Book recommendations from the Friends of the University of Minnesota Libraries Board
March-April 2023
“An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us” by Ed Yong
“Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel” by Bonnie Garmus
“Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
“Anywhere You Run: A Novel” by Wanda M. Morris
January 2023
“Candide” by Voltaire
“America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States” by Erika Lee
“The Cultural Toolbox: Traditional Ojibwe Living in the Modern World” by Anton Treuer
“An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
“Small Things Like These” by Claire Keegan
“The Violin Conspiracy: A Novel” by Brendan Slocumb
“Harlem Shuffle: A Novel” by Colson Whitehead
September 2022
“The Song of Achilles” by Madeline Miller
“Lemons In The Garden of Love: A Novel” by Ames Sheldon
“The Last Bookseller: A Life in the Rare Book Trade” by Gary Goodman
“The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood” by Sy Montgomery
“Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe
“Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray” by Rosalind
Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant” by Daniel Tammet
“Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland” by Jonathan Metzl
“Beautiful Country: A Memoir” by Qian Julie Wang
“Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson
“Fathers and Sons: by Ivan Turgenev, translator Richard Freeborn
“A small town in Germany” by John Le Carré
“We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption” by Justin Fenton
“Red Lip Theology” by Candice Marie Benbow
“Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
“The Seed Keeper: A Novel” by Diane Wilson
“The Anomaly: A Novel” by Hervé Le Tellier
April 2022
“The Sweetness of Water” by Nathan Harris
“A Reader on Reading” by Alberto Manguel
“The Sentence” by Louise Erdrich
“Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owen
“State of Terror” by Louise Penny and Hillary Rodham Clinton Clinton
“Half A Life ” by Darin Strauss
“The Woodcut Art of J. J. Lankes” by Welford Dunaway Taylor
“Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know” by Malcolm Gladwell
“The Round House” by Louise Erdrich
“Somewhere in the Unknown World” by Kao Kalia Yang
“Milkman” by Anna Burns
“Libertie: A Novel” by Kaitlyn Greenidge
“The Cooking Gene” by Michael W. Twitty
“The Bombay Prince” by Sujata Massey
December 2021
“The Matter of Black Lives: Writing from The New Yorker” by Jelani Cobb and David Remnick
“Deacon King Kong: A Novel” by James McBride
“The Between” by Tananarive Due
“Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry” by Randolph M. Nesse M.D.
“How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
“Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil” by Susan Neiman
“Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi
“A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith” by Timothy Egan
“The Debt to Pleasure: A Novel” by John Lanchester
“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
“Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson
“Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood” by Trevor Noah
“Things We Lost to the Water” by Eric Nguyen
“Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir” by Ashley C. Ford
September 2021
“The Color of Law: A forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America” by Richard Rothstein
“The Way of Integrity” by Martha Beck
“The Other Black Girl” by Zakiya Dalila Harris
“Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance” by Ananya Chatterjea
Louise Penny mystery series!
“Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernadine Evaristo
“The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
“Becoming” by Michelle Obama
“The Library Book” by Susan Orlean
“Homeland Elegies” by Ayad Akhtar
“Abundance” by Jakob Guanzon
“Somebody’s Daughter: A memoir” by Ashley C. Ford
“Furiously Happy” by Jenny Lawson
“Dune” by Frank Herbert
“Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
“All That She Carried” by Tiya Miles
“The Night Watchman” by Louise Erdrich
Selected Poems by James Wright
“Moloka’i” by Alan Brennert
“American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World” by Christina Proenza-Coles
“Circe” by Madeline Miller
