My LINKcat AccountAll the books have been counted, all the pages and minutes read accounted for, and I can finally give you all of the amazing numbers about how many people read how many books! Every year, for more years than I care to remember, I have been reporting the number of pages read in concrete terms. I have converted the number of pages read (or pages listened to, or time spent reading) into inches, then converted those inches into miles, and then plotted that number of miles on a map. Since I have been doing this annually for enough years for this to have become a tradition, and since I’m wise enough not to tamper with a fine tradition, here goes!
This year 410 people participated in the Summer Library Program. Those participants managed to read 951,944 pages and did 824 challenges which are quite an impressive number! Now, on to the calculations which begin with this question: “If you laid all the pages of the books that were read end-to-end how many miles would they stretch?” The average size of a page is 9 inches tall which gives us (951, 944 times 9” or 8,567,496 inches—always show your work if you want to receive full credit.). Then we take those 8,567,496 inches and divide by 12 to give us 71495.5 feet and then divide by 5,280 to give us 135.2miles. And, voilà! If you laid all the pages read during the Summer Reading Program end to end and drove east on I-90, you would end up about 8 miles past Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament on I90. Or heading north and west on I-90 you’d end up at– about a mile north of Dakota, MN. Any way you look at it, that’s a whole lot of reading was done this summer! Congratulations to all the Summer Reading participants.
If you haven’t worn your eyes out yet, below you will find some new book titles. Enjoy
New Non-Fiction
“Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey of the Silk Road” by Kate Harris. An Oxford-trained scientist and award-winning writer presents an evocative travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road and how it became synonymous with humanity's exploration of boundaries.
“The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior” by Stefano Mancuso. A forefront neurobiologist from the University of Florence presents a paradigm-shifting report on the plant world's sophisticated ability to innovate, adapt and learn, explaining how plants can offer compelling solutions to many of today's technological and ecological problems.
“America: The Farewell Tour” by Chris Hedges. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning presents a controversial examination of today's America that connects unemployment, deindustrialization and dwindling opportunities to today's rise in depression, hate and drug abuse.
“Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World” by Maryanne Wolf. Draws on the author's extensive research from Proust and the Squid to consider the future of the reading brain and its capacity for critical thinking, empathy and reflection in today's highly digitized world
“Burden: A Preacher, a Klansman, and a True Story of Redemption in the Modern South” by Courtney Hargrave. Tells the true story of a man who started a controversial museum honoring the Ku Klux Klan and the African-American family who took him in after he had changed his ways and ended up broke and homeless, in the book that inspired the forthcoming motion picture.
New Fiction
“The Stars Now Unclaimed, No.1 (The Universe After)” by Drew Williams. Recruiting supernaturally gifted kids to help stop a cataclysmic force from decimating countless worlds, agent Jane Kamali teams up with a telekinetic teen to navigate the madcap schemes of a power-hungry fascist cult.
“Vox” by Christina Dalcher. Marginalized in a near-future America where the government limits women to no more than 100 spoken words daily before outlawing women's education and employment altogether, a former doctor resolves to be heard for the sake of her daughter.
“Open Me” by Lisa Locascio. Redirected to Copenhagen by a logistical mix-up, a college student studying abroad falls for her guide and embarks on an erotically charged transformative journey of self-discovery that is overshadowed by her lover's dark temperament. A first novel.
“Our Homesick Song” by Emma Hooper. The members of a family in a once-idyllic fishing community decimated by mysteriously dwindling fish populations pursue respective goals in work and love in their determination to survive. By the author of “Etta and Oto and Russell and James”.
“The Beautiful Exiles” by Meg Waite Clayton. A literary friendship between headstrong journalist Martha Gellhorn and the iconic, married Ernest Hemingway flourishes into romance throughout their coverage of the Spanish Civil War, a period that establishes Martha's career and inspires Hemingway's Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece.
“The Breakers, No. 33 (Sharon McCone)” by Marcia Muller. The disappearance of a young recovering addict in southwest San Francisco leads private investigator Sharon McCone to the site of a Prohibition-era nightclub, where she discovers a ghastly chamber of horrors. By a New York Times best-selling author.
“The Spy of Venice, No.1 (William Shakespeare Mysteries)” by Heather Redmond. Seeking his fortune in 16th-century London, a talented wordsmith joins a band of players before he is dispatched to Venice on an assignment that renders him the target of Catholic assassins and a shadowy killer. A first novel.
“Walking Shadows, No.25 (Decker / Lazarus)” by Faye Kellerman. Decker and Lazarus risk their lives to solve a pair of brutal murders that may be tied to a crime from more than 20 years earlier. By the New York Times best-selling author of “Bone Box”.