By Solomon Northup

A memoir describing the life of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from Saratoga, N.Y., who was kidnapped in 1841 and forced into slavery in Louisiana for twelve years.

 

Became the movie: 12 Years a Slave.

By James Patterson
Series Women's Murder Club
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

Four women—a police detective, an assistant D.A., a reporter, and a medical examiner who call themselves the Women’s Murder Club—develop lifelong bonds as they pursue a killer whose twisted imagination has stunned an entire city.

By David Benioff

Monty starts a seven-year prison sentence for dealing drugs and tonight is his last night of freedom. His father wants him to run. His drug-lord boss wants to know if he squealed. His girlfriend isn't sure what she wants but his two friends know that if he goes in, he will never be the same.

By Agatha Christie
Series Miss Marple Mysteries
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

Mrs. McGillicuddy has trouble convincing anyone that she has seen a man strangle a woman on a passing train and turns to Miss Jane Marple for help in proving her story.

By Seth Grahame–Smith

“Grahame-Smith inserts a grandiose and gratuitous struggle with vampires into Abraham Lincoln’s life. Lincoln learns at an early age that his mother was killed by a supernatural predator. This provokes his bloody but curiously undocumented lifelong vendetta against vampires and their slave-owning allies (From Publishers Weekly).”

 

Became the movie: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

By Steve Harvey
Recommended By Alisa Fogel, Librarian-Programming

“Counsels women on understanding the mindset of a man when it comes to relationships, covering topics such as cheating, sex, age, family, money, respect, and commitment (From the Publisher).”

 

Became the movie: Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.

By Jean Hanff Korelitz
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

“Admission is at once a fascinating look at the complex college admissions process and an emotional examination of what happens when the secrets of the past return and shake a woman's life to its core (From the Publisher).”

 

Became the movie: Admission.

By Mark Twain

When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the 'sivilizing' Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures. Beneath the exploits, however, are more serious undercurrents - of slavery, adult control and, above all, of Huck's struggle between his instinctive goodness and the corrupt values of society, which threaten his deep and enduring friendship with Jim.

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This story, the first of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, includes an explanation of how Watson and Holmes come to share rooms at 221B Baker Street, and an introduction of Scotland Yard detectives Gregson and Lestrade.

 

Became the TV shows: Elementary, Sherlock, and more shows titles Sherlock.

By Mark Twain

The adventures of a mischievous young boy and his friends growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century.

 

Became numerous movies: Tom Sawyer (1907, 1917, 1930, 1936, 1973. 1973-TV movie, 1984, and 2000), Huck and Tom (1918), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944 and 1985), Back to Hannibal: The Return of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1990-TV movie), and Tom and Huck (1995).

By Anna Todd
Series After Series
Recommended By Stacey F., Reference Librarian

Good girl Tessa, just starting out in college, finds herself falling for bad boy Hardin, even though he continues to push her away.

By James Patterson
Series Alex Cross Series
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian

A Washington, D. C. police detective, Alex Cross becomes caught up in a kidnapping case that may involve a schizophrenic psychopath.

By Chris Kyle
With Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, November 10, 2015. 7:30 PM.

American Sniper is the astonishing autobiography of SEAL Chief Chris Kyle, who is the record-holding sniper in U.S. military history. Kyle has more than 150 officially confirmed kills (the previous American record was 109), though his remarkable career total has not been made public by the Pentagon.

By Frank McCourt
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

“The McCourts began their family in poverty in Brooklyn, yet when Angela slipped into depression after the death of her only daughter, the family reversed the tide of emigration and returned to Ireland, living on public assistance in Limerick. McCourts’ story is laced with the pain of extreme poverty, aggravated by an alcoholic father who abandoned the family during World War II. Given the burdens of grief and starvation, it's a tribute to his skill that he can serve the reader a tale of love, some sadness, but at least as much laughter as the McCourts' "Yankee" children knew growing up in the streets of Limerick (Library Journal).”

 

Became the movie: Angela’s Ashes

By George Orwell
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager
With Jean Simpson, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, July 14, 2015. 7:30 PM.

A satire on totalitarianism in which farm animals overthrow their human owner and set up their own government.

 

Became the movie: Animal Farm.

By Leo Tolstoy
Recommended By Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian, Nathalie Levin, Children's Services Librarian

A translation of the classic Russian novel tells the tale of rebellious Anna and her ill-fated, adulterous romance with Count Vronsky amid the turmoil of nineteenth-century Russia.

By Jules Verne

In 1872 Phileas Fogg wins a bet by traveling around the world in seventy–nine days, twenty–three hours, and fifty–seven minutes.

By Garth Stein
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian
With Ed Goldberg, Head of Reference, Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian, Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian, Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

“He Said, She Said” Book Discussion
Join us for a special evening to celebrate a year of great books and discussions.

Monday, December 19, 2011. 7:30 PM.

Nearing the end of his life, Enzo, a dog with a philosopher’s soul, tries to bring together the family, pulled apart by a three year custody battle between daughter Zoe’s maternal grandparents and her father Denny, a race car driver.

By Ian McEwan

In 1935 England, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses an event involving her sister Cecilia and her childhood friend Robbie Turner, and she becomes the victim of her own imagination, which leads her on a lifelong search for truth and absolution.

 

Became the movie: Atonement

By Kōshun Takami
Recommended By Jessikah Chautin, Community Engagement Specialist, Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

A group of ninth–grade students are confined to a small isolated island where they must fight each other for three days until only one survivor remains, as part of the ultimate in reality television.

By Iris Rainer Dart

Follows thirty years of joy, sorrow, triumph, and tragedy in the changing and enduring relationship of two very different women - the conventional Bertie and Cee Cee, a flamboyant actress.

 

Became the movie: Beaches.

By Sylvia Plath
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian , Kaye Spurrell, Readers' Services Librarian

Esther Greenwood, a talented and successful writer, finally succumbs to madness when the world around her begins to falter.

Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic poem of a hero’s triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people.

 

Became the movie: Beowulf.

By Mark Bowden

Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden’s brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3, 1993, about a hundred elite U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into the teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take an hour. Instead, they found themselves pinned down through a long and terrible night fighting against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. The following morning, eighteen Americans were dead and more than seventy had been badly wounded.

 

Became the movie: Black Hawk Down.

By Jose Saramago
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, June 13, 2017. 7:30 PM.

A city is hit by an epidemic of “white blindness” whose victims are confined to a vacant mental hospital, while a single eyewitness to the nightmare guides seven oddly assorted strangers through the barren urban landscape.

By Aldous Huxley
With Lisa Caputo, Assistant Library Director

Tuesday, February 28, 2012. 1 PM & 7:30 PM.

The story of a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability.

 

Became the movie: Brave New World.

By Truman Capote

The tale of a fun-loving, amoral playgirl in New York City is accompanied by "House of Flowers," "A Diamond Guitar," and "A Christmas Memory."

 

Became the movie: Breakfast at Tiffany's

By Helen Fielding
Series Bridget Jones

Bridget’s new relationship with Mark Darcy should have improved her self-confidence, but the difficult adjustments of sharing an apartment and Rebecca’s eagerness to cause trouble are making Bridget more uncertain than ever.

By Ben Mezrich
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

Describes how a group of overachieving, anarchist MIT students joined a decades–old underground blackjack club dedicated to counting cards and beating the system at major casinos around the world. They managed to legally take several Las Vegas casinos for more than three million dollars.

By Stephen King

An introverted girl with remarkable powers of telekinesis faces the horrors of teenage life and unleashes a few horrors of her own when she attends the high school prom.

By Joseph Heller
With Sonia Grgas, Health Reference Librarian

Tuesday, September 29, 2015. 1:30 PM.

Depicts the struggles of a U.S. airman attempting to survive the lunacy and depravity of a World War II base.

 

Became the movie: Catch 22.

By Suzanne Collins
Series Hunger Games trilogy
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

By winning the annual Hunger Games, District 12 tributes Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark have secured a life of safety and plenty for themselves and their families, but because they won by defying the rules, they unwittingly become the faces of an impending rebellion.

By Sebastian Faulks

It’s World War II and Charlotte has been trained to be an undercover courier for England. She straps on a parachute and falls from the sky into Vichy France. There she will assist the French Resistance in its defiance of Nazi occupation. Once behind enemy lines, she keeps secret her personal mission to find her lover, an RAF pilot downed over France.

Became the movie: Charlotte Gray

By Chuck Palahniuk

Medical school dropout Victor Mancini comes up with a complicated but ingenious scam to pay for his mother’s elder car, cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his zany mother, whose Alzheimer’s disease hides the bizarre truth about his parentage.

Became the movie: Choke

By Stephen King

A scarlet-and-white, 1958 Plymouth fury - salvaged over every rational dissent and objection, from decay - possesses its new owner and brings hellish terror to him, his friends, and his classmates.

 

Became the movie: Christine.

By John Irving

Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.

 

Became the movie: The Cider House Rules.

By Jean M. Auel
Series Earth's Children
Recommended By Lakshmi Kasturi, Library Clerk, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

An injured and orphaned infant carries within her the seed and hope of mankind in this epic of survival and destiny set at the dawn of prehistory.

 

Became the movie: Clan of the Cave Bear.

By Richard Price

At once an intense mystery and a revealing study of two men, a veteran homicide detective and an inner city crack dealer, on opposite sides of an endless war.

By Anthony Burgess

In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom.

 

Became the movie: A Clockwork Orange.

By David Mitchell
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

Recounts the connected stories of people from the past and the distant future, from a nineteenth-century notary and an investigative journalist in the 1970s to a young man who searches for meaning in a post-apocalyptic world.

By Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Lucas Corso, a rare book hunter, is called in to authenticate a fragment of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's "The Three Musketeers," found in the possession of a murdered bibliophile, and soon finds himself involved in an adventure in which life imitates literature.

 

Became the movie: The Ninth Gate.

By Charles Frazier

After Inman escapes from a war hospital in 1864 and starts walking to Cold Mountain, Ada struggles to save her mountain farm with the help of Ruby, an illiterate but efficient farmer.

 

Became the movie: Cold Mountain.

By Mark Twain

A blow on the head transports a Yankee to 528 A.D. where he proceeds to modernize King Arthur's kingdom by organizing a school system, constructing telephone lines, and inventing the printing press.

 

Became numerous movies: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1921, 1949, 1989-TV movie), A Connecticut Yankee (1931, 1955-TV movie), A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur’s Court (1978- TV movie), Unidentified Flying Oddball (1979), A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (1995), A Kid in Aladdin’s Palace (1998-TV movie) *spin-off*, A Young Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1996), A Knight in Camelot (1998-TV movie), and Black Knight (2001).

By Neil Gaiman
Grade(s): 5+

Looking for excitement, Coraline ventures through a mysterious door into a world that is similar, yet disturbingly different from her own, where she must challenge a gruesome entity in order to save herself, her parents, and the souls of three others.

 

Became the movie: Coraline.

By Agatha Christie
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

Criminologist Charles Hayward becomes a special assistant to Scotland Yard when his fiancée’s grandfather is murdered, and her entire family comes under suspicion.

By Arthur Miller
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

As a wave of anti-communist investigations swept across American society during the 1950s, Miller exposed the horror of such witch-hunts by retelling the story of the infamous Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692.

By Stephen King

A family's two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard is transformed by rabies and the insidious guidance of demonic forces into a terrifying monster.

 

Became the movie: Cujo.

By Dan Brown

The secret Catholic organization known as Opus Dei has struck. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been found dead inside the museum, surrounded by eldritch ciphers in invisible ink. It is up to Harvard symbolist Robert Langdon and his French cryptologist partner to decode the ciphers, and get to the bottom of an ever-widening mystery.

 

Became the movie: The Da Vinci Code.

By Lauren Weisberger

“A delightfully dishy novel about the all-time most impossible boss in the history of impossible bosses (From the Publisher).”

 

Became the movie: The Devil Wears Prada.

By Veronica Roth

In a future Chicago, sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she discovers that she is an anomoly who does not fit into any one group, and that the society she lives in is not perfect after all.