September Is Library Card Sign-Up Month!
To celebrate, we have suggested a list of library-themed books for all ages
Recommended Reading for Children
Picture Book
No Cats in the Library by Lauren Emmons
Clarisse is a clever cat who loves books. She may not understand the dark, squiggly lines, but she can’t get enough of the pictures. One day, she stumbles upon a magical building where people walk in empty-handed and come out with an armload of books. She has to find a way inside!
Picture Book
Where Is Our Library? A Story of Patience & Fortitude by Josh Funk
Curious Patience and steadfast Fortitude wait every morning to greet visitors of the New York Public Library–and slip away every night to read in the Children’s Center. But one day, Patience and Fortitude find the Children’s Center empty! The two lions set out into the city to locate their missing books and encounter some literary landmarks along the way.
Picture Book
Dear Reader: A Love Letter to Libraries by Tiffany Rose
A voracious young reader loves nothing more than going to the library and poring through books all day, making friends with characters and going off on exciting adventures with them. However, the more she reads, the more she notices that most of the books don’t have characters of color, and the only ones that do tell about the most painful parts of their history. Where are the Black heroines with Afros exploring other planets and the superheroes with ‘locs saving the day?
Picture Book
When You Love a Book by Kaz Windness
With winsome, rhyming text and sweet, irresistible art, When You Love a Book is a poetic ode to readers and the way the stories we read as children have the ability to shape our lives forever. Includes nods to some of the most beloved children’s books of all time. Perfect for book lovers, especially those who want to introduce their own little ones to the joy of finding a book that stays with them forever.
Juvenile Graphic Novel
The Night Librarian by Christopher Lincoln
Twins Page and Turner know about the magic a library holds–they’ve been going to their beloved New York City public library for years, especially since their parents are always traveling for work.But a secret mission involving their dad’s rare and valuable edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula uncovers a world they’ve never known, featuring a mysterious Night Librarian, famous heroes (and villains) that have broken free from classic books, and an epic battle to save the library from total destruction.
Recommended Reading for Adults
Fiction
The Library of the Unwritten by A. J. Hackwith
In the first book in a brilliant new fantasy series, books that aren’t finished by their authors reside in the Library of the Unwritten in Hell, and it is up to the Librarian to track down any restless characters who emerge from those unfinished stories.
Fiction
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; Nora must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
Fiction
The Librarian Spy by Madeline Martin
Ava thought her job as a librarian at the Library of Congress would mean a quiet, routine existence. But an unexpected offer from the US military has brought her to Lisbon with a new mission: posing as a librarian while working undercover as a spy gathering intelligence. Meanwhile, in occupied France, Elaine has begun an apprenticeship at a printing press run by members of the Resistance. It’s a job usually reserved for men, but in the war, those rules have been forgotten. Yet she knows that the Nazis are searching for the press and its printer in order to silence them. As the battle in Europe rages, Ava and Elaine find themselves connecting through coded messages and discovering hope in the face of war.
Non-Fiction
The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders by Stuart Kells
Ancient libraries, grand baroque libraries, scientific libraries, memorial libraries, personal libraries, clandestine libraries: Stuart Kells tells the stories of their creators, their prizes, their secrets, and their fate.
Non-Fiction
The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree &
Arthur Der Weduwen
In The Library, historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world’s great collections, trace the rise and fall of literary tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanors committed in pursuit of rare manuscripts.
Non-Fiction
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.'” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library–and if so, who?