Washoe County Library System

"Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it explain why there seems to be so much irrationality in the world, including, let's be honest, in each of us? These are the goals of Steven Pinker's follow-up to Enlightenment Now (Bill Gates's "new favorite book of all time"). Humans today are often portrayed as cavemen out of time, poised to react to a lion in the grass with a suite of biases, blind spots, fallacies, and illusions. But this, Pinker...

In the aftermath of a colossal battle, the future of the Seven Kingdoms hangs in the balance -- beset by newly emerging threats from every direction. In the East, Daenerys Targaryen, the last scion of House Targaryen, rules with her three dragons as queen of a city built on dust and death. But Daenerys has thousands of enemies. As they gather, one young man embarks up in his own quest for the queen, with an entirely different goal in mind. Fleeing...

"What will you choose: a horn or a harp? Perhaps you’re more interested in different forms of transportation: would you prefer a boat or a hot-air balloon? The possibilities are endless and the choice is yours. Featuring hundreds of artifacts from the British Museum, this is a book readers will pore over time and time again."--

On the Finfarran Peninsula on Ireland’s west coast, at the Lissbeg Library, a group of women gather together for the first book club of the summer where they’ll all face difficult choices and hope to get the happy endings they all deserve.

"Returning to the sweeping romantic saga, Colleen McCullough presents a new major work: the story of four unforgettable sisters navigating work, love, and their dreams in 1920s Australia. Because they are two sets of twins, the four Latimer sisters are as close as can be. They are famous throughout New South Wales for their beauty, wit, and ambition, but as they step into womanhood, they are not enthusiastic about the limited prospects life holds...

Just as Alix Madsen is finishing up architecture school, Adelaide Kingsley dies and wills her, for one year, the use of a charming nineteenth-century Nantucket house. The elderly woman's relationship to the Madsen family is a mystery to the spirited Alix -- fresh from a romantic breakup -- but for reasons of her own Alix accepts the quirky bequest, in part because it gives her time to plan her best friend's storybook wedding. But unseen forces move...

On a journey that will take them to Tibet, Nepal, China, Italy, and Siberia, the Fargos find themselves embroiled with black-market fossils, an ancient Tibetan kingdom, a lost landmass in the North Sea, Stone Age ostrich egg shards inscribed in a cryptic language, a pair of battles separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years ... and a skeleton that could just turn the history of human evolution on its head.

Twenty-seven-year-old Joanna Kurtz has made several trips to the altar, but never as a bride. The single young Amish woman is a closet writer with a longing to be published something practically unheard of in her Lancaster County community. Yet Joanna's stories aren't her only secret. She also has a beau who is courting her from afar, unbeknownst even to her sister, Cora, who, though younger, seems to have suitors to spare. Eben Troyer is a responsible...

Isabelle is one of Cinderella's ugly stepsisters, who cut off their toes in an attempt to fit into the glass slipper; but there is more to her story than a maimed foot, for the Marquis de la Chance is about to offer her a choice and the opportunity to change her fate--there will be blood and danger, but also the possibility of redemption and triumph, and most of all the chance to find her true self.

In 1960, Billie Valentine is a young housewife living in a sleepy Massachusetts suburb, treading water in a dull marriage and caring for two adopted daughters. Summers spent with the girls at their lakeside camp in Vermont are her one escape -- from her husband's demands, from days consumed by household drudgery, and from the nagging suspicion that life was supposed to hold something different. Then a new family moves in across the street. Ted and...