Daniel's Staff Picks

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

Showing 1 - 20 of 24  There are a total of 106 valid entries on the list.
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 "Annihilation"
Star rating for Annihilation
Series:
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
Area X has claimed the lives of members of eleven expeditions. The twelfth expedition consisting of four women hopes to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
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 "Cloud atlas"
Star rating for Cloud atlas
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
Recounts the connected stories of people from the past and the distant future, from a nineteenth-century notary and an investigative journalist in the 1970s to a young man who searches for meaning in a post-apocalyptic world.
Book cover for "Come and get it"
Star rating for Come and get it
Author:
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks, and illicit intrigue"--
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 "The girl in the road"
Star rating for The girl in the road
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
Waking up in a futuristic Mumbai with five snake bites, Meena is compelled to return to her native Ethiopia by way of a forbidden path spanning the Arabian Sea; while a girl from a different time, Mariama, flees a traumatic experience to Ethiopia in search of a better life.
Book cover for "The haunting of Hill House"
Star rating for The haunting of Hill House
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:

Now a hit Netflix miniseries directed by Mike Flanagan and starring Michiel Huisman, Carla Gugino, and Timothy Hutton

Past the rusted gates and untrimmed hedges, Hill House broods and waits.

Four seekers have come to the ugly, abandoned old mansion: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of the psychic phenomenon called haunting; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a lonely, homeless girl well

...
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 "Libertie"
Star rating for Libertie
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"Coming of age as a free-born Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her mother, a physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie will go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie feels stifled by her mother's choices and is constantly reminded that, unlike her mother, Libertie has skin that is too dark. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be...

12. Matrix

Book cover for "Matrix"
Star rating for Matrix
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE 2022 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2021

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, The Financial Times, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Vulture, Marie Claire, Vox, The Los Angeles Times,
...
Book cover for "The night watchman"
Star rating for The night watchman
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
A novel based on the life of "Erdrich's grandfather, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C."--Dust jacket flap. Based on the extraordinary life of Louis Erdrich's grandfather Patrick Gourneau, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, with lightness and gravity,...
Book cover for "The only good Indians"
Star rating for The only good Indians
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
"Peter Straub's Ghost Story meets Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies in this American Indian horror story of revenge on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Four American Indian men from the Blackfeet Nation, who were childhood friends, find themselves in a desperate struggle for their lives, against an entity that wants to exact revenge upon them for what they did during an elk hunt ten years earlier by killing them, their families, and friends"--
Book cover for "The overstory"
Star rating for The overstory
Average Rating:
3.6 stars
Description:
A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.
Book cover for "The remains of the day"
Star rating for The remains of the day
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
An English butler reflects--sometimes bitterly, sometimes humorously--on his service to a lord between the two world wars and discovers doubts about his master's character and about the ultimate value of his own service to humanity The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second...
Book cover for "The secret history"
Star rating for The secret history
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.
Book cover for "The secret lives of church ladies"
Star rating for The secret lives of church ladies
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"[This book] explores the raw and tender places where black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions"--
Book cover for "The sparrow"
Star rating for The sparrow
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
Emilio Sandoz, a brilliant Jesuit priest, seems like the perfect leader for the first expedition to an extraterrestrial culture. However, when Sandoz returns to Earth 20 years later as the mission's sole survivor, he is accused of unspeakable violence and depravity. Why? An extraordinary fiction debut, by paleoanthropologist Mary Doria Russell.

20. Trust

Book cover for "Trust"
Star rating for Trust
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
"An award-winning writer of absorbing, sophisticated fiction delivers a stylish and propulsive novel rooted in early 20th century New York, about wealth and talent, trust and intimacy, truth and perception. In glamorous 1920s New York City, two characters of sophisticated taste come together. One is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; the other, the brilliant daughter of penniless aristocrats. Steeped in affluence and grandeur, their marriage excites...