Books and Literature: Read to 2020: April - Roses are Read

Milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.

Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things.

Indecency is boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order

Internationally recognized poet Mahogany Browne challenges the conditioning of society by crafting an anthem of strength and magic undeniable in its bloom for all beautiful Black girls

Pulitzer Prize winner Sylvia Plath's complete poetic works, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes.

An inspired collection of new and selected poems from the former US Poet Laureate.

The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred movements, turned hearts and informed generations. She's been hailed as a firebrand, a radical, a healer, and a sage; a wise and courageous voice who has spoken out on the sensitive issues, including race and gender, that touch our national consciousness.

The works of award-winning poet and novelist Julia Alvarez are rich with the language and influences of two cultures: the Dominican Republic of her childhood and the America of her youth and adulthood.

A landmark anthology celebrating twenty-one native poets first published in the twenty-first century.

A comprehensive collection of ecstatic poetry that delights with its energy and passion, The Essential Rumi brings the vibrant, living words of famed thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Jelalludin Rumi to contemporary readers.

The most comprehensive English-language collection of work ever by “the greatest poet of the twentieth century—in any language” (Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez) In his work a continent awakens to consciousness,” wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America’s most revered writers and political figures.

The National Book Award-winning author of Time and Materials, Robert Hass is one of the most revered of all living poets. With The Apple Trees at Olema, the former Poet Laureate and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize offers twenty new and selected poems grounded in the beauty of the physical world.

"Rich's poems do not demand the willing suspension of disbelief. They demand belief, and it is a measure of her success as a poet that most of the time they get it. . . . The affirmation and the occasional moments of pure joy in these poems are quiet but fully earned."--Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review

Hailed by Harold Bloom as "America’s greatest living poet," John Ashbery has won every major American literary award for his poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Containing all of Robert Frost's best-known poems--including "Birches, " "Mending Walls, " and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"--And dozens more--this collection celebrates the New England countryside, Frost's appreciation of common folk, and his understanding of the human condition.

Share in Dickenson's admiration of language, nature, and life and death, with this collection of her finest works.

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its subject.

The authoritative edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets and Poems from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes:

A story of our shared humanity, Gwendolyn Brooks honors the beauty of our world and the many different people in it. Brooks speaks to all children of the world in this moving poem about acceptance, stressing that every child should have the opportunity for a shining future and offering hope for a better tomorrow.

An inspiring collection of the author's own glorious poems celebrating a love of words and all the ways we use and interact with them: reading, speaking, writing, singing, and storytelling. Includes a glossary of Spanish words used in the poems.

Winner of the Coretta Scott King illustrator award, I, Too, Am America blends the poetic wisdom of Langston Hughes with visionary illustrations from Bryan Collier in this inspirational picture book that carries the promise of equality.

With his famous wicked humor and the cunning of a big bad wolf, master storyteller and satirist Roald Dahl retells his six favorite fairy tales. Get ready for Dahl's diabolical version of what really happened to Cinderella, Goldilocks, the Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood.

A brand-new rib-tickling collection of more than 100 never-before-published poems by national bestselling poet Prelutksy.

A bilingual collection of poetry by the late Francisco X. Alarcón, acclaimed Chicano poet celebrating the days of the week and everyday childhood experiences.

The world of Christopher Robin is a world of childhood-gay, rollicking, imaginative-a world of reality and enchanting make-believe.

A howling wolf, a stalking tiger, a playful panda, a dancing bird - pairing the stunning photography of National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore with the delicate poetry of Newbery award-winning author Kwame Alexander, this lush picture book celebrates the beauty, diversity, and fragility of the animal world.

A collection of poems evoking the world and feelings of childhood.

A boy who turns into a TV set and a girl who eats a whale are only two of the characters in a collection of humorous poetry illustrated with the author's own drawings.

Utterly delightful to read aloud, and for parent and child to share, Edward Lear's humorous verses shine with irrepressible joy and rhythm.

A collection of nursery rhymes, most original but some from Mother Goose, divided into sections celebrating all of the special moments in a baby's day, from wake-up time to bedtime.

From a National Book Award finalist and New York Times-bestselling author comes a fiercely stunning novel that takes place in 60 potent seconds--the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he's going to murder the guy who shot and killed his brother.

Xiomara has always kept her words to herself. When it comes to standing her ground in her Harlem neighbourhood, she lets her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But X has secrets - her feelings for a boy in her bio class, and the notebook full of poems that she keeps under her bed. And a slam poetry club that will pull those secrets into the spotlight. Because in spite of a world that might not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to stay silent.

Eighteen-year-old Matt's atheism is tested when, after a horrific accident of his own making that plunges him into a dark, quiet place, he hears a voice that calls everything he has ever disbelieved into question.

Her mother died when she was twelve, and suddenly Artemisia Gentileschi had a stark choice: a life as a nun in a convent or a life grinding pigment for her father's paint.
She chose paint.
By the time she was seventeen, Artemisia did more than grind pigment. She was one of Rome's most talented painters, even if no one knew her name. But Rome in 1610 was a city where men took what they wanted from women, and in the aftermath of rape Artemisia faced another terrible choice: a life of silence or a life of truth, no matter the cost.

Young Timothy is sentenced to house arrest after impulsively stealing a wallet, and he is forced to keep a journal into which he pours all his thoughts, fears, and frustrations.

In early twentieth-century Cuba, bandits terrorize the countryside as a young farm girl struggles with dyslexia. Based on the life of the author's grandmother.

In this poetic memoir Engle, the first Latina woman to receive a Newbery Honor, tells of growing up as a child of two cultures during the Cold War. Her heart was in Cuba, her mother's tropical island country, a place so lush with vibrant life that it seems like a fairy tale kingdom. But most of the time she lived in Los Angeles, lonely in the noisy city and dreaming of the summers when she can take a plane through the enchanted air to her beloved island.

I Feel Bad About My Neck meets Elizabeth Berg in celebrated YA novelist Sonya Sones's first adult novel, weaving together a seamless narrative in free verse--a funny, fierce and piercingly honest coming-of-middle-age story about falling apart and putting yourself back together.

The story of a woman torn between love for her boyfriend, a dedicated Marine deployed to Afghanistan, and the resentment she has for the war that is tearing their lives apart.

After her tribal village is attacked by militants, Amira, a young Sudanese girl, must flee to safety at a refugee camp, where she finds hope and the chance to pursue an education in the form of a single red pencil and the friendship and encouragement of a wise elder.

When the first apple falls from the tree, Faith and Peter know that it's applesauce weather, even though Peter is getting a little old for such things. It also means Uncle Arthur should be here to tell his stories, with a twinkle in his eye as he spins tales about how he came to have a missing finger. But this is the first year without Aunt Lucy, and when Uncle Arthur arrives, there's no twinkle to be found and no stories waiting to be told. Faith is certain, though, that with a little love and patience, she and Peter might finally learn the truth about that missing finger.

Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.

Keet knows the only good thing about moving away from her Alabama home is that she'll live near her beloved grandfather. When Keet starts school, it's even worse than she expected, as the kids tease her about her southern accent. Now Keet, who can 'talk the whiskers off a catfish,' doesn't want to open her mouth. Slowly, though, while fishing with her grandfather, she learns the art of listening. Gradually, she makes her first new friend. But just as she's beginning to settle in, her grandfather has a stroke, and even though he's still nearby, he suddenly feels ever-so-far-away. Keet is determined to reel him back to her by telling him stories; in the process she finds her voice and her grandfather again.

As the days go on, nine-year-old Eleanor realizes that maybe being at summer camp isn't so bad after all, and is full of special surprises.

In this middle grade novel in verse that's Love That Dog meets The Watsons Go to Birmingham meets Slam, twelve-year-old twin basketball stars Josh and Jordan wrestle with highs and lows on and off the court as their father ignores his declining health.

Garvey's father has always wanted Garvey to be athletic, but Garvey is interested in astronomy, science fiction, reading--anything but sports. Feeling like a failure, he comforts himself with food. Garvey is kind, funny, smart, a loyal friend, and he is also overweight, teased by bullies, and lonely. When his only friend encourages him to join the school chorus, Garvey's life changes. The chorus finds a new soloist in Garvey, and through chorus, Garvey finds a way to accept himself, and a way to finally reach his distant father--by speaking the language of music instead of the language of sports.

Jack is studying poetry again in school, and he continues to write poems reflecting his understanding of famous poems and how they relate to his life.

Through a series of poems, a young girl chronicles the life-changing year of 1975, when she, her mother, and her brothers leave Vietnam and resettle in Alabama.

As the Great War continues to take its toll, headstrong twenty-one-year-old Emily Bryce is determined to contribute to the war effort. She is convinced by a cheeky and handsome Australian pilot that she can do more, and it is not long before she falls in love with him and accepts his proposal of marriage.

Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carre's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive.

The Cohens are wildly impractical intellectuals--academics, activists, and artists. The Barlows are Wall Street Journal-reading lawyers steeped in trusts and copyrights, golf and tennis. The two families are reserved with and wary of each other, but tonight, the evening before the wedding that is supposed to unite them, they will attempt to set aside their differences over dinner in the garden.

An uncompleted final novel of Ernest Hemingway, which he worked on intermittently from 1946 until his death in 1961. Set on the Côte d'Azur in the 1920s, it is the story of a young American writer, David Bourne, his glamorous wife, Catherine, and the dangerous, erotic game they play when they fall in love with the same woman.

For fans of THE ROSIE PROJECT and THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHTTIME, a broken man and his damaged robot build an unlikely friendship--with some assembly required.
Ben's really great at failing at things--his job, being a husband, taking the garbage out. But then he finds a battered robot named Tang in his garden. And Tang needs Ben.

Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice "until the monsoon comes."

An extraordinary new writer makes her literary debut with this suspenseful novel of desire, obsession, power and vulnerability, in which a crisis of inheritance leads to the downfall of a wealthy family of Persian Jews in early twentieth-century Iran.

Lethem is the quintessential Brooklynite, so its intriguing to learn that the setting of his latest title is mainly Sunnyside Gardens, a planned community in New Yorks borough of Queens. The time is the 1950s and 1960s, the characters include three generations of American leftists, and the theme is the disillusionment that can come with fervent belief.

Portofino, Italy, 1943. A young woman steps off a boat in a scenic coastal village. Although she knows how to disappear in a crowd, Elodie is too terrified to slip by the German officers while carrying her poorly forged identity papers. She is frozen until a man she's never met before claims to know her.

A young wounded civil war solider is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet falls in love with a blind man, and a mysterious traveler comes to town in the year when summer never arrives. At the center of everyone's life is a mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look.

Combining the thrills of classic Deaver with a new and epic twist, this novel is set in Hitler's Germany, pre-World War II.

The dying wish of a loving father ignites a family drama that brings two sisters and their acid-tongued, Russian-born mother together in a story that reaches back to WWII Leningrad.

Shortly before World War II, a Chinese man, sent to Japan to recover from tuberculosis, meets a lovely Japanese girl and four older residents, beginning a love story abrim with passion and sacrifice.

1559. Elizabeth has been on the throne for six months, and life in England seems newly golden. But for the Royal Court, murder and betrayal are foretold in the stars....

A haunting and luminous novel that explores the dark secrets lurking beneath the stunning natural beauty of a dying timber town.

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? The shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares.

Garden historian Marta McDowell traces the story of the White House grounds and how they have changed from administration to administration. From George Washington's obsession with collecting trees to Michelle Obama's kitchen garden, McDowell shows how the White House grounds are a reflection of America's enthusiasms.

From Sir Walter Scott's fairytale Scottish castle to Rupert Brooke's riverside retreat in Cambridge; from Virginia Woolf's rural Sussex idyll to Beatrix Potter's windswept hill-top farm in the Lake District, each garden provides new insights into the writer's work, life, solace and inspiration.

Garden Revolution shows how an ecological approach to planting can lead to beautiful gardens that buck much of conventional gardening's counter-productive, time-consuming practices.

An illustrated, round-the-world tour of idiosyncratic gardens from beloved traveler/writer/watercolorist Vivian Swift.

Avid vegetable gardeners will love the challenge to shake up their routine with 224 intriguing plants. Many are favorites from cultures around the globe. All offer exciting flavors and textures and novel colors and shapes.

The Drought-Defying California Garden offers gardeners in the Golden State everything they need to get started on a new type of garden.

Frey and LeBuhn provide everything you need to know to create a vibrant, healthy garden that helps both the threatened honeybee and native bees.

Kathi Keville, internationally known aromatherapist and herbalist, shows you how to create rich garden scent combinations and make your own body oils, tonics, and sachets.

Bestselling author Jessi Bloom inspires people to turn any outdoor space, from a small balcony to a large garden, into a personal sanctuary for health and wellness.

The Night Gardener is a Victorian ghost story with shades of Washington Irving and Henry James. More than just a spooky tale, it's also a moral fable about human greed and the power of storytelling.

For nearly a century the Nomeolvides women have tended the grounds and lush estate gardens of La Pradera. They have a tragic legacy: if they fall in love too deeply, their lovers vanish.

Blue is having a hard time moving on. He's in love with his best friend. He's also dead. Luckily, Hamal can see ghosts, leaving Blue free to haunt him to his heart's content.

Renowned graphic novel artist, Edith, has created an enchanting version of the classic Tom's Midnight Garden.

Ten-year old Mary come to live in a lonely house on the Yorkshire moors and discovers an invalid cousin and mysteries of a locked garden.

Return to Harlem's "wildly entertaining" family in this funny, heartwarming sequel. When catastrophe strikes their beloved upstairs neighbors, the Vanderbeeker children set out to build the best, most magical healing garden in Harlem--in spite of a locked fence, thistles and trash, and the conflicting plans of a wealthy real estate developer.

From Newbery Honor and National Book Award-winning author Horvath comes a magical novel, set during World War II on a farm on Vancouver Island, about a garden that grants wishes.

Follows perceptive, astute Anna as she strives to grow a perfect garden -- only to realize that the garden she grows with her new friend is more than good enough, weeds and all.

When five sixth-graders accidentally summon warriors from their favorite role-playing game to Brooklyn, they are taken on a wild adventure that tests their wits and their friendships.

Lily and her friends volunteer to help at the public garden, where they learn that plants need water, sun, and--just like them--time to grow.