Daniel's Staff Picks

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

Showing 1 - 20 of 43  There are a total of 109 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "13 ways of looking at a fat girl"
Star rating for 13 ways of looking at a fat girl
Author:
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
Follows Lizzie, a young woman growing up in Mississauga, as she fights her way from fat to thin, but who still, even as a married adult woman, sees herself as a fat girl.
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"--
Book cover for "Beastie Boys book"
Star rating for Beastie Boys book
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"A panoramic experience that tells the story of Beastie Boys ... by band members ADROCK and Mike D"--Provided by publisher.
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 "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 "The dispossessed"
Star rating for The dispossessed
Series:
Hainish series volume 1.
Average Rating:
4.4 stars
Description:
Shevek, a brilliant physicist, attempts to reunite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust.
Book cover for "Down girl"
Star rating for Down girl
Author:
Description:
In this "analysis of what misogyny really is, how it works, its purpose, and how to fight it, the philosopher Kate Manne argues that modern society's failure to recognize women's full humanity and autonomy is not actually the problem. She argues instead that it is women's manifestations of human capacities--autonomy, agency, political engagement--is what engenders misogynist hostility"--
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 "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 "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:
4.4 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 to do nothing"
Star rating for How to do nothing
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as...doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process"--
Book cover for "I have some questions for you"
Star rating for I have some questions for you
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past--the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers--needs--to...
Book cover for "If I survive you"
Star rating for If I survive you
Average Rating:
2.8 stars
Description:
"A collection of humorous and harrowing linked stories following a Jamaican-American family as they seek stability upon moving to Miami."--
Book cover for "In the dream house"
Star rating for In the dream house
Average Rating:
4.6 stars
Description:
A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to...