Read for Understanding: Celebrate Native American Heritage Month
Reading Suggestions

Read for Understanding: Celebrate Native American Heritage Month

  Since 1990, November has been designated as Native American Heritage Month, when we recognize the cultures, contributions and struggles of America’s indigenous people. According to Native Hope, an advocacy organization for the Native American community, there are an estimated 6.79 million Native Americans currently living in the United States, and 574 federally recognized tribes. Unfortunately, the languages and cultures […]

Forever Young (12/14/2020): Neverworld Wake
Book Clubs

Forever Young (12/14/2020): Neverworld Wake

It’s been one year since graduation, and Beatrice Hartley has mixed feelings about joining her friends a weekend reunion.
She’s right to be worried. After a night out, they narrowly avoid a collision with a car on a deserted road. Or so they believe.
Back at the mansion where they are staying, a mysterious man knocks on the door during a raging storm. He tells them that they must make a choice: one of them will live, and the rest will die. And the decision must be unanimous.
Soon time backbends. Beatrice and her friends are forced to repeat that dreadful day so many times they lose count. With each replay, events twist and fears come alive in horrifying ways.
This nightmare, this nothingness . . . this is the Neverworld Wake.
To escape, they have to vote. But how do you choose who to kill? And then how do you live with yourself?
“Beautifully creepy.” —The New York Times
“You wont be able to stop reading until the mystery is unraveled.” —Refinery29
“A dark and twisty tale brimming with psychological suspense.” —Bustle […]

Spinecrackers (12/04/2020): The Turn of the Key
Book Clubs

Spinecrackers (12/04/2020): The Turn of the Key

When she stumbles across the ad, she’s looking for something else completely. But it seems like too good an opportunity to miss—a live-in nannying post, with a staggeringly generous salary. And when Rowan Caine arrives at Heatherbrae House, she is smitten—by the luxurious “smart” home fitted out with all modern conveniences, by the beautiful Scottish Highlands, and by this picture-perfect family.

What she doesn’t know is that she’s stepping into a nightmare—one that will end with a child dead and herself in prison awaiting trial for murder.

Writing to her lawyer from prison, she struggles to explain the events that led to her incarceration. It wasn’t just the constant surveillance from the home’s cameras, or the malfunctioning technology that woke the household with booming music, or turned the lights off at the worst possible time. It wasn’t just the girls, who turned out to be a far cry from the immaculately behaved model children she met at her interview. It wasn’t even the way she was left alone for weeks at a time, with no adults around apart from the enigmatic handyman.

It was everything.

She knows she’s made mistakes. She admits that she lied to obtain the post, and that her behavior toward the children wasn’t always ideal. She’s not innocent, by any means. But, she maintains, she’s not guilty—at least not of murder—but somebody is.

Full of spellbinding menace and told in Ruth Ware’s signature suspenseful style, The Turn of the Key is an unputdownable thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time. […]

Book Clubbers (12/03/2020): The Paragon Hotel
Book Clubbers

Book Clubbers (12/03/2020): The Paragon Hotel

A gun moll with a knack for disappearing flees from Prohibition-era Harlem to Portland’s Paragon Hotel.

The year is 1921, and “Nobody” Alice James has just arrived in Oregon with a bullet wound, a lifetime’s experience battling the New York Mafia, and fifty thousand dollars in illicit cash. She befriends Max, a black Pullman porter who reminds her achingly of home and who saves Alice by leading her to the Paragon Hotel. But her unlikely sanctuary turns out to be an all-black hotel in a Jim Crow city, and its lodgers seem unduly terrified of a white woman on the premises.

As she meets the churlish Dr. Pendleton, the stately Mavereen, and the club chanteuse Blossom Fontaine, she understands their dread. The Ku Klux Klan has arrived in Portland in fearful numbers—burning crosses, electing officials, infiltrating newspapers, and brutalizing blacks. And only Alice and her new Paragon “family” are searching for a missing mulatto child who has mysteriously vanished into the woods. To untangle the web of lies and misdeeds around her, Alice will have to answer for her own past, too.

A richly imagined novel starring two indomitable heroines, The Paragon Hotel at once plumbs the darkest parts of America’s past and the most redemptive facets of humanity. From international-bestselling, multi-award-nominated writer Lyndsay Faye, it’s a masterwork of historical suspense. […]

Stranger than Fiction (12/01/2020): This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Book Clubs

Stranger than Fiction (12/01/2020): This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

Whether you load your iPod with Bach or Bono, music has a significant role in your life—even if you never realized it. Why does music evoke such powerful moods? The answers are at last becoming clear, thanks to revolutionary neuroscience and the emerging field of evolutionary psychology. Both a cutting-edge study and a tribute to the beauty of music itself, This Is Your Brain on Music unravels a host of mysteries that affect everything from pop culture to our understanding of human nature, including:

• Are our musical preferences shaped in utero?
• Is there a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music?
• What do PET scans and MRIs reveal about the brain’s response to music?
• Is musical pleasure different from other kinds of pleasure?

This Is Your Brain on Music explores cultures in which singing is considered an essential human function, patients who have a rare disorder that prevents them from making sense of music, and scientists studying why two people may not have the same definition of pitch. At every turn, this provocative work unlocks deep secrets about how nature and nurture forge a uniquely human obsession. […]

Join the fall Big Library Read!
Digital Resources

Join the fall Big Library Read!

  Starting November 2, library patrons can check out the latest selection for the Big Library Read, a digital book club sponsored by Overdrive/Libby and local libraries across the country. Reverie is a contemporary YA fantasy novel by debut author  Ryan La Sala. When a gay teen’s daydreams suddenly materialize in real life, he begins to question what is real, […]

What’s on the Shelf?  Thrills and Chills to watch or read!
Uncategorized

What’s on the Shelf? Thrills and Chills to watch or read!

It’s the most frightening time of the year! Halloween is almost here and it’s the perfect time to load up on scary movies and books. AAPLD’s collection includes horror classics and soon-to-be classics. Our horror films are tagged with a special sticker and located on a special seasonal display for easy access. Whatever you’re in the mood for…terrifying tales of […]

Oh, the Horror! (11/24/2020): Ararat
Book Clubs

Oh, the Horror! (11/24/2020): Ararat

“When a newly engaged couple climbs Mount Ararat in Turkey, an avalanche forces them to seek shelter inside a massive cave uncovered by the snow fall. The cave is actually an ancient, buried ship that many quickly come to believe is really Noah’s Ark. But when a team of scholars, archaeologists, and filmmakers make it inside the ark for the first time, they discover an elaborate coffin in its recesses … and when they break it open, they find that the cadaver within is an ugly, misshapen thing … and it has horns. A massive blizzard blows in, trapping them in that cave thousands of meters up the side of a remote mountain … but they are not alone”– Provided by publisher. […]