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Handpicked by Mary Kay December 2017
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Thank you for checking out my picks! I work as the Adult Services Manager on the second floor of RFPL and my favorite hobbies are a) reading; and b) listening to audiobooks while taking walks. My favorite genres right now are psychological suspense, literary fiction, and political nonfiction. I also love movies and tv shows with a dark edge. However, I enjoy helping readers / watchers of ALL stripes find that next great book or show at the library! Feel free to contact me for a custom list at mkakers@rflib.org. I hope to see you in the library soon.
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Lauren Greenfield: Generation Wealth is both a retrospective and an investigation into the subject of wealth over the last twenty-five years. Greenfield has traveled the world - from Los Angeles to Moscow, Dubai to China - bearing witness to the global boom-and-bust economy and documenting its complicated consequences. Provoking serious reflection, this book is not about the rich, but about the desire to be wealthy, at any cost.
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Smile by Roddy DoyleApproached by a man he does not remember who claims they attended secondary school together, a man on his own for the first time in years reluctantly reflects on unhappy memories from the past, including those of a brutal teacher who left him traumatized and struggling to hold fast to his sanity. By the award-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
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Start Without Me : a novel by Joshua Max FeldmanA recovering alcoholic struggling with esteem issues while trying to return home for Thanksgiving and a pregnant flight attendant from a racially torn family forge an unlikely bond over the course of a day marked by fragile emotions, past reckonings and important decisions about their futures. By the author of The Book of Jonah. 75,000 first printing.
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Listen Up! Some Recent Audiobooks I Loved
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All the Time in the World : a novel by Caroline AngellWorking as a nanny to support herself after a shocking betrayal sidelines her music career, Charlotte faces a difficult choice between pursuing her dreams and holding her two young charges' world together in the wake of a devastating tragedy. A first novel.
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The Golden House by Salman RushdieA real estate tycoon and his mysterious, corrupt family become the subjects of an aspiring filmmaker's project before revelations of their criminal past activities give way to the rise of a mad presidential candidate.
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Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore DreiserIn a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, " Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn ." Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naive and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser's view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy.
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Age of InnocenceStory of the manners and morals of New York society in the later 1800's, focusing on a handsome young lawyer who cannot decide between passion and propriety in his women. Based on the novel by Edith Wharton.
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BasketsDue to financial difficulties and his inability to learn French, Chip Baskets flunks out of clown school in France, returning home to California to live with his mother and work as a rodeo clown while confronting his past.
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Personal ShopperA young woman living in Paris working as a personal shopper and moonlighting as a medium believes her twin brother who died is trying to connect with her.
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Wizard of LiesDramatizes the events leading up to Bernie Madoff's arrest for a Ponzi scheme which defrauded his clients of billions of dollars.
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Hitler's Monsters : a supernatural history of the Third Reich by Eric KurlanderA history of the supernatural in Nazi Germany explores the occult ideas, esoteric sciences and pagan religions touted by the Third Reich, whose relationship with the otherworldly was far from straightforward and was used to gain power and shape propaganda and policy.
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Katalin Street by Magda SzabóAfter the lives of three close Budapest families are torn apart by the German occupation, the only family left alive after the war deals with their losses and guilt, as they are haunted by the ghost of the young daughter of their Jewish neighbor.
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Wonder Valley : a novel by Ivy PochodaA runner who dodges through traffic at the peak of the morning rush hour in Los Angeles inadvertently changes the lives of a handful of locals, from a former juvie inmate looking for his mother, to teen twins who escape their father's desert commune, to a bored lawyer who is inspired to pursue fulfillment. By the author of Visitation Street. 75,000 first printing.
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