Every year ICPL staff vote on their top books published that year, identifying their favorite reads in 10 categories: FICTION; YOUNG ADULT; PICTURE BOOKS; MIDDLE GRADE AND CHILDREN'S; MYSTERY; ROMANCE; SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY; BIOGRAPHIES and MEMOIRS; NONFICTION; and GRAPHIC NOVELS.
Join us as we share our favorites in each category, then be sure to check out what titles were named BEST OF THE BEST for 2019. To make our BEST OF THE BEST list, a book had to be nominated by more than one employee. The book with the most staff nominations is ICPL's BEST BOOK of 2019!
We'll announce the BEST OF THE BEST for 2019, and our pick for BEST BOOK of 2019, on December 31. For now, enjoy our favorite BIOGRAPHIES and MEMOIRS of 2019!
Maybe you should talk to someone : a therapist, her therapist, and our lives revealed
Lori Gottlieb
616.8914092 /Gottlieb
Nonfiction, Memoir
"From a New York Times best-selling author, psychotherapist, and national advice columnist, a hilarious, thought-provoking, and surprising new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist's world--where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she)"--
Maid : hard work, low pay, and a mother's will to survive
Stephanie Land
331.481 /Land
Nonfiction, Memoir
A journalist describes the years she worked in low-paying domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them.
Me
Elton John
781.66092 /John
Nonfiction, Memoir
In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life, from his rollercoaster lifestyle as shown in the film Rocketman, to becoming a living legend. Christened Reginald Dwight, he was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed of becoming a pop star. By the age of twenty-three he was performing his first gig in America, facing an astonished audience in his bright yellow dungarees, a star-spangled T-shirt, and boots with wings. Elton John had arrived and the music world would never be the same again. His life has been full of drama, from the early rejection of his work with song-writing partner Bernie Taupin to spinning out of control as a chart-topping superstar; from half-heartedly trying to drown himself in his LA swimming pool to disco-dancing with Princess Diana and Queen Elizabeth; from friendships with John Lennon, Freddie Mercury, and George Michael to setting up his AIDS Foundation to conquering Broadway with Aida, The Lion King, and Billy Elliot the Musical. All the while Elton was hiding a drug addiction that would grip him for over a decade. In Me, Elton also writes powerfully about getting clean and changing his life, about finding love with David Furnish and becoming a father. In a voice that is warm, humble, and open, this is Elton on his music and his relationships, his passions and his mistakes. This is a story that will stay with you by a living legend.
Long live the tribe of fatherless girls : a memoir
T Kira Madden
BIOGRAPHY Madden, T Kira
Nonfiction, Biographies
"The acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut is a memoir about coming of age as a queer, biracial teenager within the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where cult-like privilege, shocking social and racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hide in plain sight. As a child in Florida, T Kira Madden lived a life of extravagance--from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoes, she had plenty to envy. But beneath the surface, life in "the rat's mouth" of Boca Raton was dangerous. Left to her own devices as both parents battled drug addiction, Kira navigated the perils of coming of age too quickly, and without guidance--oblivious parents and misguided babysitters at home, tormentors at school, sexual predators at the mall, and the confused, often destructive, desperately loving friendship of fatherless girls. With unflinching honesty and moving, lyrical prose, and spanning from 1960's Hawai'i to the nip and tuck rooms of 1990s Florida to the present-day struggle of a young woman in a culture of harassment, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is the story of families both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful" --
Greek to me : adventures of the comma queen
Mary Norris
BIOGRAPHY Norris, Mary
Nonfiction, Biographies
Presents a chronicle of the author's lifelong love affair with words, filtered through her passion for all things Greek and her solo adventures in Greece.
Unfollow : a memoir of loving and leaving the Westboro Baptist Church
Megan Phelps-Roper
286.5 /Phelps-Roper
The activist and TED speaker Phelps-Roper reveals her life growing up in the most hated family in America. Rich with suspense and thoughtful reflection, her life story exposes the dangers of black-and-white thinking and the need for true humility in a time of angry polarization.
Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in love by her family and a strict doctrine of “We’re right, everyone else is wrong” by her church. When she begins to questions her belief, she knows that to give up one (church), she loses the other — her beloved family.
In many ways, reading Unfollow was like Tara Westover’s Educated. To an outsider, it’s all “They’re terrible! Why did you stay?” We don’t see them as family. The strength Megan shows to not only leave everything she’s ever known, but to not shy away from past actions or place blame, but apologize and try to learn more, to do and be better, is admirable and inspiring.
No one needs to #savemegan. She’ll save herself.
- Meredith
Save me the plums : my Gourmet memoir
Ruth Reichl
BIOGRAPHY Reichl, Ruth
Nonfiction, Biographies
When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America's oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone's boss. Yet Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no? This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed, forever, the way we eat. Readers will meet legendary chefs like David Chang and Eric Ripert, idiosyncratic writers like David Foster Wallace, and a colorful group of editors and art directors who, under Reichl's leadership, transformed stately Gourmet into a cutting-edge publication. This was the golden age of print media--the last spendthrift gasp before the Internet turned the magazine world upside down. Complete with recipes, Save Me the Plums is a personal journey of a woman coming to terms with being in charge and making a mark, following a passion and holding on to her dreams--even when she ends up in a place she never expected to be.
This isn’t an easy book to read, but it is an important one. It helps describe and explain what life is like for poor people in this country. Government programs that are put in place to help people in poverty often, as Land describes and explains, punishes those working to get out of poverty. For every step forward, you lose a service that could keep you moving forward. I’m glad Land was able to beat the odds and share her story.
- Meredith