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Leisure Reading   Tags: leisure  

Take a break from studying and read a book!
Last Updated: Apr 23, 2014 URL: http://newpaltz.libguides.com/leisure Print Guide RSS Updates

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Reading for fun at STL

Did you know the college library doesn't just have academic tomes but also books you might want to read for pleasure and relaxation? 

We’ve got bestselling fiction and non-fiction, poetry, and short stories. In addition, we’ve got a large collection of classics in literature and history.  So if you have a little down time over the weekend or during semester breaks, please explore these pages or come browse the stacks.

 

New Fiction at STL

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Conversations on the Hudson: An Englishman bicycles five hundred miles through the Hudson Valley, meeting artists and craftspeople along the way - Nick Hand
Call Number: NK838.N37 H36 2014
ISBN: 1616892242
The title of this compact art ramble/travel memoir says it all.

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Life After Life - Kate Atkinson
Call Number: PR6051.T56 L54 2013
ISBN: 0316176486
Every time Ursula Todd dies, she is born again. Each successive life is an iteration on the last, and we see how Ursula's choices affect her, those around her, and--so boldly--the fate of the 20th-century world. Most impressive is how Kate Atkinson keeps the complexity of her postmodern plotting so nimble. Life After Life approaches the universe in both the micro- and macro sense, balancing the interior lives of Ursula's friends and family with the weight of two World Wars. (How many writers can make domestic drama as compelling as the London Blitz?) Life After Life is an extraordinary feat of narrative ambition, an audacious genre-bender, and a work of literary genius. --Kevin Nguyen, Amazon.com

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I Shall Be Near to You - Erin Lindsay McCabe
Call Number: PS3613.C3233 I17 2014 --- On New Shelf
ISBN: 0804137722
An extraordinary novel about a strong-willed woman who disguises herself as a man in order to fight beside her husband in the Civil War. . .I Shall Be Near To You is a tender love story, an exploration of gender roles and marriage, and a hard examination of war.--provided by publisher

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Claire of the Sea Light - Edwidge Danticat
Call Number: PS3554.A5815 C57 2013
ISBN: 030727179X
In interlocking stories moving back and forth in time, Danticat weaves a beautifully rendered portrait of longing in the small fishing town of Ville Rose in Haiti. Seven-year-old Claire Faustin’s mother died giving birth to her. Each year, her father, Nozias, feels the wrenching need to earn more money than poor Ville Rose can provide and to find someone to care for Claire. Gaelle Lavaud, a fabric shop owner, is a possible mother for the orphaned child, but she is haunted by her own tragic losses. Bernard, who longs to be a journalist and create a radio show that reflects the gang violence of his neighborhood, is caught in the violence himself. Max Junior returns from Miami on a surreptitious mission to visit the girl he impregnated and left years ago and to remember an unrequited love. Louise George, the raspy voice behind a gossipy radio program, is having an affair with Max Senior, head of the local school, and teaches the ethereally beautiful Claire. Their stories and their lives flow beautifully one into another, all rendered in the luminous prose for which Danticat is known.--Booklist

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Winter's Tale - Mark Helprin
Call Number: PS3558.E4775 W5 2005
ISBN: 0156031191

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The Circle - Dave Eggers
Call Number: PS3605.G48 C57 2013
ISBN: 0385351399
Most of us imagine totalitarianism as something imposed upon us—but what if we’re complicit in our own oppression? That’s the scenario in Eggers’ ambitious, terrifying, and eerily plausible new novel. When Mae gets a job at the Circle, a Bay Area tech company that’s cornered the world market on social media and e-commerce, she’s elated, and not just because of the platinum health-care package. The gleaming campus is a wonder, and it seems as though there isn’t anything the company can’t do (and won’t try). But she soon learns that participation in social media is mandatory, not voluntary, and that could soon apply to the general population as well. For a monopoly, it’s a short step from sharing to surveillance, to a world without privacy. This isn’t a perfect book—the good guys lecture true-believer Mae, and a key metaphor is laboriously explained—but it’s brave and important and will draw comparisons to Brave New World and 1984. Eggers brilliantly depicts the Internet binges, torrents of information, and endless loops of feedback that increasingly characterize modern life. But perhaps most chilling of all is his notion that our ultimate undoing could be something so petty as our desperate desire for affirmation.--Booklist

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The Interestings - Meg Wolitzer
Call Number: PS3573.O564 I58 2013
ISBN: 1594488398
The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. --Google Books

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MaddAddam - Margaret Atwood
Call Number: PR9199.3.A8 M34 2013
ISBN: 0385528787
"Bringing together characters from Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, this thrilling conclusion to Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction trilogy confirms the ultimate endurance of humanity, community, and love. Combining adventure, humor, romance, superb storytelling, and an imagination that is at once dazzlingly inventive and grounded in a recognizable world, MaddAddam is vintage Margaret Atwood, and a moving and dramatic conclusion to her internationally celebrated dystopian trilogy"-- Provided by publisher.

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Flight Behavior - Barbara Kingsolver
Call Number: PS3561.I496 F55 2012
ISBN: 0062124269
In what may be the first novel to realistically imagine the near-term impact of “global weirding,” Barbara Kingsolver sets her latest story in rural Appalachia . In fictional Feathertown, Tennessee, Dellarobia Turnbow--on the run from her stifling life--charges up the mountain above her husband’s family farm and stumbles onto a “valley of fire” filled with millions of monarch butterflies. This vision is deemed miraculous by the town’s parishioners, then the international media. But when Ovid, a scientist who studies monarch behavior, sets up a lab on the Turnbow farm, he learns that the butterflies’ presence signals systemic disorder--and Dellarobia's in-laws’ logging plans won’t help. Readers who bristle at politics made personal may be turned off by the strength of Kingsolver’s convictions, but she never reduces her characters to mouthpieces, giving equal weight to climate science and human need, to forces both biological and biblical. Her concept of family encompasses all living beings, however ephemeral, and Flight Behavior gracefully, urgently contributes to the dialogue of survival on this swiftly tilting planet. --Mari Malcolm, amazon.com

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The Dog Stars - Peter Heller
Call Number: PS3608.E454 D64 2012
ISBN: 0307959945
“A riveting, powerful novel about a pilot living in a world filled with loss—and what he is willing to risk to rediscover, against all odds, connection, love, and grace. Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope. In his 1956 Cessna, Hig flies the perimeter of the airfield or sneaks off to the mountains to fish and to pretend that things are the way they used to be. Narrated by a man who is part warrior and part dreamer, a hunter with a great shot and a heart that refuses to harden, The Dog Stars is both savagely funny and achingly sad, a breathtaking story about what it means to be human.” – Publisher’s description.

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Some Kind of Fairy Tale - Graham Joyce
Call Number: PR6060.O93 S67 2012
ISBN: 0385535783
Acclaimed author Graham Joyce’s mesmerizing novel centers around the disappearance of a young girl from a small town in the heart of England. Her sudden return twenty years later, and the mind-bending tale of where she’s been, will challenge our very perception of truth. For twenty years after Tara Martin disappeared from her small English town, her parents and her brother, Peter, have lived in denial of the grim fact that she was gone for good. And then suddenly, on Christmas Day, the doorbell rings at her parents’ home and there, disheveled and slightly peculiar looking, Tara stands. It’s a miracle, but alarm bells are ringing for Peter. Tara’s story just does not add up. And, incredibly, she barely looks a day older than when she vanished. Award-winning author Graham Joyce is a master of exploring new realms of understanding that exist between dreams and reality, between the known and unknown. Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a unique journey every bit as magical as its title implies, and as real and unsentimental as the world around us. – Publisher’s description.

 

Faculty Picks: Zelbert Moore

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All God's Dangers - Nate Shaw and Theodore Rosengarten
Call Number: HD1478.U6 S5 1974
ISBN: 0226727742

 

Featured List: NPR's Book Concierge--Best Books of 2013

NPR's Best Books of 2013:  Not sure what to read?  Search through more than 200 standout titles selected by NPR staff and critics.  Searchable by genre, book club picks, young adult, and more.

 

New Audio Books at STL

Click HERE for a list of audio books at STL or try some of these newest additions to our collection:

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The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek - Richard Kluger; Alan Sklar (Narrated by)
Call Number: Media/Audio Computer Disk PT9876.22.A6933 L8413 2010c
ISBN: 0307879305
Publication Date: 2011

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The Obamas - Jodi Kantor; Robin Miles (Read by)
Call Number: Media/Audio Computer Disk: E909 .K36 2012c / Audio
ISBN: 1611139732
Publication Date: 2012

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Barrel Fever - David Sedaris (Narrated by); Amy Sedaris (Narrated by)
Call Number: Media/Audio Computer Disk PS3569.E314 B3 2011c
ISBN: 1609417666
Publication Date: 2011

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Quiet : [sound recording] the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking - Susan Cain
Call Number: Media/Audio Computer Disk BF698.35.I59 C35 2012c
ISBN: 1415959129
Publication Date: 2011

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The Stand - Stephen King
Call Number: Media/Audio Computer Disk PS3561.I483 S7 2012c
ISBN: 0449008606

 

Other places for good books...

If our library does not have what you're looking for you might be able to find it in one of our regional public libraries systems.  Here are links to a few local libraries:


The Elting Memorial Library:  Located right in the center of town, the Elting is a member of the Mid-Hudson Library System.

The Gardiner LibraryLocated about 7 miles away in the Hamlet of Gardiner, this library is a member of the Ramapo Catskill Library System.



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