Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library Reader Advisory Blog: New York, New York

The big city is calling! This month's display on the main floor of the library is featuring books all about, or set in, New York City including the following novels:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Dreamland by Kevin Baker: (Historical/Mystery/Love story)

Coney Island's Dreamland amusement park becomes the setting for a sweeping historical novel that follows a young Eastern European stowaway from his 1909 arrival in New York City through his rise to power in a Manhattan underworld organization to the birth of the labor union movement.

Trauma by Patrick McGrath: (Psychological Fiction)

Growing up in a severely dysfunctional family, Charlie Weir builds a career as a psychiatrist in New York City, working with victims of trauma including veterans returning from Vietnam, but the suicide of a patient, the breakup of his marriage, the growing turmoil of the city around him, and a volatile other woman lead Charlie to question everything, even his own sanity.

Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye: (Mystery/Historical)

Joining the newly formed NYPD at the height of Ireland's 19th-century potato famine, Timothy reluctantly assumes his duties in a notorious slum district, where in the middle of the night he hears a little girl's claim that dozens of bodies have been buried in a local forest.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer: (Bildungsromans/Humorous)

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is a precocious Francophile who idolizes Stephen Hawking and plays the tambourine extremely well. He's also a boy struggling to come to terms with his father's death in the World Trade Center attacks. As he searches New York City for the lock that fits a mysterious key he left behind, Oskar discovers much more than he could have imagined.

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5

"Being Mortal is about the limitations of what modern medicine can provide for people as their lives draw to a close. Gawande argues that the objective of medicine should not merely be treatment and survival; medical care should also ensure dignity in death and having control over one's final moments. He argues that instead of aggressively fighting the inescapable realities of aging, we should ask the hard questions of ourselves and our loved ones -- What makes life worth living? When should we try to extend our lives, and when should we choose a better quality of our remaining days over extending their quantity?

This book is difficult to read. Not because of the way Gawande writes -- his style is highly engaging, and he never lapses into excessively scientific jargon or overly simplistic explanations -- but because of the tough subject matter. Gawande draws on his own experiences as a doctor and peppers his book with honest and humane stories of his patients, friends, and family; the stories he tells make the book more accessible, and also more heartbreaking. (And that's not a bad thing.)

No one likes to think about their loved ones', or their own, impending mortality. But it's important to have these hard conversations, because as Gawande says, "endings matter." - Amanda

New York, New York

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