reading Revelry include three short, uncanny books perfect for Fall reading! If you are interested in requesting these books, click on the hyperlink in the title, and on the blue “Place Request” button on the left side of the page. 

Our picks for November:

 

 

 

Comfort Me with Apples by Catherynne M. Valente 
ISBN: 9781250816214 
Publication Date: 2021 

Sophia was made for him. Her perfect husband. She can feel it in her bones. He is perfect. Their home together in Arcadia Gardens is perfect. Everything is perfect. 

Comfort Me With Apples

It’s just that he’s away so much. So often. He works so hard. She misses him. And he misses her. He says he does, so it must be true. He is the perfect husband, and everything is perfect. 

But sometimes Sophia wonders about things. Strange things. Dark things. The look on her husband’s face when he comes back fr

om a long business trip. The questions he will not answer. The locked basement she is never allowed to enter. And whenever she asks the neighbors, they can’t quite meet her gaze… 

But everything is perfect. Isn’t it? 

 

Bunny by Mona Awad 
ISBN: 9780525559757 
Publication Date: 2019 

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’

Bunny by Mona Awad - Audiobook - Audible.com

s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. 

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination. 

 

 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson | Goodreads

We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson ISBN: 0143039970 
Publication Date: 1962 

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.