Published:
Commuter Picks III: More tales from the rails and musts from the bus!
Hop aboard another exciting Commuter Picks! I take two trains and a bus to work and ask commuters about their favorite book. If it’s in the DCPL catalog, I read it and recommend it to you! Today’s selection includes three books adapted for the screen. Grab an altar-side seat to a (fictional) new pope’s selection, see how a (real) murder in Ireland prompts universal questions, cruise the intersection of geography and jobs, set boundaries with the Bible’s help and master the lingo of the “droogs” to explore whether it is inhuman to be totally good. Got a library card? Check’em out!
Looking to get personalized reading recommendations from DC Public Library staff?
Get a personalized reading list.
When I lived in Brazil, I heard the expression “more inside than a nun’s belly button.” That’s how reading Conclave makes you feel. The electoral intrigue in Robert Harris’ thriller is the author's invention, but his depiction of the process to select a new pope is so meticulous that fans of the book or the Academy Award-winning movie based on it felt stunned that Pope Leo XIV’s election took just 33 hours. “I saw the movie, but the book is always better,” said my fellow commuter, a former seminarian and Peace Corps volunteer with knitting needles peeking from his backpack.
A commuter who loved Say Nothing, a devastating true account of The Troubles in Ireland, was suddenly BFFs with the stranger sitting on my other side who loved it too. The book starts at Boston College with Irish detectives investigating the murder of a widowed mother of 10; they are picking up oral history records that should have remained sealed. Author Patrick Raddon quilts that evidence and his own research into a deeply revealing narrative that prompts disturbing questions about uncompromising devotion and how the stories we tell ourselves and our societies shift to fill shadows between memory and truth.
“This book is how to interact with people in a very thoughtful way,” said a commuter heading to work at the Naval Research Laboratory. He had spent two years on self-development and recommended this Christian self-help classic by clinical psychologist Henry Cloud. “This book presents a biblical view of boundaries: what they are, what they protect, how they are developed, how they are injured, how to repair them, and how to use them,” Cloud writes. His examples of well-intentioned people overwhelmed by responsibilities are all too relatable, and he backs up his practical advice with permission direct from the Bible.
“I like to read a lot about growth,” said the commuter who recommended this book. The most poignant fact about The New Geography of Jobs is that it isn’t new. Enrico Moretti, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, published it in 2013, and the evidence he musters to favor tech hubs over manufacturing strikes a dissonant chord with the dramatic policy shift since January in Washington, DC. Moretti wrote that we were at a “major historical crossroads.” So, here we are on the other side, and time will tell how today’s policies alter the geography of jobs.
A program analyst heading to work said, “A Clockwork Orange is a book that's very bright but very dark.” Author Anthony Burgess denounced it as too preachy to be art. But generations of fans of the book and subsequent movie disagree, immortalizing this hyperviolent classic written in a Russian-inflected Cockney lingo. Alex rampages with his gang of teenage “droogs” until he is arrested and reprogrammed with unexpected results. “It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil,” writes Burgess in the introduction, hence the title: a living organism that's just a wind-up toy inside.
About the Author
Barbara Cornell is a Library Associate at the William O. Lockridge Bellevue Neighborhood Library. She grew up in Michigan, where the public library across the street from her house was a first taste of independence. Since then, she has lived in five countries and always finds a home in books. She has two grown sons and lives with her husband in Washington, DC.