Great Books Recommended By Librarians

Librarians are always a great reference point when looking for new books to read. Not only are they vivid readers, but they also have the required skills for identifying which books are best, according to your personal tastes and interests.

In this article, we will review some of the greatest books recommended by librarians for this year!

 

• Nutshell (Ian McEwan)

Trudy has an adulterous relationship with Claude, who is her husband’s brother. John, Trudy’s husband, is a poet and poetry editor. He’s also a depressive dreamer with a tendency towards obesity, and their marriage is falling apart. Claude is more pragmatic and works in the real estate business. The two lovers come out with a plan: to assassinate John by poisoning him. The reason: a Georgian mansion valuated at eight million pounds that, in case John dies, is inherited by Trudy.

But there is a witness in this criminal plan: the fetus that Trudy carries with her. In a feat that seems unbelievably impossible to accomplish, McEwan turns the fetus – who still doesn’t have a name – into the narrator of this novel. From the first page to the last, it’s a real page-turner.

 

• Our Souls at Night (Kent Haruf)

Louis Waters and Addie Moore have lived a great part of their lives as neighbors in the peaceful town of Holt, Colorado. They have both become widowed recently. At their ripe, old age, it seems they have no other option than getting used to being alone, especially during the night. But Addie is not willing to conform. In the most natural way, she decides on an unexpected visit to her neighbor: ‘I was wondering if you’d like to come home and spend the night with me. And talk...’ Upon such a surprising proposal, Louis can’t do anything but accept it.

At first, they both feel strange. But night after night, they get to know each other: they talk about their youth and their marriages, about their past hopes, their achievements and their mistakes. Intimacy starts to grow between them, and despite the neighbor’s gossip and the incomprehension of their own children, they start to think about the possibility of spending the rest of their days together.

  

• The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)

In the Republic of Gilead, Defred’s body serves only for the purpose of procreation, according to the fierce rules established by the puritan dictatorship that rules the country. If Defred does not obey, or if she is not able to conceive, she will be publicly executed or exiled to the Colonies, where she will succumb to toxic residues. In this way, the regime controls even the most minimal details of women’s lives: their diet, their clothes, and even their sexual activity. But no one, even a despotic government, can rule a human being’s thinking, nor her desire.

The inherent dangers of mixing religion and politics; the commitment of every absolute power to submit women as a conducive step to subdue the entire population; the irrepressible force of desire as a transgressor element; these are just some of the subjects that this heartbreaking tale gives us, with the subtle sarcasm that constitutes the distinctive touch of Margaret Atwood. A universal writer who, with the passage of time, does not stop to amaze us with the lucidity of her ideas and the power of her prose.

  

• La Bibliothéque Des Livres Refusés (David Foenkinos)

“The Library of the Rejected Books” takes place in Crozon (Great Britain), where a librarian decides to accommodate all the books that have been rejected by editors. While being on vacation in Bretona, a young editor and her writer husband visit the library of rejected books and find a masterpiece in it: “The last hours of a love story”, a novel written by someone named Henri Pick, who died two years ago.

Pick ran a pizza restaurant with his wife, and according to her, he never read a single book in his life and hadn’t written anything besides a shopping list during his entire existence. Did the author have a secret life?

These are some of the most recommended books by librarians for this year! Do you love reading? Do you think you can also become a librarian? All you have to do is enroll in a Master of Library and Information Science (MLS), such as this one. In this way, your book recommendations may one day appear in an article like this one!