Melissa's Staff Picks

I'm a librarian at Southeast Regional Library, and these are some of my favorite reads! Feel free to email me at melissa.schultz@wakegov.com if you enjoyed one of these books!

Showing 1 - 20 of 51  There are a total of 209 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "All my knotted-up life"
Star rating for All my knotted-up life
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Author, speaker, visionary, and founder of Living Proof Ministries Beth Moore has devoted her whole life to helping women across the globe come to know the transforming power of Jesus. An established writer of many acclaimed books and Bible studies for women on spiritual growth and personal development, Beth now unveils her own story"--
Book cover for "All the beauty in the world"
Star rating for All the beauty in the world
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard"--
Book cover for "As you wish"
Star rating for As you wish
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
From actor Cary Elwes, who played the iconic role of Westley in The Princess Bride, comes the New York Times bestselling account of the making of the cult classic film filled with never-before-told stories, exclusive photographs, and interviews with costars Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, and Mandy Patinkin, as well as author and screenwriter William Goldman, producer Norman Lear, and director Rob Reiner.
The...
Book cover for "At home"
Star rating for At home
Author:
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, showing how each room has figured in the evolution of private life. Bryson takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, showing how each room has figured in changes in private life.
Book cover for "Bad blood"
Star rating for Bad blood
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"In 2014 Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup 'unicorn' promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier ... There was just one problem: The technology didn't work. For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When [the author], working at The Wall...
Book cover for "Between the world and me"
Star rating for Between the world and me
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT
Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary...
Book cover for "Born a crime"
Star rating for Born a crime
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • More than one million copies sold! A “brilliant” (Lupita Nyong’o, Time), “poignant” (Entertainment Weekly), “soul-nourishing” (USA Today) memoir about coming of age during the twilight of apartheid
 
“Noah’s childhood stories are told with all the hilarity and intellect that characterizes
...
Book cover for "Brain on fire"
Star rating for Brain on fire
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
An account of the author's struggle with a rare brain-attacking autoimmune disease traces how she woke up in a hospital room with no memory of baffling psychotic symptoms, describing the last-minute intervention by a doctor who identified the source of her illness.
Book cover for "Caste"
Star rating for Caste
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"In this ... Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate....
Book cover for "Catch and kill"
Star rating for Catch and kill
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Now an HBO documentary series streaming on HBO Max. 
One of the Best Books of the Year
 Time * NPR * Washington Post * Bloomberg News * Chicago Tribune * Chicago Public Library * Fortune * Los Angeles Times * E! News * The Telegraph * Apple * Library Journal  In...
Book cover for "The coddling of the American mind"
Star rating for The coddling of the American mind
Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Description:
"Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising--on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible...
Book cover for "Cultish"
Star rating for Cultish
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"From SoulCycle to Scientology, we're all obsessed with cults. Linguist Amanda Montell examines the language cults use to draw us in"--
Book cover for "Dead wake"
Star rating for Dead wake
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania
“Both terrifying and enthralling.”—Entertainment Weekly
Thrilling, dramatic and powerful.—NPR
Thoroughly engrossing.—George R.R. Martin

On May 1, 1915, with...
Book cover for "Digital minimalism"
Star rating for Digital minimalism
Author:
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today bestseller
"Newport is making a bid to be the Marie Kondo of technology: someone with an actual plan for helping you realize the digital pursuits that do, and don't, bring value to your life."—Ezra Klein, Vox
Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It's the key to living
...
Book cover for "Educated"
Star rating for Educated
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University"--Amazon.com.
Book cover for "Evicted"
Star rating for Evicted
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
"Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. But today, most poor renting families are spending more than half of their income on housing, and eviction has become ordinary, especially for single mothers ... [In this book], Desmond provides a ground-level view of one of the most urgent issues facing America today. As we see families forced into shelters, squalid apartments, or more dangerous neighborhoods, we bear...
Book cover for "Furious hours"
Star rating for Furious hours
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"The stunning true story of an Alabama serial killer, and the trial that obsessed the author of To Kill a Mockingbird in the years after the publication of her classic novel--a complicated and difficult time in her life that, until now, has been very little examined. Willie Maxwell was a Baptist reverend in Alabama; he also happened to be a serial killer. Between 1970 and 1977, his two wives and brother all died under suspicious circumstances -- each...
Book cover for "The glass castle"
Star rating for The glass castle
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities. In the tradition of Mary Karr's "The Liars' Club" and Rick Bragg's "All Over But the Shouting," Jeannette Walls has written a stunning and life-affirming memoir about surviving a willfully impoverished, eccentric and...
Book cover for "Grit"
Star rating for Grit
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
"In this must-read book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, athletes, students, and business people--both seasoned and new--that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit." Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly...
Book cover for "How to keep house while drowning"
Star rating for How to keep house while drowning
Author:
Average Rating:
4.9 stars
Description:
"For anyone tired of staring at the same mess every day but struggling to find the time and willpower to fix it, popular therapist and Tiktok star KC Davis presents a revolutionary method of cleaning to end the stress-mess cycle"--