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Introducing our new service Shelf Discovery! Stuck on what to read next? Let us help! Just fill out the form below with your contact info, the last books you loved (or hated!), and your preferred genres. Our staff will select 3-4 book recommendations based on your interests. You will receive an email with your personalized reading list within 7 days.

Shelf Discovery

Staff Picks

Get to know our staff through their recommendations. You might find your next favourite book!

No Place Like Home: The Missing Key to Our Housing Crisis

Author: Jessica Barrett
Call Number: 363.50971 Bar
Genre: Non-Fiction
Collection:Non-Fiction
Format: Book

After living in Vancouver for her entire adult life, Jessica Barrett packed up her apartment, quit her dream job as a magazine editor, and headed for Calgary in search of an affordable place to call home. In the years since Barrett was priced out of Vancouver, the issue of housing affordability has become a national crisis, fanning the flames of social inequality and setting us up for financial ruin. But our obsession with rising housing prices obscures a more complex and pressing we have lost our reverence for and our understanding of home. In No Place Like Home, Barrett dives behind the headlines and statistics of Canada's housing crisis to examine how it has eaten away at our psyches by undermining our human needs for belonging, connection, and stability. Through a mix of powerful memoir and rigorous journalism, she delivers an eye-opening portrait of our housing system while scouring the world for examples of how we might do things differently, pulling inspiration from the slum communities of Harare, Zimbabwe, the stately streets of Vienna, Austria, and the Cold-war era apartment blocks of West Berlin. In the process, Barrett forms a framework for solutions and the basis for achievable change. Her biggest discovery? We cannot solve our housing crisis until we first address our crisis of home.

Want to Know a Secret?

Author: Freida McFadden
Call Number: FIC McFad
Genre: Thriller, Suspense
Collection: Fiction
Format: Book

YouTube baking sensation April Masterson knows the secret to the perfect gooey brownies. Or how to make key lime squares that will melt in your mouth. But if you keep watching her offline, you may find out some other secrets about April. Secrets she’d rather you didn’t know. Like where did her son go when he snuck out of the house? What was she doing with the local soccer coach behind fogged windows? And what’s buried in her backyard? Everyone has secrets. Some are worse than others. April’s secrets are enough to destroy her. I’ll make sure of that.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

Author: Amanda Montell
Call Number: On Libby
Genre: Non-Fiction
Collection: Digital
Format: eAudioook

What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . . Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day. Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere.

The Book Witch

Author: Meg Shaffer
Call Number: FIC Shaff
Genre: Fantasy, Magical Realism
Collection:SF/Fantasy
Format: Book

Rainy March is a proud third-generation book witch, sworn to defend works of fiction from all foes real and imaginary. With her magical umbrella and feline familiar, she jumps into and out of novels to fix malicious alterations and rogue heroes. Book witches live by a strict Real people belong in the real word; fictional characters belong in works of fiction…. Do not eat, drink, or sleep inside a fictional world, lest you become part of the story. Falling in love with a fictional character? Don’t even think about it. Which is why Rainy has been forbidden from seeing the Duke of Chicago, the dashing British detective who stars in her favorite mystery series. If she’s ever caught with him again, she’ll be expelled from her book coven—and forced to give up the magical gifts that are as much a part of her as her own name. But when her beloved grandfather disappears and a priceless book is stolen, there’s only one person she trusts to help her solve the case: the Duke. Their quest takes them through the worlds of Alice in Wonderland, The Great Gatsby, and other classics that will reveal hidden enemies and long-buried family secrets.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Author: Gail Honeyman
Call Number: FIC Honey
Genre: Fiction
Collection: Fiction
Format: Book

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding unnecessary human contact, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen, the three rescue one another from the lives of isolation that they had been living. Ultimately, it is Raymond’s big heart that will help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one. If she does, she'll learn that she, too, is capable of finding friendship—and even love—after all. Smart, warm, uplifting, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . .

The Midnight Library

Author: Matt Haig
Call Number: FIC Haig
Genre: Fantasy
Collection: SF/Fantasy
Format: Book

Between life and death there is a library. When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change. The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren't always what she imagined they'd be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger. Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

Author:Angela Chen
Call Number: 306.762 Che
Genre: Non-Fiction
Collection: Non-Fiction
Format: Book

What exactly is sexual attraction and what is it like to go through the world not experiencing it? What does asexuality reveal about consent, about compromise, about the structures of society? This exceedingly accessible guide to asexuality shows that the issues that aces face—confusion around sexual activity, the intersection of sexuality and identity, navigating different needs in relationships—are conflicts that all of us need to address as we move through the world. Through interviews, cultural criticism, and memoir, ACE invites all readers to consider big-picture issues through the lens of asexuality, because every place that sexuality touches our world, asexuality does too. Journalist Angela Chen uses her own journey of self-discovery as an asexual person to unpretentiously educate and vulnerably connect with readers, effortlessly weaving analysis of sexuality and societally imposed norms with interviews of ace people. Among those included are the woman who had blood tests done because she was convinced that "not wanting sex" was a sign of serious illness, and the man who grew up in an evangelical household and did everything "right," only to realize after marriage that his experience of sexuality had never been the same as that of others. Also represented are disabled aces, aces of color, non-gender-conforming aces questioning whether their asexuality is a reaction against stereotypes, and aces who don't want romantic relationships asking how our society can make room for them.

My Dark Vanessa

Author:Kate Elizabeth Russell
Call Number: FIC Brook
Genre: Fiction
Collection: Fiction
Format: Book

2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed? Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.

Online Readers Advisory Resources

https://www.cbc.ca/books The CBC’s home for readers and writers. Includes Canada Reads.

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/ Search and browse bibliographies of over 50,000 bestselling fiction authors, with the latest books and series information.

https://www.goodreads.com/ Find and read more books you’ll love, and keep track of the books you want to read. Be part of the world’s largest community of book lovers on Goodreads.

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