“Does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself.” The Glass Hotel begins dramatically in 2018 as Vincent is falling from a shipping vessel into the ocean. The novel flips back and forth in time…
Did you know that newly released books, including ebooks, come out on Tuesdays? Every Tuesday morning I order the new fiction ebooks for Cook Memorial Public Library District’s Overdrive (Libby) and Cloud Library services. If you are an ebook user, you've probably noticed that the new titles often are quickly checked out. So if you…
An old church deacon nicknamed “Sportcoat’’ is having a rough time in his golden years. He doesn’t remember shooting a young local drug dealer in the face. He keeps having fierce arguments with his wife Hettie, who died two years ago. He can’t find his church’s Christmas box filled with parishioners’ donations. Now his best…
I enjoy a good historical fiction novel so, as you can imagine, I've read more than my fair share of books about war or countries that were occupied by foreign powers during times of conflict. And many of those stories, usually the ones that affected me the most profoundly, were told from the viewpoint of…
The library has many resources that you can use with your Cook Memorial Public Library card even when the library is closed. You can find those resources on our eLibrary page and our Research page. If you want ebooks or eaudiobooks, check out OverDrive (download the Libby app from OverDrive to use on your tablet…
What would you do if your best friend falls in love with the man you're destined to be with? That's the premise of this wonderful love story. Dannie Kohan is a compulsively organized New York lawyer with specific plans for her future: the perfect job, the perfect apartment, and the perfect fiancé – David, an…
The silence, the distance and space, is everything that the clutter of cities below are not.Tim Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity After a patron highly recommended it, I picked up a copy of Timothy Egan’s A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith and listened to it. It was everything…
There are three things I look for in a story: appealing, well-drawn characters, great prose, and a world I can get lost in. Good books have one or two of these elements. Great books -- the ones I shove into the hands of everyone I know, the ones I can't stop thinking about -- have…
What do you do when your whole family is suddenly gone? How do you keep going, and how do you find any meaning in life? Even worse, how do you figure this out when you're only 12 years old? This is the premise of Dear Edward, the best-selling book by Ann Napolitano. Young Eddie is…
At the start of this book, Matt Rose is in a Humvee in eastern Baghdad, not sure who he is or what he's doing there. Five months later, Rose is back in Missoula, Montana, his hometown, discharged from the military with a traumatic brain injury and still trying to piece together memories of his past…
