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Books for building our block

 From the practical to the political and prosaic, here are my top picks. 

Home Improvement

Heather J. Paper, Built-Ins Idea Book. The Taunton Press, 2017. (Minuteman Library Network records linked.) 

Neighborhood

 What's neat about that new manhole on Partridge street, or the graffiti under the bridge? Spike Carlsen's, A Walk Around the Block: Stoplight Secrets, Mischievous squirrels, Manhole Mysteries & Other Stuff You See Every Day (And Know Nothing About) New York: HarperCollins, 2020. 

Ask, Listen, Empower: Grounding Your Library Work in Community Engagement. Eds. Mary Davis Fournier and Sarah Ostman. Chicago: ALA, 2021. 

For kids

 Jarrett Dapier and Eugenia Mello, Jazz for Lunch. Atheneum, 2021. 

Mo Willems, Knuffle Bunny Free. New York: Balzer, 2010. 

History/Biography (For Martin Luther King Jr. Day) Audio CD available of this biography by Tufts Professor Kerri K. Greenidge, Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter. New York: Liveright, 2020. Troy R. Saxby, Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2020.

Sociology (For the anniversary of Jan 6.) Mia  Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko, Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford, CA: Redwood, 2021. 

Memoir (For 20th anniversary of Guantánamo Jan 11th) Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo. New York: Hachette, 2021. 

Fiction. Askold Melnyczuk, The Man Who Would Not Bow: & Other Stories. Grand Iota, 2021. 

 In the title story of a local master storyteller's latest collection, a resettled refugee reconciles his vocation as a writer with old world politics, and in "Termites" a reporter teeters at the brink of the Syrian conflict only to find out what is considered casual.

For essays about poems that lift off the page try Pulitzer winner, Kay Ryan, Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose. New York: Grove Press, 2020.

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