Reading Room Blog

This readalike is in response to a patron's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. You can browse our book matches here.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel. As Lee soon learns, Ault is a cloistered world of jaded, attractive teenagers who spend summers on Nantucket and speak in their own clever shorthand. Both intimidated and fascinated by her classmates, Lee becomes a shrewd observer of–and, ultimately, a participant in–their rituals and mores.

If you like Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld you might like:

If You Come Softly

by Jacqueline Woodson
After meeting at their private school in New York, fifteen-year-old Jeremiah, who is black and whose parents are  separated, and Ellie, who is white and whose mother has twice abandoned her, fall in love and then try to cope with people's reactions. 

Keeping the Moon by Sarah Dessen
This is the story of fifteen year old Colie. She is spending the summer with her eccentric Aunt Mira while her mother travels. Formerly chubby and still insecure, Colie has built a shell around herself. But her summer with her aunt, her aung's tenant Norman, and her friends at the Last Chance Diner teach her some important lessons about friendship and learning to love yourself.

Looking for Alaska by John Green
This is the story of sixteen year old Miles and his first year at Culver Creek Preparatory School in Alabama. He shares good times and great pranks with friends. But the year is defined by the search for answers about life and death after a fatal car crash.

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly
A wonderful book about an angry, grieving seventeen year old musician facing expulsion from her prestigious Brooklyn private school. She travels to Paris with her father when her mother is deemed unable to care for her. She uncovers a diary of a young actress during the French revolution and her adventure begins. Who would have expected that uncovering the past could help her deal with her future?
 

In her stunning new novel, State of Wonder, Ann Patchett captures the claustrophobic nature of the dense jungle where danger--in the form of poisonous insects and snakes--is present at every turn and a person’s daily existence depends only upon a few bare essentials.

Dr. Annick Swenson has spent a major portion of her life in the Amazon researching potential medical cures. When she and her mentor discover a tribe whose women can regularly conceive children well into their seventies and beyond, Vogel Pharmaceuticals agrees to fund the ground-breaking study. But Dr. Swenson goes rogue, cutting off all communication with the company executives. To make matters infinitely worse, no outsider has the slightest idea where in the jungle the research compound is located.

I decided to read this book because I’ve always been interested in the Dalai Lama. I really thought The Art of Happiness would be more focused on understanding Buddhist principles; instead, it’s a peculiar mix of Eastern religion meets Western medicine.

Co-author Dr. Howard Cutler is a psychiatrist with a private practice in Phoenix, and the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist monk. It’s amusing to see two very different approaches to achieving happiness. The Dalai Lama’s approach to achieving happiness is more of a holistic, spiritual system that focuses on improving oneself using the power of the mind. Dr. Howard Cutler takes more of a back-seat approach in which he listens to the Dalai Lama’s suggestions and gives input about modern psychological approaches used in the United States.

When I first saw Tina Fey co-anchor Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update with Jimmy Fallon on some lonely teenage evening, I couldn't stand her. The punchlines were marinated in a sense of overwhelming superiority, with a side of mean-spirited smarminess. Thankfully this is not the version of Tina Fey that came into focus as time passed.