Librarians' Line-Up: Favorite Reads of the Summer

We're back! After a summer hiatus, your MPL librarians are back to tell you what we're reading and why we love it. Check out some of our favorites from our summer reading! 

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne
I got into reading a lot of romantic comedies this summer and this was by far the best. Two executive assistants, Lucy and Joshua, work in close proximity to each other and cannot stand one another. When a job opens up that they both want, they're forced to face each other head to head. But as tensions rise between them, they both discover they may not hate each other at all. 

I really liked this one because Lucy and Josh spent a lot of time together and actually talked (although a lot of the 'talking' was thinly veiled hate-flirting). It was funny, romantic, and I couldn't put it down. 

~Meredith

Ink and Paint: The Women of Walt Disney's Animation by Mindy Johnson

Fans of art, animation and women's history will love this coffee-table sized book dedicated to exploring the role women played during Walt Disney Studio's formative and golden years. Though limited because of the culture in the types of jobs they were allowed to receive, the women detailed in this book were talented artists and trailblazers for their time. I loved this as a summer read because the sheer size of the book required that I disconnect from everything else in order to read and soak in the beautiful full page photographs found on every other page. A great book to take your time with, and also be inspired by.  

~Meg

Whisper by Lynette Noni

They say that words have power and silence is golden, but Jane Doe hasn't spoken for the two years she has been institutionalized and experimented on. Because, her words really do have power - the power to change the world, the power to create, and the power to kill. Then, suddenly, Jane finds out that she may not be only one... This is one of my favorite books of the summer/year.  

~Mary

It’s Your Universe: You Have the Power to Make It Happen by Ashley Eckstein

Anyone who knows me knows that I have no problem proclaiming my admiration for Ashley Eckstein, actress and founder of the Her Universe fashion line. Her Universe was founded as an inclusionary brand for fangirl fashion, and Ashley’s vision for a positive pop culture community is evident in all of her work. Last year I was overjoyed to hear that she was writing her own book called It’s Your Universe: You Have the Power to Make It Happen. After waiting patiently for a year, it finally arrived! And it was everything I hoped it would be. I actually picked up the book at a singing, and it was overwhelming to see all of the young girls who came out in their Ashoka t-shirts, clutching onto their books, waiting to meet their hero. Ashley’s book was a bright spot in my summer reading, with its positive message acting as a brief reprieve from more gruesome titles like I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. In It’s Your Universe, Ashley goes over her journey from fan girl to CEO, with workbook sections for the reader to set their own goals. My favorite part of the book had to be the illustrations from Her Universe veteran artist Ashley Taylor. I look forward to sharing this book with my nieces when the get a little bit older, and encouraging them to work hard and do their best.
~Marilyn

Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain

The best thing I’ve read this summer is Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw. Bourdain was a brilliant writer and his essays are a lot of fun to read. There’s less apocalyptic stuff about what goes on in kitchens (although there is some), and more about food and the food business in general. Bourdain could write beautifully in a lot of registers: sardonic, funny, humane, and brutally honest about his own failings. His essay about Alice Waters (founder of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse) is one of the very best pieces of writing that I have ever read.

 ~John

The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan
My favorite book read this summer was probably The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan. It was such a sweet and cozy read. A comfortable story to slip into about a woman who gives up everything she knows to start her life over in a new country, where she wants to run a bookmobile. Adorable and picturesque, too! (I also loved The Hating Game.) 
~Cailey

What was your favorite read this summer? 

Top Ten Tuesday: Books that take place in foreign countries

Top Ten Tuesday is a theme from That Artsy Reader Girl's blog.

They set the topic, we make the lists. Visit their site to see more on this topic

Okay, this is a challenge because, as some of you will recall, I did a post on bookish locales a few months ago and went through a lot of the obvious choices. Still, this post isn’t so much meant to be about variety of places, as much as about a variety of books, so I’ll probably end up doubling up here and there. Once again, the reason this is interesting (at least to me) is that I really love books that have a pronounced sense of place. This is why, for instance, I’ve talked about Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind in a number of these posts. Zafón’s books (and that one in particular) are intimately connected with Barcelona in Franco’s Spain. Anyway, that’s what I’m looking for, so let’s see if I can find some other good stuff.

1. Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

This is the fourth of Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie books. They’re all set in the United Kingdom, although Atkinson likes to shift things around. The first in the series, Case Histories, was set in Cambridge, while the next two (One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News?) are set in Edinburgh. The Brodie novels all have an air of melancholy, and this is the darkest of the lot. It’s set in and around Leeds, one of the bleaker industrial areas in England, but even when Brodie gets out into the country things are dark. Still, Atkinson has an almost unmatched talent for weaving complex stories that manage to come together without feeling the need to tie up every thread.

2. Colin Dexter, The Way through the Woods

Many people know Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels through the television versions, in which the eponymous detective is played with perfect grumpiness by John Thaw. The books have a little different flavor, but the essentials are the same, particularly the setting: the Thames Valley in and around Oxford. As you might expect from the university connection, there is a pronounced literary element to this series. In The Way through the Woods, Morse and his partner DS Lewis are brought in to look into a cold case in which a poem has been found among the effects of a missing woman. There is some literary interpretation to be done, but also a lot of good old fashioned detective work and Dexter’s ability to combine the two kept people coming back to the Morse books through thirteen volumes.

3. Patrick Taylor, An Irish Country Doctor

Taylor’s series is set in the small town of Ballybucklebo in Northern Ireland. They begin with Barry Laverty, a newly qualified MD, taking up a position in a small town and learning its people and its ways. There is a passing similarity to James Herriot’s All Creaturs novels, substituting life in small town Ireland for that of the Yorkshire dales. But Herriot’s books focus on the relationships between people and animals, while Taylor’s books are about the ways, sometimes tense but more often than not heartwarming, that people relate to each other. Taylor’s writing is straightforward and unassuming, and his characters are as well. This is not to say that the plots are bland, but rather that he gives his characters a lot of credit for breadth of spirit and warmth of soul.

4. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

This the first in Ferrante’s series of novels about girls growing up in Naples in the 1950s. They made a big splash a couple of years ago, and rightly so. Ferrante’s writing is beautifully crisp and conveys with precision the lives and conflicts of people in the very inward looking communities of postwar Sicily. Ferrante’s characters struggle with school and boys, but also with violence both inside and outside the family, with the dangers posed by organized crime (even if it’s only organized at the neighborhood level) and with the need to find one’s way in a world in which girls are mostly being groomed for marriage at the earliest possible point. Ferrante mixes interesting and varied storylines with an expert eye for detail and the result is gripping and beautiful.

5. John LeCarré, The Constant Gardener

LeCarré cut his teeth in the British Foreign Service in the days when the sun was finally setting on the empire. It clearly left its mark. Throughout his books, from his series centered on the MI 6 operative George Smiley to his freestanding works, LeCarré makes place crucial to his stories, from London, to Cold War Berlin, to the Far East. The Constant Gardener starts off in Africa and then moves all over, all the while harkening back to the problems of the less developed world and the role of countries and corporations in making them worse or better. The main character’s search for the reasons behind his wife’s murder are told in a number of places and time frames and LeCarré lends the whole story the feel of a spy novel without it being about an actual spy.

6. Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone

This book is set in a foreign country both in the sense that it’s set in Germany and that it’s set in Nazi Germany (see David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country for the meaning of that gag). Written in the space of a month or so, Fallada’s novel is inspired by the exploits of a married couple who left anti-Nazi propaganda in public places as a means of resistance. Their goal was to overcome the isolation that totalitarianism forces on people and, given that doing so was punishable by death, it took incredible courage to do so. It’s worth reading for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the way that it lets the reader in to the connections between the topography of Berlin and the flavor of life in Nazi Germany.

TTT: Favorite Book Quotes

One of the best things about reading a lot is coming across some passage or turn of phrase that sums things up in a way that hadn’t occurred to you before. Some of them, like the quote from Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, are the kind of thing that really turn your world upside down. Others, like the passage from Amis’s Lucky Jim sum up little moments in life in a way that I wish I only wish I could. Each comes from a work that I think is worth reading as a whole, since it’s rare that someone comes up with one good line without a bunch of others to set it up. And so, in no particular order…

Top Ten Tuesday is a theme from That Artsy Reader Girl's blog.

They set the topic, we make the lists. Visit their site to see more on this topic

1. Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

This is, as far as I am concerned, the absolute finest line in the history of hardboiled detective fiction:

The eighty-five-cent dinner tasted like a discarded mail bag and was served to me by a waiter who looked as if he would slug me for a quarter, cut my throat for six bits, and bury me at sea in a barrel of concrete for a dollar and a half, plus sales tax.

2. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

My mom sent me a copy of this book when I was working as a bike messenger and living on day old bread. I really found this passage comforting.

It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

3. Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

A friend lent me a copy of this a couple of years ago and I just couldn’t put it down. Lahiri is an absolute master of taking the little details of life and making them strange and beautiful.

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

4. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I find I’m always sharing this quote with friends, especially in periods when things are going badly. I usually try to disguise the source, since people tend to be a bit hesitant about taking life advice from a book about hobbits.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

5. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

I know it’s sort of bad form to include two quotes from the same series, but I love this particular line. It comes when Aragorn is deciding that he and two of his comrades are going to try to chase down about 200 orcs in order to save their friends. It’s a great one line statement of what the character is all about: this is something we’ve got to do, and if we catch up to these guys we are going to seriously light them up no matter what the odds.

With hope or without hope we will follow the trail of our enemies. And woe to them, if we prove the swifter!

6. Herman Melville, Moby Dick

There’s a moment in Moby Dick when the main character, left alone on a night watch, falls into a dream in which all the other denizens of the ship are transformed into demons. He becomes so caught up in this that he nearly capsizes the ship because he has accidentally turned around to face the stern. Having righted himself and the Pequod, he then meditates on the human condition in a passage that is one of the most lyrical and moving ever written, and which culminates in the lines below. This, in a nutshell, is the wisdom of Melville’s greatest book. You have to look at the bad things in the world, but you can’t let them devour you.

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

7. Albert Camus, The Plague

The Plague was Camus’s attempt to come to terms with totalitarianism and the ways people coped with it. This line is one of those “here I stand, I can do no other” moments that I find really moving. It’s as if the character is saying, “Well, I can’t fix the big problems of the world, but I can live by a moral principle that I choose.” This is a perfect example of why Camus was one of the most humane and brilliant writers of the 20^th century.

I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die.

8. Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky, is just one of the most stunningly beautiful novels ever written. Paul Bowles’s writing is rich and compelling throughout, but there are moments when he puts his finger on something fundamental about the human condition. I remember reading this for the first time and it absolutely took my breath away.

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

9. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Austen gets my vote for the patron author of librarians. It’s not just this quote, although when I read it in college I immediately thought, “Yeah, that’s the kind of life that I want to live.” There’s just something about the style of life in Austen novels that is fundamentally attractive and I think that this is one of the things that gives them their continuing appeal.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

10. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

No one has ever summed up the lifestyle of a person in a dead end career as successfully (and poignantly) as Amis did in Lucky Jim. Jim Dixon is a university lecturer in 1950s Britain, locked in competition with his fellows and paralyzed by the feeling that his life’s work is trivial. This line, which comes at the end of a passage in which Dixon’s supervisor has nearly involved them in a horrific car crash while nattering on about something trivial, is the perfect expression of the combination of boredom and terror of being stuck in a life that’s going nowhere.

Dixon, thought on the whole glad at this escape, felt at the same time that the conversation would have been appropriately rounded off by Welch’s death.

What is your favorite quote?

~John F.

Librarians' Line-Up: Top Books of 2017

As librarians, we read more than your average bear. So if we say something was our favorite, you know it's up against a lot of competition. Check out our favorites and let us know what yours were in the comments below!

I have mentioned Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor multiple times on the blog now (here, here, and mentioned by Mary here and here). It was definitely my favorite book of 2017 and I would even put it in my top five favorite books in general. I have given a blurb for this book before, so instead I will just say Laini Taylor writes beautifully and pulls you into a world that you want don't want to leave. It has magic, mythical cities, and adventure; there isn't much more you can ask for! I am already thinking about rereading this one soon.
~Ragan

I really enjoyed The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid. Sure, it’s long, but it’s beautifully written with an eye for subtle detail and descriptions that bring the various historical figures (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and a host of others). By the end I felt like I knew all the characters personally, and that’s a real win for a biography.
~John

One of few books I gave five stars to in 2017 was The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes. I read a lot of historical fiction, but this one caught me off-guard. Half of the book takes place during WWI in occupied France, and the other half takes place in the early 2000s in London. These seemingly unconnected storylines merge over the history of a painting. This book got to me in a big way and I haven't been able to forget it. Curse you and your knives to my heart, Jojo Moyes!
~Cailey

Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone is the best book I read in 2017. It has everything I love in a good story: a fast-paced plot that keeps you eagerly turning pages, wonderfully descriptive writing that is both suspenseful and atmospheric, and a beautiful love story that defies the tired and clichéd romance tropes. It is the first book in a trilogy, but I am seriously apprehensive to read the sequel—I don’t want to somehow retroactively tarnish my experience of this fantastic book! Maybe I’ll muster up enough courage in 2018….
~Ariel

My best book of 2017 is The Good Stuff Cookbook by Spike Mendelsohn.
I lived in Washington, DC for one summer during college and my coworkers and I would often go to the Good Stuff restaurant for our lunch breaks. Everything on the menu was great, but my favorite item was the rosemary French fries with all of the different dipping sauce options. I always checked online for a copycat recipe for the different sauces but never found anything that tasted as good.

Turns out the answer was right in front of me in The Good Stuff Cookbook. Check it out, and take your fry dipping to the next level!

~Marilyn

Full admission - I didn't really read that many books in 2017, so my pick for "best book" will just be the one I managed to get through. That would be Leia, Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray, which I will admit, I did enjoy. This book explores Leia as she faces the challenges of becoming the princess of her planet while also uncovering secrets her parents are attempting to hide from her about their involvement with the rebellion against the Empire. This book also offers a little background on my new favorite Star Wars character, Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo from The Last Jedi who makes an appearance as one of Leia's classmates and eventual close friend.
~Meredith

Warcross – Marie Lu. Set in the near future, Warcross is about a destitute hacker girl who gets pulled into the worldwide Warcross (a virtual reality video game) Gaming Championships. She is tasked by the game's creator to find the terrorists trying to destroy the championships, the game, and the game's designers. This book has mystery, adventure, virtual reality, hacking, gaming, and great characters. I loved this book. It was my favorite of the year.
~Mary

And please share! What was your favorite read of 2017?

10 Bookish Places I’d Like to Visit

10 Bookish Places I’d Like to Visit

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme started on the Broke and the Bookish blog.

They set the topic, we make the lists. Visit their site to see more on this topic

I’ve interpreted this a little bit freely. Most of the things that came to mind are the kind of places (like London) that have seemed attractive to a lot of people as the setting for novels. I really like a book with a good sense of place, so I tried to think of books that I’d read that evoke something special about the place in which they’re set. And I also love hobbits, but that’s another story.

1. Edinburgh: I’ve been there actually, but only briefly and it’s the setting for so many interesting books that I’d really like to go back. Fans of the Rebus detective novels by Ian Rankin will well remember the maze of streets and alleys, laden with some kind of obscure history. But Edinburgh has been the setting for so many great books, from Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and a lot in between. The weather there is generally pretty frightful, but I’m sure one could find something there to make a person forget about it.

2. What holds for Edinburgh holds for London in spades. The list of important literary figures that haunted its streets would make a pretty extensive list of its own. I’ve always loved books set there, especially the numerous Sherlock Holmes stories set in London (of course some take place elsewhere), and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere which takes a really different approach to the city (and which is one of my very favorite books).

3. I’ve never been to Barcelona, but after reading Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind and The Angels Game, I really want to go there. From what I’ve heard, Barcelona retains a lot of its old world charm, having not been bombed during the Second World War, or otherwise damaged during the Franco era. Zafon’s novels have a tremendous sense of place, and Barcelona seems to have a lot less of the sort of modern reconfiguration of, for instance, Madrid. Anyway, I’d love to find out.

4. Is there anywhere interesting to go in Wyoming? If there is, I haven’t found it yet. I haven’t really spend a lot of time there, mostly just transiting through on cross country drives at various times. But having been a big fan of Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire mysteries, set in the fictitious Absaroka County, hard by a Northern Cheyenne reservation. Both the books and television series (done first by AMC and then by Netflix) do a great job of conveying life in the wide open plains and the challenges (but also the enjoyments of that life).

5. Middle Earth, New Zealand. People who know me know that I am fascinated to the point of obsession with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The movies were, sad to say, a little disappointing. On the other hand, the decision to retain (or reconstruct since I think some of them were torn down) some of the sets, and particularly the village of Hobbiton is something that I completely support. I don’t really know how I’m gonna hack the 14 hour flight down to New Zealand, but somehow love will find a way.

6. Prince Edward Island: Is it weird that I like Anne of Green Gables? Well I do. My friend went on vacation up on PEI and said it was really nice. I’ve been to the west coast of Canada, but never the eastern maritime provinces. I looks like they’ve preserved a lot of the traditional flavor up there. Anne of Green Gables has a really pleasant hominess to its story, and it’s one of those things that I read in childhood and never quite got over.

7. Glamis Castle: It’s one of the key locations in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which isn’t really one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, but still retains some interest. Actually, I’m kind of curious to do the whole castles in Scotland thing, especially since another of my favorite books in childhood was Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, in which the hero sort of gets lost in a magical landscape of the lost Gaelic world of the Scottish highlands. Ok, Glamis is near Aberdeen, which is not the highlands, but you get my point.

8. Davos, Switzerland: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in which the main character goes to visit his cousin in a sanatorium there and ends up staying for seven years, is not everyone’s cup of tea. But I do like it in the sense that it’s about isolating yourself and taking the time to think through things (among a lot of other themes). I’ve always kind of thought that if I moved to some higher altitude I might get a better perspective on the world, and there are a lot worse places to spend your time than the Swiss alps.

9. North Africa: A few years ago a friend turned me on to Paul Bowles’s hypnotically beautiful novel, The Sheltering Sky. Bowles used the backdrop of North Africa to investigate the complicated relationship among his characters in a way that was rich with metaphor, but also had a richness and immediacy that was quite captivating. Sadly, a lot of North Africa has gotten kind of dangerous these days, give the current geopolitical circumstances, but I’d love the opportunity to wander as the characters in Bowles’s book did and soak up the local culture.

10. Dublin: There are a lot of reasons I want to visit Dublin, some literary, some not. I’m not one of these people who wants to go around to all the spots that they hit in Joyce’s Ulysses (although some people that I know have done it to good effect). But I am attracted by the way the city is portrayed in books like Roddy Doyle’s Star Called Henry or in the mystery novels of Tana French. There was a long time when Dublin was kind of dingy and down at the heels, but it’s much nicer and now and the kind of place where someone with a literary cast of mind can find a lot to entertain them

~John

Librarians' Line-Up: Books that Haunt Us

Happy Halloween! For this month's Librarians' Line-Up, our librarians are discussing books that have haunted them. Take a look and share yours below!
 

Doll Bones​ by Holly Black is one that has stuck with me. You wouldn't expect a middle grade book to be scary, but Black manages to weave a story of friendship and growing up with some seriously creepy elements. Zach, Poppy and Alice are three friends who love to make up stories together, but one day Poppy claims she is being haunted by a murdered girl whose ashes have been hidden inside a china doll. They set off to lay her ghost to rest, but they continue to encounter strange and unexplained events as they journey to her grave.
~Meredith

The United States of Absurdity by Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds

So let’s be real for a second, the past is a pretty scary place. We humans have done a lot of crazy and messed up things, and we often times discover that truth is stranger than fiction.

With that in mind, I’d recommend checking out The United States of Absurdity. Comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds compiled a book featuring some of the weirdest stories from their American history podcast, the Dollop. And while there are plenty of true and outrageous stories in the book the one that still haunts me is the story of Dr. Walter Freeman, the guy who came up with the ice pick lobotomy. While I won’t go into too much detail (for those of you who are faint of heart) I will note that Dr. Freeman even took his show on the road, performing ten minute lobotomies out of his van which would later be referred to as the “Lobotomobile.”

Like I said, the past is terrifying. 

~Marilyn

 A book that haunts me is Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris. I read this book in 2016 and it was actually featured on this blog as my choice for the best book I read that year. The story is about a seemingly perfect couple whose relationship is not at all what is appears to be from the outside looking in. There is very little violence but the mental abuse Jack conflicts on his wife Grace, is truly haunting. There were moments in this book where my heart was racing and I was desperately hoping for Grace to win in the end. This story has stuck with me and I continue to recommend it to people who like a good psychological thriller.
~Ragan

I’m not a horror enthusiast, probably thanks to the last scary book I read: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz. Practically everyone my age was exposed to this collection of stories based in American folklore when we were young, and I know I’m not the only person to be traumatized by it. The funny thing is, the stories themselves aren’t even scary—they’re cheesy and actually kind of funny. (The only one I can remember with some clarity involves a phantom looking for his big toe.) The illustrations, on the other hand….  Nope. Scarred for life.
 ~Ariel

 Under a Graveyard Sky by John Ringo. Zombies! Somebody released a virus that causes the infected to go crazy and try to kill anyone near them. They are not quite zombies (because they are still alive), but they have no higher cognitive functions. The question: Do you kill your infected daughter/son/mother/father/friend/wife just because they are trying to kill you?  Is it ethically acceptable to harvest semi-living beings to make a vaccine? As the infected start to take over the world, where and how do you survive? Where do you go? And, once you've gone, how do you go about recovering from the Zombie apocalypse? Do you risk what is left of your family to take back the USA?  This book/series is a romping good read. Great characters, kick-butt women, tons of adventure, survival at its best, and loyalty abounds. But, the psychological and ethical questions keep me up at night. 
~Mary P.

I first read Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey when I was about five years old (I found it by accident on my parents’ bookshelf). Seriously the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen, even now. “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” still gives me nightmares.

~John F. 

The big thing when I was a kid were Goosebumps, both the books and the show. All us little kids wanted a big scare. So I read many of those books, but the one that I still think about is The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight by R.L. Stine. I cannot drive by a field without being reminded of this story where the scarecrows come to life. Scarecrows are creepy, guys.

~Cailey 

Those are our creepy reads. What still haunts you?