{"id":53850,"date":"2024-12-12T06:00:30","date_gmt":"2024-12-12T12:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=53850"},"modified":"2024-10-25T17:03:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-25T22:03:28","slug":"books-to-fill-your-weekends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/books-to-fill-your-weekends\/","title":{"rendered":"Books to Fill Your Weekends"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you looking for a book to fill your weekends? Do you need something to keep you company during these cozy fall evenings? I have gathered a list of books that are over 450 pages long to help you stay busy.<\/p>\n

All of these titles have been published in 2024 and are currently owned by the Davenport Public Library at the time of this writing. The descriptions have been provided by the publishers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Long Island Compromise<\/a><\/strong><\/em>\u00a0by Taffy Brodesser-Akner<\/p>\n

\u201cWere we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.<\/em><\/p>\n

But now, nearly forty years later, it\u2019s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband\u2019s emotional health. Their three grown children aren\u2019t doing much better: Nathan\u2019s chronic fear won\u2019t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything\u2014substance, foodstuff, women\u2014in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she\u2019s not a product of her family\u2019s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives\u2019 successes and failures.<\/em><\/p>\n

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family\u2019s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives\u2019 tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.<\/em> – Random House<\/p>\n

This title is also available in large print.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Ours<\/a><\/em><\/strong> by Phillip B. Williams<\/p>\n

In this ingenious, sweeping novel, Phillip B. Williams introduces us to an enigmatic woman named Saint, a fearsome conjurer who, in the 1830s, annihilates plantations all over Arkansas to rescue the people enslaved there. She brings those she has freed to a haven of her own creation: a town just north of St. Louis, magically concealed from outsiders, named Ours.<\/em><\/p>\n

It is in this miraculous place that Saint\u2019s grand experiment\u2014a truly secluded community where her people may flourish\u2014takes root. But although Saint does her best to protect the inhabitants of Ours, over time, her conjuring and memories begin to betray her, leaving the town vulnerable to intrusions by newcomers with powers of their own. As the cracks in Saint\u2019s creation are exposed, some begin to wonder whether the community\u2019s safety might be yet another form of bondage.<\/em><\/p>\n

Set over the course of four decades and steeped in a rich tradition of American literature informed by Black surrealism, mythology, and spirituality, Ours is a stunning exploration of the possibilities and limitations of love and freedom by a writer of capacious vision and talent.<\/em> – Viking<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The Book of Love<\/a><\/em><\/strong> by Kelly Link<\/p>\n

The Book of Love showcases Kelly Link at the height of her powers, channeling potent magic and attuned to all varieties of love\u2014from friendship to romance to abiding family ties\u2014with her trademark compassion, wit, and literary derring-do. Readers will find joy (and a little terror) and an affirmation that love goes on, even when we cannot.<\/em><\/p>\n

Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are.<\/em><\/p>\n

With them in the room is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance\u2014and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of the bargain their music teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they\u2019ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers.<\/em><\/p>\n

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura\u2019s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.<\/em><\/p>\n

Welcome to Kelly Link\u2019s incomparable Lovesend, where you\u2019ll encounter love and loss, laughter and dread, magic and karaoke, and some really good pizza.<\/em> – Random House<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The Bright Sword<\/a><\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>by Lev Grossman<\/p>\n

A gifted young knight named Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a place at the Round Table, only to find that he\u2019s too late. King Arthur died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlann, and only a handful of the knights of the Round Table are left.<\/em><\/p>\n

The survivors aren\u2019t the heroes of legend like Lancelot or Gawain. They\u2019re the oddballs of the Round Table, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight, and Sir Dagonet, Arthur\u2019s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They\u2019re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin\u2019s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill.<\/em><\/p>\n

But it\u2019s up to them to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance, even as God abandons Britain and the fairies and old gods return, led by Morgan le Fay. They must reclaim Excalibur and make this ruined world whole again\u2014but first they\u2019ll have to solve the mystery of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell.<\/em><\/p>\n

The first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium, The Bright Sword is steeped in tradition, complete with duels and quests, battles and tournaments, magic swords and Fisher Kings. It\u2019s also a story about imperfect men and women, full of strength and pain, trying to reforge a broken land in spite of being broken themselves.<\/em> – Viking<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>There are Rivers in the Sky<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Elif Shafak<\/p>\n

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur\u2019s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur\u2019s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family\u2019s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.<\/em><\/p>\n

A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, a drop which remanifests across the centuries. Both a source of life and harbinger of death, rivers\u2014the Tigris and the Thames\u2014transcend history, transcend fate: \u201cWater remembers. It is humans who forget.\u201d<\/em> – Knopf<\/p>\n

This title is also available in large print.<\/p>\n

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More Books<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n