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Commuter Picks rides again: 1 DCPL library card + 1 Metro farecard=5 more fantastic reads!
Welcome back to Commuter Picks! When I take two trains and a bus to work, I ask fellow commuters about their favorite book. If it’s in the DCPL catalog, I read it and recommend it to you! With today’s selections, you'll solve a crime in ancient Rome, hunt for treasures in the Amazon basin, race against time to save the world, weigh whether the gift of foresight is a blessing or a curse and hold your breath as a young girl slaloms through foster care, prostitution, drugs, gangs, domestic violence, typing, and law school. Got a library card? Check’em out!
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A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown
If the back cover hadn’t said that Cupcake Brown “practices law at one of the nation’s largest law firms,” I wouldn’t have lasted three chapters. Brown’s harrowing memoir is anything but a piece of cake, starting at age 11, when she finds her mother face down in bed dead from an epileptic seizure. How Cupcake ends up not just alive, but triumphant is a heartbreaking and hilarious page-turning thrill ride. The security guard who recommended this book said her favorite is The Coldest Winter Ever, which my first Commuter Picks blog recommended. Now we have two books we both love!
Did you know you can book a time machine to ancient Rome with your DCPL library card? Check out Steven Saylor’s Roman Blood, the first novel in the Roma Sub Rosa mystery series. The author studied history and classics; he cleverly turns a famous trial oration by Cicero into an ingeniously crafted historical whodunit, authentic right down to a victory feast of stewed sows’ udders. Brace yourself for a slyly satisfying landing. The commuter who recommended Roman Blood was holding a book about Plato. “I read all kinds of books,” he said. “Lately I’ve been into the history of philosophy.”
I’m a (library) card-carrying David Grann Fan, having guzzled Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager. So, when a commuter told me his favorite book was The Lost City of Z, I couldn’t wait to read Grann’s take on explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett. A ragtag fraternity has tried to trace Fawcett’s 1925 final journey in search of an Amazonian empire of gold, but Grann’s insatiable curiosity unearths far richer treasures. Fawcett’s wife helped him cram for his explorer preparation exam. Grann’s wife sends him off with: “Don’t be stupid.” Spoiler alert: only one man lives to tell the tale.
A hundred million readers have already discovered this book, but it took a commuter to introduce me to the world where “the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills.” The Eye of the World is a gymnastic feat of creativity. Robert Jordan’s first book in the 14-book (plus prequel) Wheel of Time epic fantasy series is so intricately imagined that it comes with an extensive glossary. As his reluctant young heroes drag you deeper into their race to save the world, Jordan blurs the lines between friend and foe, humanity and nature, light and shadow, fate and choice, past and future.
My first taste of Anthony Doerr’s exquisite storytelling was his blockbuster, All the Light We Cannot See. A fellow commuter steered me to Doerr’s first novel, About Grace. In this luminous story of an expert on snow and water who abandons his daughter to save her, Doerr still ponders things we cannot see--fundamental questions like the nature of time, self-determination, memory, existence. The story cleverly parallels his observations on nature, like the “tiny instabilities” in the vibrating molecules of a snowflake: “On the outside the crystals look stable, but on the inside, it’s like an earthquake all the time.”
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.