Celebrated each year on Aug. 9, National Book Lovers Day is the perfect opportunity to reread one of your favorite novels, dust off a classic or pick up something new at one of your favorite bookstores. Here, Delaware Today staffers share some of their favorite titles (and where they like to buy them), many of which may be perfect for a last-minute beach read.
“I am a big reader and I am in love with the entire ‘Outlander’ series. I especially love the TV adaptation on Starz. I shop at the Hockessin Book Shelf. They have a great selection of new and used books, and they let you have a trade account.”
—Becky Galante, account executive
“I recently read ‘Quiet’ by Susan Cain—it really spoke to me. I gravitate toward non-fiction but recently branched out with ‘What Alice Forgot and ‘The Paris Architect’—both were hard to put down in very different ways.
—Christina Kelley, business development & special projects manager
“I just read ‘Still Alice,’ ‘One Hundred Summers’ and this week began ‘The Nest.’ My favorite local bookstore is the library.”
—Cindi Viviano, senior account executive and Internet sales manager
“‘The Vampire Chronicles’ by Anne Rice is my favorite book series.”
—Eric Anderson, account executive
“‘Soup,’ an autobiographical account of author Robert Newton Peck’s experiences growing up in rural Vermont in the 1920s.”
—Heather Vega, graphic designer
“I can’t say that I have one favorite book, but there are a few I’ve read several times. I just picked up ‘The Songlines’ by Bruce Chatwin for the fifth or sixth time since I first read it as a college student in 1990. I love the originality of Chatwin’s thinking and the adventure that begins when he tests his idea that the common foundation of all language, if there is one, is song, as revealed through his discussions with some Aboriginal elders who explain how the Dreamtime ancestors sang the world into being. Chatwin passed away before he finished the book, so we’ll never know if he could justify his hypothesis. But I still love the picture he paints of Australia and Aboriginal culture. I love the imagery he evokes with his lean but vivid prose. And I love the glimpse he gives of his notebooks—quotes from ages of thinkers who muse on man’s need to roam. It’s a dangerous book: Each reading awakens a deeply buried desire to shuck it all and start walking.”
—Mark Nardone, executive editor
“I’m indebted to my mom for many things; chief among them are my spectacularly stocked childhood bookshelves. When I was about nine, she introduced me to Sydney Taylor’s ‘All-of-a-Kind Family’ books, which follow the adventures of a charming Jewish family growing up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early 1900s. I have not stopped rereading this series since, and can’t wait to hopefully share it with my own children someday.”
—Jennifer Finn, digital editor
