Otis Library Asks:
What are you reading?

Book reviews and best sellers lists are all well and good, but sometimes the best books are those you hear about from word of mouth. With that in mind, the Otis Library asks “What are you reading?” Add their recommendations to your own reading list! Remember to ask at the Information Desk if you need help locating one of these books.

Our reader this month is:
Sylvia Baird
Director of Multicultural Affairs for the Southeastern Mental Health Authority

Girl Interrupted by Sussana Kaysen
I didn’t fall in love with the book until page 167 when I read “Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that? I had something to tell her now. I see you, I said”. The eloquence of this passage seemed to sum up the time that the writer spent on an adolescent psychiatric unit. The book gives an interesting perspective to life on a psychiatric ward from the patient’s perspective.

However, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, grabbed me from page one “I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster”. And from that point on you are caught up in the “adventure” which became their lives. The book evokes many emotions as it challenges the reader to ferret out what is magical and what is reality? What was neglect and what was creative and other “choices” that the parents made.




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