Staff PIcks

Are you looking for an interesting and captivating book to read?  Here are some of the best books from 2018, all of which are available for check out at the Chickasha Public Library (with each book’s shelf location in parentheses).

According to the New York Times, Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday (Fiction Halliday) is “a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years, and it manages to be, all at once, a transgressive roman à clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction.”  There There by Tommy Orange (Fiction Orange) tells the interconnected stories of a group of Native Americans in California who are traveling to a powwow.

If you are interested in award-winning historical fiction, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Fiction Edugyan) is the winner of the 2018 Giller Prize and is set in Barbados in the 1830s during the last days of slavery.  The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Fiction Makkai) has been nominated for the Booker Prize, and the National Book Award and its story centers around the early years of the AIDS epidemic.

For nonfiction readers, How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan (615.7 Pollan) details the history and science of psychedelic drugs and how it relates to consciousness.  Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston (306.3 Hurston) recounts the life of Cudjo Lewis, who was the last known person to be captured in Africa and sold into slavery in the United States.  If you are seeking memoirs and current events, NPR recommends Becoming by Michelle Obama (Biography Obama), In Pieces by Sally Field (Biography Field), and Fear by Bob Woodward (973.933 Woodward).