Adults enjoy variety of books during summer reading program
This summer 48 individuals completed the Adult Summer Reading Program at the Hastings Public Library. This means that each wrote down books read and turned in the list to the library. In addition, these individuals represented 13 different organizations in the “group competition.” For the second year in a row, the Hastings Kiwanis Club led the groups with ten members participating. The Fortnightly Study Club was second with six participants.
From scanning the lists of titles read this summer, it is obvious that Adams County readers enjoy variety. What follows is a randomly selected taste of what your fellow citizens have been reading.
Novels were by far the choice for summer reading and range from Carrie Brown’s latest, “Rope Walk,” a summer story with a compelling 10 year old main character reminiscent of “To Kill a Mockingbird” to “I Don’t Know How You Do It” by Allison Pearson, a humorous and poignant look at the plight of working mothers. Also appearing on lists were “Dead End”, Mariah Stewart’s fourth installment in the FBI thriller “Dead” series, “Big Stone Gap”, the first of Adriana Trigiani’s small town Virginia stories and Ian McEwan’s “Enduring Love”, a tale of love, obsession and forgiveness. By far my favorite title is “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” by Marisha Pessl. Readers should not be put off by the reference to physics – this novel features one feisty young woman trying to come to grips with a very peculiar childhood and contains allusions to just about every major work of Western literature.
Biographies were often the choice of non-fiction readers. “Bryson City Tales”, a Guideposts publication by Dr. Walt Larimore is the first in a series of chronicles from the young doctor’s experiences in rural North Carolina. A much more brutal experience is recounted in Stanley Alpert’s “The Birthday Party”, the story of his kidnapping and the events that followed. A companion piece to Mark Mathabanes’s “Kaffir Boy,” Miriam Mathabane’s memoir, “Miriam’s Song,” gives a glimpse of life in South Africa during the turbulent 1980s from a black woman’s perspective.
See what your neighbors have been reading at the Hastings Public Library. Library hours are 9 AM to 9 PM Monday through Thursday, 9 AM to 6 PM Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM Saturday, with 24/7 access to the catalog, research databases and more from www.hastings.lib.ne.us. Sunday hours (1 to 5 PM) will resume September 9.