Everyone loves to come to the library, but what happens when we’re not there? What friendships are formed at the esteemed library, and could there be more sinister happenings inside the hallowed walls? Try a few books on this list and find out!
For a printable handout of this list, click here: BOOKS ABOUT LIBRARIES
Library of Gold
Alex Archer
He was one of Russia's most infamous rulers, and he alone held the key to a legendary Byzantine collection of books, given to him in the dowry of Princess Sophia of Constantinople. Ivan Vasilyevich—otherwise known as Ivan the Terrible—owned a library filled with rare and priceless tomes that men would kill for. Would die for. But the czar carried the knowledge of its whereabouts to his grave. And it falls to archaeologist Annja Creed, almost five hundred years later, to discover the secrets of the Library of Gold. When the opportunity to unravel the mystery of this so-called eighth wonder of the world lands in Annja's lap, she can't resist. Armed with a diary of cryptic clues, she embarks on a journey to Russia, where she must somehow find her way into the very heart of the country, beneath the Kremlin. But Annja soon discovers she's racing a ruthless KGB agent driven by sinister motives. She finds herself deep beneath the Russian soil in a dangerous game of cat and mouse… Will she be the next to mysteriously disappear from history?
Read More View in CatalogThe Library
Chihoi, Christian Gasser
Chihoi, a young Hong Kong artist, has had books published in Chinese, Italian and French. The Library is the first English edition of his work. Chihoi is a poet of the quotidian. He is also the poet of the invisible. He illuminates his stories with a warm spark. He imbues them with a rhythm. His stories are more complicated than they appear, open and complex and full of little contradictions and they resonate long after we turn the last page. They are like the calm after a storm, when the landscape is revealed anew.
Read More View in CatalogThe Invisible Library
Genevieve Cogman
Collecting books can be a dangerous prospect in this fun, time-traveling, fantasy adventure from a spectacular debut author. One thing any Librarian will tell you: the truth is much stranger than fiction... Irene is a professional spy for the mysterious Library, a shadowy organization that collects important works of fiction from all of the different realities. Most recently, she and her enigmatic assistant Kai have been sent to an alternative London. Their mission: Retrieve a particularly dangerous book. The problem: By the time they arrive, it's already been stolen. London's underground factions are prepared to fight to the death to find the tome before Irene and Kai do, a problem compounded by the fact that this world is chaos-infested—the laws of nature bent to allow supernatural creatures and unpredictable magic to run rampant. To make matters worse, Kai is hiding something—secrets that could be just as volatile as the chaos-filled world itself. Now Irene is caught in a puzzling web of deadly danger, conflicting clues, and sinister secret societies. And failure is not an option—because it isn’t just Irene’s reputation at stake, it’s the nature of reality itself... FEATURING BONUS MATERIAL: including an interview with the author, a legend from the Library, and more! From the Trade Paperback edition.
Read More View in CatalogThe Geographer’s Library
Jon Fasman
A twelfth-century Sicilian cat burglar snatches a sack of artefacts from the king's geographer's library, and the tools and talismans of transmutation - and eternal life - are soon scattered all over the world. The bizarre and dangerous circumstances under which these alchemical objects change hands are testament to their extraordinary value, but it is not until nine hundred years later that a young reporter on a local paper, Paul Tomm, stumbles upon evidence that someone is collecting them again. Investigating the suspicious death of a local professor, Tomm finds the dead man's heavily fortified office stuffed with books on alchemy and clues that the man's life was as suspicious as his death ...
Read More View in CatalogThe Library of the Unwritten
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. Many years ago, Claire was named Head Librarian of the Unwritten Wing-- a neutral space in Hell where all the stories unfinished by their authors reside. Her job consists mainly of repairing and organizing books, but also of keeping an eye on restless stories that risk materializing as characters and escaping the library. When a Hero escapes from his book and goes in search of his author, Claire must track and capture him with the help of former muse and current assistant Brevity and nervous demon courier Leto. But what should have been a simple retrieval goes horrifyingly wrong when the terrifyingly angelic Ramiel attacks them, convinced that they hold the Devil's Bible. The text of the Devil's Bible is a powerful weapon in the power struggle between Heaven and Hell, so it falls to the librarians to find a book with the power to reshape the boundaries between Heaven, Hell….and Earth.
Read More View in CatalogThe Ladies’ Lending Library
Janice Kulyk Keefer
It is August of 1963, the year of the Taylor/Burton film epic Cleopatra, showcasing a passion too grand to be contained on the movie screen. The women of the Kalyna Beach cottage community gather for gin and gossip, trading the current racy bestsellers among themselves as they seek a brief escape from the predictable rhythms of children and chores. But dramatic change is coming this summer as innocence falters and the desire for change reaches a boiling point, threatening to disrupt the warm, sweet, heady days and the lives of parents and children, family and friends, forever.
Read More View in CatalogShakespeare’s Library
Stuart Kells
• From acclaimed author and ardent bibliophile Stuart Kells comes an exploration of the quest to find the personal library of the world’s most famous author • The whereabouts of Shakespeare’s library—his personal collection of manuscripts, books, letters and miscellaneous papers—is a mystery that continues to compel and inspire bibliophiles around the world • In Shakespeare’s Library, Kells follows the long line of bibliomaniacs who have tried, with mixed success, to trace Shakespeare’s library over centuries, creating a narrative as compelling as the best mystery fiction • Stuart Kells’s style is wonderfully erudite yet accessible, and he fills his books with charming anecdotes and historical detail about his bookish finds • Kells is a Melbourne-based authority on antiquarian books. His previous book The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders, published by Text in 2017, is a love letter to libraries both real and fictional, praised by Jane Sullivan in the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘a sprightly cabinet of bookish curiosities’ • Kells has also previously published a critically acclaimed biography of antiquarian bookseller Kay Craddock, Rare, and a history of Penguin Books, Penguin and the Lane Brothers, which won the 2016 Ashurst Australian Business Literature Prize
Read More View in CatalogThe Manara Library
Milo Manara, Hugo Pratt
Milo Manara's landmark collaboration with Dark Horse continues with the premier volume of Manara Erotica, a sumptuous companion to the Manara Library! A master of storytelling and of the human form, Manara has created some of the sexiest comics ever published.
Read More View in CatalogKafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world’s great storytellers at the peak of his powers. Here we meet a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who is on the run, and Nakata, an aging simpleton who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey.
Read More View in CatalogDewey
Vicki Myron
Experience the uplifting, "unforgettable" New York Times bestseller about an abandoned kitten named Dewey, whose life in a library won over a farming town and the world--with over 2 million copies sold! (Booklist) Dewey's story starts in the worst possible way. On the coldest night of the year in Spencer, Iowa, at only a few weeks old--a critical age for kittens--he was stuffed into the return book slot of the Spencer Public Library. He was found the next morning by library director Vicki Myron, a single mother who had survived the loss of her family farm, a breast cancer scare, and an alcoholic husband. Dewey won her heart, and the hearts of the staff, by pulling himself up and hobbling on frostbitten feet to nudge each of them in a gesture of thanks and love. For the next nineteen years, he never stopped charming the people of Spencer with his enthusiasm, warmth, humility (for a cat), and, above all, his sixth sense about who needed him most. As his fame grew from town to town, then state to state and finally, amazingly, worldwide, Dewey became more than just a friend; he became a source of pride for an extraordinary Heartland farming community slowly working its way back from the greatest crisis in its long history.
Read More View in CatalogThe Body Library
Jeff Noon
Jeff Noon returns with a staggering hallucinogenic sequel to A Man of Shadows, taking hapless investigator John Nyquist into a city where reality is contaminated by the imagination of its citizens In a city dissolving into an infected sprawl of ideas, where words come to life and reality is contaminated by stories, John Nyquist wakes up in a room with a dead body… The dead man’s impossible whispers plunge him into a murder investigation like no other. Clues point him deeper into an unfolding story infesting its participants as reality blurs between place and genre. Only one man can hope to put it all back together into some kind of order, enough that lives can be saved… That man is Nyquist, and he is lost. File Under: Science Fiction
Read More View in CatalogThe Library Book
Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean’s bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is “a sheer delight…as rich in insight and as varied as the treasures contained on the shelves in any local library” (USA TODAY)—a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries. “Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book” (The Washington Post). On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand 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? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In the “exquisitely written, consistently entertaining” (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. “A book lover’s dream…an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.
Read More View in CatalogLibrary of Souls
Ransom Riggs
When a madman is on the loose and Miss Peregrine in peril, Peculiar Children Jacob Portman and Emma Bloom stage rescue missions, meet new allies, and face great dangers.
View in CatalogHitler’s Private Library
Timothy W. Ryback
A study of Hitler's emotional and intellectual world traces the evolution of his political philosophy, analyzing key phrases and ideas from his personal books as revealed in his own writings, speeches, conversations, and actions.
View in CatalogThe Library Paradox
Catherine Shaw
Cambridge, 1896. Motherhood and private detecting don't easily go hand in hand, but even with two small children Vanessa Weatherburn still manages to indulge her passion for solving mysteries. When three sombre scholars knock on the door of her family home, Vanessa is presented with perhaps her most puzzling case yet. Professor Gerard Ralston, Head of the History Department at King's College, London, has been shot dead in his study. As the only suspect left the building a matter of seconds before the shot was heard, and with witnesses testifying that no one left the building after the shot rang out, all are perplexed as to how the killer could have escaped. Vanessa must use all her logic and intuition in order to solve the paradox of a seemingly impossible murder.
Read More View in CatalogThe Library Card
Jerry Spinelli
The lives of four young people in very different circumstances are changed by their encounters with a mysterious library card that introduces them to the world of books and reading. Reprint.
View in CatalogMobile Library
David Whitehouse
From the award-winning novelist David Whitehouse, hailed by The New York Times as “a writer to watch,” a tragicomic adventure about a troubled adolescent boy who escapes his small town in a stolen library-on-wheels. “An archivist of his mother,” Bobby Nusku spends his nights meticulously cataloging her hair, clothing, and other traces of the life she left behind. By day, Bobby and his best friend Sunny hatch a plan to transform Sunny, limb-by-limb, into a cyborg who could keep Bobby safe from schoolyard torment and from Bobby’s abusive father and his bleach-blonde girlfriend. When Sunny is injured in a freak accident, Bobby is forced to face the world alone. Out in the neighborhood, Bobby encounters Rosa, a peculiar girl whose disability invites the scorn of bullies. When Bobby takes Rosa home, he meets her mother, Val, a lonely divorcee, whose job is cleaning a mobile library. Bobby and Val come to fill the emotional void in each other’s lives, but their bond also draws unwanted attention. After Val loses her job and Bobby is beaten by his father, they abscond in the sixteen-wheel bookmobile. On the road they are joined by Joe, a mysterious but kindhearted ex-soldier. This “puzzle of people” will travel across England, a picaresque adventure that comes to rival those in the classic books that fill their library-on-wheels. At once tender, provocative and darkly funny, Mobile Library is a fable about the intrinsic human desire to be loved and understood—and about one boy’s realization that the kinds of adventures found in books can happen in real life. It is the ingenious second novel by a writer whose prose has been hailed as “outlandishly clever” (The New York Times) and “deceptively effortless” (The Boston Globe).
Read More View in CatalogLibrary Wars: Love & War
Kiiro Yumi
The war between the Library Forces and the government's censorship committee heats up! Iku Kasahara, once a lowly Library Forces recruit, is now a high-profile militia member, undercover and off the radar as she accompanies a censored author to a foreign embassy. All the while, her mentor and secret love Dojo is recovering from a gunshot wound. The last time she saw Dojo, Iku vowed to tell him her true feelings, but now she's not sure she can go through with it. Are Iku and Dojo destined to be together, or will the battle for books tear them apart? -- VIZ Media
Read More View in Catalog