Adults

The book for August is A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. Meet Ove. He’s a curmudgeon—the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him “the bitter neighbor from hell.” But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn’t walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time? Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness.

July’s book is The Barefoot Lawyer by Chen Guangcheng. Chen Guangcheng is a unique figure on the world stage, but his story is even more remarkable than anyone knew. The son of a poor farmer in rural China, blinded by illness when he was an infant, Chen was fortunate to survive a difficult childhood. But despite his disability, he was determined to educate himself and fight for the rights of his country's poor, especially a legion of women who had endured forced sterilizations and abortions under the hated "one child" policy.

June’s book is The Round House by Louise Erdrich. The Round House transports readers to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. It is an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.

May’s book is Sometimes There is a Void by Zakes Mda. Zanemvula Mda was born in 1948 into a family of lawyers and grew up in Soweto’s ambitious educated black class. At age fifteen he crossed the Telle River from South Africa into Basutoland (Lesotho), exiled like his father, a “founding spirit” of the Pan Africanist Congress. Exile was hard, but it was just another chapter in Mda’s coming-of-age.

April’s book is The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world.

March’s book is Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang. Through the story of three generations of women in her own family–the grandmother given to the warlord as a concubine, the Communist mother, and the daughter herself–Jung Chang reveals the epic history of China's twentieth century.

February's book is Maya's Notebook by Isabel Allende. This contemporary coming-of-age story centers upon Maya Vidal, a remarkable teenager abandoned by her parents.

January's book is I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai.

Presentation by the Ohio Society for Bigfoot Investigation.

The Jackson City Library board of trustees will meet in regular session at 4:00 p.m.