Oregon City Adult Staff Picks List

Titles recommended by Adult Services staff in the Oregon City Adult Collection.

Updated October 25, 2025
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The casebook of Victor Frankenstein : a novel
Ackroyd, Peter
Paper Book
A New York Times Notable Book and Providence Journal Best Book of the Year From the incomparable Peter Ackroyd: a brilliant re-imagination of the classic tale that has enthralled readers for nearly two centuries. nbsp; Victor Frankenstein, a...
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Baldwin, James.
Paper Book
As one of the century's premier American writers, James Baldwin has profoundly altered the nation's social and literary consciousness. Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin's first novel, brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, as it starkly contrasts two generations of an embattled...
The elegance of the hedgehog
Barbery, Muriel
A moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous. In an elegant apartment building in the heart of Paris, Renée, the concierge, scrutinizes the vacuous lives of its well-to-do tenants. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: plump,...
A short history of nearly everything
Bryson, Bill.
Paper Book
THE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER, UPDATED FOR 2025 * A wonder-filled quest to understand everything that has happened in the history of the Earth, from the Big Bang theory to the rise of civilization and beyond--revised to reflect the last two decades of scientific advancement ...
The Tao of physics : an exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism
Capra, Fritjof.
Paper Book
After a quarter of a century in print, Capra's groundbreaking work still challenges and inspires. This updated edition of The Tao of Physics includes a new preface and afterword in which the author reviews the developments of the twenty-five years since the book's first publication, discusses...
Trust
Díaz, Hernán
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE "Buzzy and...
One hundred years of solitude
García Márquez, Gabriel
Paper Book
From the Nobel Prize winning novelist, this epic tale of seven generations of the Buendia family spans a hundred years of Latin American history. The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love--in rich,...
Claudius the god and his wife Messalina
Graves, Robert
Paper Book
A modern classic of historical fiction written in the form of Claudius's autobiography. Claudius the God is the second part of Robert Graves's two-part account of the life of Tiberius Claudius, "the cripple, the stammerer, the fool of the family" who became Emperor of Rome...
I, Claudius : from the autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, born 10 B.C., murdered and deified A.D. 54
Graves, Robert
Paper Book
A modern classic of historical fiction written in the form of Claudius's autobiography. Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus lived from 10 B.C. to 54 A.D. Despised as a weakling and dismissed as an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and...
Steppenwolf
Hesse, Hermann
Paper Book
Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine
Honeyman, Gail
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick "Beautifully written and incredibly funny, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is about the importance of friendship and human connection. I fell in love with Eleanor, an eccentric...
Klara and the sun
Ishiguro, Kazuo
Paper Book
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY TAIKA WAITITI AND STARRING JENNA ORTEGA AND AMY ADAMS * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Once in a great while, a book comes along that changes our view of the world. This magnificent novel from the Nobel laureate and author of Never Let Me Go<...
One flew over the cuckoo's nest
Kesey, Ken.
Paper Book
"Powerful, poetic realism...makes the tired old subject of life in a mental hospital into an absorbing Orwellian microcosm of all humanity."--Life. An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of...
The poisonwood Bible : a novel
Kingsolver, Barbara.
Paper Book
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to...
My struggle
Knausgård, Karl Ove
Paper Book
A New York Times bestseller, My Struggle: Book 1 introduces American readers to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It...
Lonesome Dove : a novel
McMurtry, Larry.
Paper Book
The 40th anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic of the American West, with a new foreword by Yellowstone cocreator Taylor Sheridan. An epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness. "My...
Annals of the former world
McPhee, John A.
Paper Book
The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the...
Becoming
Obama, Michelle
Paper Book
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States   #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WATCH THE EMMY-NOMINATED NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER * ONE OF...
Bewilderment : a novel
Powers, Richard
Paper Book
The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from...
The overstory : a novel
Powers, Richard
Paper Book
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric...
Packing for Mars : the curious science of life in the void
Roach, Mary.
Paper Book
The best-selling author of Stiff and Bonk explores the irresistibly strange universe of space travel and life without gravity. Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space...
The order of time
Rovelli, Carlo
Paper Book
One of TIME's Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade "Meet the new Stephen Hawking . . . The Order of Time is a dazzling book." --The Sunday Times From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It...
Blindness
Saramago, José.
Paper Book
International Bestseller | A stunningly powerful novel of humanity's will to survive against all odds during an epidemic by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. "This is a shattering work by a literary master."--Boston Globe A city is hit by an epidemic...
Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore
Sloan, Robin
Paper Book
A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal life--mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of...
A tree grows in Brooklyn
Smith, Betty
Paper Book
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick The beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the twentieth century. From the moment she entered the world, Francie Nolan needed to be made of stern stuff, for the often harsh life of Williamsburg,...
The elements of style
Strunk, William
Paper Book
You know the authors’ names. You recognize the title. You've probably used this book yourself. And nowThe Elements of Style–the most widely read and employed English style manual–is available in a specially bound 50th Anniversary Edition that offers...
A gentleman in Moscow
Towles, Amor
Paper Book
The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers * A New York Times "Readers' Choice: Best Books of the 21st Century" Pick From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Table for Two, a beautifully transporting novel about a...
On earth we're briefly gorgeous : a novel
Vuong, Ocean
Paper Book
A New York Times bestseller * Nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction * Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century ...
A people's history of the United States
Zinn, Howard
Paper Book
“It’s a wonderful, splendid book—a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future.” —Howard Fast, author of Spartacus and The Immigrants “[It] should be...

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