Daniel's Staff Picks

Here are some books that staff member Daniel enjoyed reading. Maybe you will too!

Showing 1 - 20 of 48  There are a total of 106 valid entries on the list.

1. 2312

Book cover for "2312"
Star rating for 2312
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity's only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future. The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering...
Book cover for "The actual star"
Star rating for The actual star
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
Through the epic saga of three reincarnated souls, this book takes readers on a journey over thousands of years and six continents where it demonstrates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, love and hate.
Book cover for "An American marriage"
Star rating for An American marriage
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
"Newlyweds Celestial and Roy, the living embodiment of the New South, are settling into the routine of their life together when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. An insightful look into the lives of people who are bound and separated by forces beyond their control"--

4. Aurora

Book cover for "Aurora"
Star rating for Aurora
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"Generations after leaving earth, a starship draws near to the planet that may serve as a new home world for those on board. But the journey has brought unexpected changes and their best laid plans may not be enough to survive. "--
Book cover for "Becoming abolitionists"
Star rating for Becoming abolitionists
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems...
Book cover for "Beloved"
Star rating for Beloved
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...
Book cover for "Blacktop wasteland"
Star rating for Blacktop wasteland
Author:
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
"A gritty, voice-driven thriller about a former getaway driver who thought he had escaped the criminal life who is pulled back in by race, poverty, and his own former life of crime. Beauregard "Bug" Montage is a man with many different titles: husband, father, friend, honest car mechanic. But before he gave it up, Bug used to be known from the hills of North Carolina to the beaches of Florida as the best Wheel Man on the East Coast. After a series...
Book cover for "Bluebird, bluebird"
Star rating for Bluebird, bluebird
Series:
Highway 59 volume 1.
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
"When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules--a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home. When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders--a black lawyer from...
Book cover for "Confessions of the fox"
Star rating for Confessions of the fox
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. Yet no one knows the true story; their confessions have never been found. Until now. Reeling from heartbreak, a scholar named Dr. Voth discovers a long-lost manuscript--a gender-defying exposé of Jack and Bess's adventures. Dated 1724, the book depicts a London underworld where scamps and rogues clash with the city's newly established...
Book cover for "Detransition, baby"
Star rating for Detransition, baby
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"[A novel] about three women--transgender and cisgender--whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex..."--
Book cover for "Exhalation"
Star rating for Exhalation
Author:
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR Nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories—two published for the very first time—all from the mind of the incomparable author of Stories of Your Life and Others
Tackling some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the...
Book cover for "Exit west"
Star rating for Exit west
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
"From the internationally bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a love story that unfolds in a world being irrevocably transformed by migration. In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet--sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, thrust into premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it...
Book cover for "Filthy animals"
Star rating for Filthy animals
Average Rating:
2.7 stars
Description:
"In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group...
Book cover for "The final revival of Opal & Nev"
Star rating for The final revival of Opal & Nev
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Opal is a fiercely independent young woman pushing against the grain in her style and attitude, Afro-punk before that term existed. Coming of age in Detroit, she can't imagine settling for a 9-to-5 job--despite her unusual looks, Opal believes she can be a star. So when the aspiring British singer/songwriter Neville Charles discovers her at a bar's amateur night, she takes him up on his offer to make rock music together for the fledgling Rivington...
Book cover for "Forest of noise"
Star rating for Forest of noise
Description:
"Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives. Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned, they form one...
Book cover for "Freshwater"
Star rating for Freshwater
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
An extraordinary debut novel exploring the metaphysics of identity and mental health, centering on a young Nigerian woman as she struggles to reconcile the proliferation of multiple selves within her.
Book cover for "Gender queer"
Star rating for Gender queer
Author:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal...
Book cover for "Hijab butch blues"
Star rating for Hijab butch blues
Author:
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"Fourteen years old and growing up in the Middle East, Lamya is an overachiever and a class clown, qualities that help her hide in plain sight when she realizes she has a crush on her teacher-her female teacher. She's also fourteen when she reads a passage in Quran class about Maryam, known as the Virgin Mary in the Christian Bible, that changes everything. Lamya learns that Maryam was untempted by an angelically handsome man, and later, when told...
Book cover for "How long 'til black future month?"
Star rating for How long 'til black future month?
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
Three-time Hugo Award winner and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society in her first collection of short fiction, which includes never-before-seen stories. Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying...
Book cover for "How not to drown in a glass of water"
Star rating for How not to drown in a glass of water
Author:
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
"From the beloved author of Dominicana, a GMA Book Club Pick and Women's Prize Finalist, an electrifying and indelible new novel about a woman who has lost everything but the chance to finally tell her story. Write this down: Cara Romero wants to work. Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market...