Monday, March 5, 2018
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Everything Old is New Again
The primary focus of WPLC's Overdrive collections is on new and current ebooks and audio books. But what of the books that never go out of fashion, a beloved author's backlist or old neglected titles that suddenly find new life with a new generation of readers? Overdrive does offer a collection of older, classic titles, and it's expanding every day. Don't see a title that you'd love to read as an ebook? Search results will often include an option to recommend a title to librarians to consider adding to the collection. Readers can recommend up to three titles within a thirty day window, with the option to be placed on hold for a title if it is purchased. You can track your recommendations under your account settings on desktop versions of Overdrive (recommend functionality is not currently available with the Libby app). While not every request cannot be filled, recommendations do help build a library suited to what you, the reader, want to see on digital shelves, including these classic older titles making their Overdrive debut. Seach for these and other favorites in both print and digital formats through your local library catalog.
Questions? Email madtech@madisonpubliclibrary.org
The Martian Chronicles
by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn -first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars ... and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.
Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him.
Go Tell It On the Mountain
by James Baldwin
Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
The Man With a Load of Mischief
by Martha Grimes
Long Piddleton had always been wary of newcomers. But the quiet town was stunned when the first stranger was found dead, upended in a butt of ale in the cellar of the Men with a Load of Mischief. Then the second body appeared, swinging in place of the mechanical man above the door of the Jack and Hammer. Suddenly Long Piddleton had good reason to be wary of everyone! Its cozy pubs and inns with their polished pewter and blazing hearths had become scenes of the most bizarre crimes. Who were the victims? And who was the murderer? A stranger? A maniac? Or the disarmingly friendly man next door?
A Wild Sheep Chase
by Haruki Murakami
It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn't realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself.
Contact
by Carl Sagan
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and astronomer Carl Sagan imagines the greatest adventure of all—the discovery of an advanced civilization in the depths of space. In December of 1999, a multinational team journeys out to the stars, to the most awesome encounter in human history. Who—or what—is out there? In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe. In Contact, he predicts its future—and our own.
Presumed Innocent
by Scott Turow
The novel that launched Turow's career as one of America's pre-eminent thriller writers tells the story of Rusty Sabicch, chief deputy prosecutor in a large Midwestern city. With three weeks to go in his boss' re-election campaign, a member of Rusty's staff is found murdered; he is charged with finding the killer, until his boss loses and, incredibly, Rusty finds himself accused of the murder.
Smilla's Sense of Snow
by Peter Hoeg
Smilla's Sense of Snow presents one of the toughest heroines in modern fiction. Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is part Eskimo but she lives in Copenhagen and keeps to herself. When her six-year old neighbor is killed, Smilla doesn't believe it was an accident and begins her own investigation of a case that even the police don't want to get involved in.