Top 10 Library Downloads of 2013 : E-Books

Libraries are about more than physical books these days. More and more people are discovering the free downloadable books their library has to offer. Cheshire Library has over 4000 e-book titles and over 1500 audiobook titles in our collection. Here are some of the most popular downloads from our online e-book collection:

eBOOKS – Adult Fiction

1.   Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
2.   Inferno, by Dan Brown
3.   Fifty Shades of Grey, by E L James
4.   The Heist, by Janet Evanovich
5.   Fifty Shades Freed, by E L James
6.   Fifty Shades Darker, by E L James
7.  A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin
8.   The English Girl, by Daniel Silva
9.   The Racketeer, by John Grisham
10. Defending Jacob, by William Landay

         

 

eBOOKS- Adult Nonfiction

1.    Orange Is the New Black, by Piper Kerman
2.    Zealot, by Reza Aslan
3.    Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg
4.    Wild, by Cheryl Strayed
5.    Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand
6.    Quiet, by Susan Cain
7.    Dad is Fat, by Jim Gaffigan
8.    The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg
9.    The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
10. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo

Assistant Director Maria Brandriff Retiring After 36 Years at CPL

Cheshire Library hosted a reception on Monday November 18 to honor retiring Assistant Director Maria Poirier Brandriff. After 36 years of planning and hosting fabulous concerts and other quality adult programs at the Cheshire Library, Maria has decided to retire in order to spend more time traveling, pursuing her food-related interests and visiting friends and family.
Many residents know Maria from the Sunday concert series. Although she did not initiate the concert series, she rechristened it Sunday Showcase, moved it to a better time slot, gave it more variety, engaged quality acts and increased the attendance from an average of 20 to an average of 100 within the first year.
We only hope she will return to the library occasionally to do her hugely popular chocolate programs!

It was wonderful to see so many people show up to wish Maria well:

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Susan reads: The Queen of Katwe

Wow – two books on chess in the same year?  Odd, yes, but this book fed my brain AND my sense of social welfare at the same time. In The Queen of Katwe, Phiona Mutesi is the poorest of the poor – poorer than the Indian children of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, poor as only the poor of war-torn Uganda can be, yet through her own uneducated analytical mind, she rises above everything as a sort of chess savant, traveling to Siberia to compete on a world level – at the age of 15, a girl who has never even seen a flush toilet, who does not even know when her birthday is.

Much of the book is taken up not with Phiona – how I wish more of the book focused on her, her thoughts, etc. – but with everyone around her, and just how the circumstances formed for her to shoot her star so incredibly high. Throughout, Phiona is a shadowy figure, almost a mentally disabled girl who for a few brief moments is able to see and understand clearly, and then is sent back down to the depths of her dull & hopeless life. Is it crueler to leave her mindless in the mud of the streets or to show her the glory of the rest of the world, and then send her back to nothing? I’m not sure. It’s a real “Flowers for Algernon” conundrum.

And I can’t help but wonder what the author could/did do for some of these people – you see them trying to teach chess with boards missing pieces, so crudely carved you can’t always tell a knight from a rook – did you buy them a few chess sets, when what to us is $10 and to them is a year’s salary? Did you donate so the club could continue to feed the starving children who come there to learn? I myself could not look upon such conditions without trying to help, but the author is silent as to how he himself was moved by the situation. A good book, an incredible story, but I wanted so much more, both for me and for Phiona.

Librarians Pick The Top Ten New Books for November

Every month, librarians from around the country pick the top ten new books they’d most like to share with readers. The results are published on LibraryReads.org. One of the goals of LibraryReads is to highlight the important role public libraries play in building buzz for new books and new authors. So click through to read more about what new and upcoming books librarians consider buzzworthy this month…

  1. Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield

  2. Through the Evil Days by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  3. The Death of Santini by Pat Conroy

  4. Someone Else’s Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson

  5. The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan

  6. Lies You Wanted To Hear by James Whitfield Thomson

  7. Parasite by Mira Grant

  8. The Raven’s Eye by Barry Maitland

  9. Death of a Nightingale by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

  10. The Cartographer of No Man’s Land by P. S. Duffy

Six Picks : Books to Read Now That ‘Breaking Bad’ is Over

breakingLooking for something to fill the void now that ‘Breaking Bad‘ is over?  Here are six titles that should keep you entertained.

dragon tattooThe Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Forty years after the disappearance of Harriet Vanger from the secluded island owned and inhabited by her powerful family, her uncle, convinced that she had been murdered by someone from her own deeply dysfunctional clan, hires journalist Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander, an unconventional young hacker, to investigate.

JacketDifficult Men : behind the scenes of a creative revolution : from the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad men and Breaking bad  by Brett Martin. The new golden age of television drama—addictive, dark, suspenseful, complex, morally murky—is chronicled in Brett Martin’s Difficult Men. This group portrait of the guys who made The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Mad Men and Breaking Bad is a deeply reported, tough-minded, revelatory account of what goes on not just in the writers’ room but in the writer’s head—the thousand decisions fueled by genius, ego, instinct, and anger that lead to the making of a great TV show.

no countryNo Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain.

fightFight Club by Chuck Palanuik. The rise of a terrorist organization, led by a waiter who enjoys spitting in people’s soup. He starts a fighting club, where men bash each other, and the club quickly gains in popularity. It becomes the springboard for a movement devoted to destruction for destruction’s sake.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. Probably most famous for the gritty depiction of a gang of Scottish Heroin addicts,  Welsh’s controversial first novel  focuses on the darker side of human nature and drug use.

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell. Ree Dolly’s father has skipped bail on charges that he ran a crystal meth lab, and the Dollys will lose their house if he doesn’t show up for his next court date. With two young brothers depending on her, 16-year-old Ree knows she has to bring her father back, dead or alive. As an unsettling revelation lurks, Ree discovers unforeseen depths in herself and in a family network that protects its own at any cost.