Probably one of the biggest questions we get asked at the circulation desk is “What do you recommend?” Well, we decided we’d compile a list of everything the staff is reading/watching/listening to so you can enjoy the staff’s recommendations when you’re not in Avalon!
If you’re interested in placing a hold on one of the staffs picks, visit our online catalog. Remember, if you are an AVALON PROPERTY OWNER you are eligible for our Library by Mail program. For more information about our Library by Mail program, visit our website.
Olivia’s Pick:
Last Night a Superhero Saved My Life by Liesa Mignogna
“I cried (in a good way) the entire time!”
As broad as our exponentially growing cultural fascination with caped crusaders is, it runs just as deep as this long awaited anthology underscores. Liesa Mignogna the VP, Editorial Director at Simon Pulse and editor of this anthology can expound on the virtues of Batman (her wedding was even Batman-themed) but it’s her retelling of incredibly harrowing yet ultimately inspiring encounters with The Dark Knight over the years, as she struggled to coexist with the supervillains in her own family that birthed this collection.
Last Night, A Superhero Saved My Life gives readers the chance to connect to their beloved authors, while those same authors connect to their beloved superheroes, and within that feedback loop of respect and admiration lies a stellar, and phenomenally accessible, anthology full of thrills, chills, and spills.
Contributors include New York Times bestsellers Christopher Golden, Leigh Bardugo, Brad Meltzer, Neil Gaiman, Carrie Vaughn, Jodi Picoult, and Jamie Ford, as well as award-winners and mainstays like Joe R. Lansdale, Karina Cooper, and Ron Currie, Jr among many others. Last Night, A Superhero Saved My Life‘s authors share their most hilarious and most heart wrenching experiences with their chosen defender to explain why superheroes matter, what they tell us about who we are, and what they mean for our future.
Description provided by Goodreads
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Ryan’s Pick:
In the Heart of the Sea
“Very intense!”
In the winter of 1820, the New England whaling ship Essex was assaulted by something no one could believe: a whale of mammoth size and will, and an almost human sense of vengeance. The real-life maritime disaster would inspire Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. But that told only half the story. “In the Heart of the Sea” reveals the encounter’s harrowing aftermath, as the ship’s surviving crew is pushed to their limits and forced to do the unthinkable to stay alive. Braving storms, starvation, panic and despair, the men will call into question their deepest beliefs, from the value of their lives to the morality of their trade, as their captain searches for direction on the open sea and his first mate still seeks to bring the great whale down.
Description provided by IMDb
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Blu-Ray
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Michelle’s Pick:
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
“A solid follow-up to a classic comedy!”
Still working in her parents’ Greek restaurant, Toula Portokalos’s daughter Paris is growing up. She is getting ready to graduate high school and Toula and Ian are experiencing marital issues. When Toula’s parents find out they were never officially married, another wedding is in the works. Can this big, fat, Greek event help to bring the family together?
Description provided by IMDb
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Blu-Ray
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Elizabeth’s Pick:
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
“It wasn’t what I expected but I still really enjoyed it!”
SNL alumni Tina Fey steps into the well worn shoes of journalist Kim Barker in Paramount Pictures’ adaptation of Barker’s memoir The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which details her years as a reporter in Pakistan and Afghanistan beginning in 2002.
Description provided by Rotten Tomatoes
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Blu-Ray
DVD
Nancy’s Pick:
Wire in the Blood (BBC)
“BBC detective series at its best!”
Dark and twisting mystery series based on the characters created by Scottish crime writer Val McDermid. Set in the fictional English city of Bradfield, clinical psychologist Dr. Tony Hill is recruited as a criminal profiler for the police department. Aiding DCI Carol Jordan (and DI Alex Fielding in later episodes), the doctor’s eccentric methods and deep understanding of the criminal mind help track down vicious serial killers and solve the most gruesome of crimes.
Description provided by IMDb
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Season 1 (DVD)
Season 2 (DVD)
Season 3 (DVD)
Season 4 (DVD)
Season 5 (DVD)
Season 6 (DVD)
Hoopla (Streaming Video)
Sean’s Pick:
The Fire Man by Joe Hill
“It’s a tense, post-apocalyptic epic.”
From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author ofNOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman.
The fireman is coming. Stay cool.
No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.
Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.
Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.
In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.
Description provided by Goodreads
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