*Corrado Library at Central Catholic High School*: New Materials in the Collection

 

Bright individuals can be successful on many career tracks, and we're starting to update some of our career exploration books, including The Ultimate Career Guide for Business Majors  and Careers in Marketing: The Comprehensive Guide to Traditional and Digital Marketing Careers,  both of which replace books that were nearly as old as some 9th graders.    Bright individuals are also involved in the arts.  Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell's Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World  is a short, illustrated love-letter to the pursuit of the arts  (if you have been in or near our Library, or looked behind the Arts display boards, you've seen the chapter where they talk about why Reading and Libraries are Great).

 

Reading is great, let me illuminate some new fiction: Waiting for Eden is some short, literary, fiction about a comatose veteran, The Librarian of Auschwitz  is based on the true story of the preservation of books and knowledge during the Holocaust, and Radio Free Vermont: a Fable of Resistence,  about secessionist Vermont is environmental writer Bill McKibben's first foray into fiction.

 

Sequels include  David Levithan's Someday (Every Day)and Laini Taylor's Muse of Nightmares (sequel to Strange the Dreamer)  which is not the only book about muses -- Heidi Heilig's For a Muse of Fire also contains sheet music for musical compositions in/about the story (Arts Integration!) -- and the 7th book in a Sarah J. Maas series (Kingdom of Ash)

 

Not everything new is about the bright and happy season: Vestiges of the Halloween and Election seasons crop up in these books.   Scary, suspenseful, and mysterious stories include:  The Dark Maidens (Rikako Akiyoshi); two beautiful new hard-cover copies of The Haunting of Hill House; The Big Book of Female Detectives;  In a Dark, Dark Wood, and the non-fiction hit Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Killings and the Birth of the FBI.    Difficult Political discussions (or attempts to make them less difficult: Faculty may recognize Derald Wing Sue's name from recent meetings (Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race). You may recognize The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure from a "____ Is Reading" sign, and Jonathan Haidt's name (co-author, with Greg Lukianoff) from some great TED Talks about moral psychology,  or Ben Sasse's (Them: Why We Hate Eachother -- and How to Heal) name from being a member of the U.S.Senate.  Last in the Scary and/or Politics realm is the speculative historical fiction The Trial and Execution of the Traitor George Washington: a Novel manages to cover both Politics and Mystery.

 

Speaking of History (or really Information/Media Literacy disguised as History because maybe people will listen to History teachers, if not their Librarians), Samuel Wineburg (of the Stanford History Education Group, whom I've talked of before) has a book called Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone) where he makes a good case for the importance of questioning sources, checking facts, and that knowledge and skill are required to find and process information (among other things).

 

 

Nic Netzel

Thanks to the future, wears shades.