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I love supplying favorite get-well books to ailing family and friends. Recently, I was the reader-in-need, and you know exactly where I turned, right? I take two trains and a bus to work and ask fellow commuters about their favorite book. If it’s in the DCPL catalog, I read it and recommend it to you! These five Commuter Picks are just what the doctor ordered: two legends (one real spy and one imaginary architect); two teetering worlds (one evil republic and one luxury wedding), and one tome by America’s prisons’ most banned author. Got a library card? Check’em out!
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OK, maybe Jayne Eyre never contemplated overdosing on her dead cat’s tuna-flavored painkillers. But protagonist Phoebe is a Jayne Eyre scholar, so expect tantalizing parallels. “It’s one of my favorite books I’ve read this year,” said a Green Line commuter with a Pike Street Market tote, “because it starts out dark, but it’s not dark in any way.” A million-dollar destination wedding has overtaken the luxury inn where Phoebe plans her suicide. With “the gift random strangers can give you,” she learns to navigate the space where one set of dreams dies and the next is waiting to be born.
“Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction,” says our recommender, a Museum of the Bible volunteer heading to the Federal Center Metro stop. Understatement of the century! This probing portrait of FBI agent Robert Hanssen details the convenient delusions that allowed a superspy to operate with impunity for decades. His capture is jaw-dropping. “No one at all burrows more deeply or broadly into the national intelligence community’s vault of top secrets,” writes author and legal analyst Lis Wiehl, whose father was an FBI agent. “And no one gives America’s superpower archenemy more to work with or intelligence of greater value.”
This book pick is from a Smithsonian lawyer, who was deep into the second book of the Hierarchy series when I met him on the Metro. “It’s a really smart main concept,” he said, “and it has a main character you’re ready to root for, which is really nice.” A tragic orphan, an elite magic academy, greedy politicians, yadda, yadda, right? But what makes this sci-fi fantasy a masterpiece is its figurative and literal power source—human will, harvested with the consent of the governed. Islington’s award-winning imaginary world makes readers think about their mindless complicity in our real one.
Did someone say power source? This century-spanning compendium is credible enough to merit a Penguin and threatening enough to be banned by prisons in 18 states. “It’s a really good business book,” our commuter says. “I read that book a few times.” Greene, the most banned author by U.S. prisons, does for deception and manipulation what Andrew Carnegie does for charm. Drawing on a trove of aphorisms, anecdotes and folk wisdom, he cites sources as varied as Sun-tzu and PT Barnum. “If the game of power is inescapable,” Greene writes, “better to be an artist than a denier or a bungler.”
In this meticulous novel, you meet two master architects. One is Shunsuke Murai, the fictional Sensei who has created a Japanese version of his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin community. The other is the author, a longtime fiction editor, whose debut novel skillfully places brick after brick in this homage to dedication and craftsmanship. Our commuter, heading to his EPA job at the Federal Triangle Metro, once dreamed of becoming an architect. “It’s definitely something I’m interested in.” He called the book “a celebration of culture and the everyday of life.” Even better, the book is about designing a library!
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.