Rest and Retreat

I know solitude seems like the opposite of what you want to do right now, but solitude with a purpose, such as rest, could be highly beneficial especially after this difficult year. There are also many forms of rest. Resting the mind for better sleep, retreating to rest and recharge, and finding solitude to create or come to terms with our season of winter. 

Here are a few books in our collection that bring that idea of rest to mind:

Nothing Much Happens: Cozy and Calming Stories to Soothe your Mind and Help You Sleep by Kathryn Nicolai

While my insomnia has been more pregnancy related than not, I’ve been finding tools to help slow down my overthinking brain to make it not so miserable: heartburn tea, putting my phone away an hour before bed, and the most important tool, reading a physical book at bedtime. Based on the podcast this collection includes soothing new stories and adorable illustrations to help you sleep.

Imagining Life, Post-Pandemic

There was a time – two months or so ago – when readers flocked to dystopian fiction so that they might imagine  what strange, dark days might lay ahead. Now that we’re all living through something that feels a bit like sci-fi itself, futuristic fiction is still there to help us envision and contemplate the way forward.

In Mike Chen’s Beginning at the End, it felt pretty apocalyptic when the viral epidemic known as MGS wiped out 70% of the world’s population. But the world didn’t end, and six years later we join three residents of San Francisco as they emerge from social isolation into a city and a world that is different, yet in many ways still the same. Rob’s young daughter doesn’t yet know that her mother has died. Struggling former wedding-planner Krista escaped her own abusive family under cover of the plague, and now counsels traumatized survivors. Former pop star Moira’s life has been reinvented in surprising ways during the epidemic. Chen’s perceptive, empathetic novel helps us to process realities not so very different from our own.