January 2026: New Year, New Pages
We are kicking off our Year in Reading challenge with January's New Year, New Pages! Read a book (fiction or nonfiction, your choice!) done in epistolary style - which is written like a series of letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, etc.
We have some good suggestions to get you started, but feel free to share some of your favorites on the Year in Reading Beanstack challenge!
84, Charing Cross Road
Author(s):
Hanff, Helene
Doel, Frank.
Description:
What started as a request for an out-of-print book evolved into a 20-year friendship between Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York, and Frank Doel, a used-book dealer in London.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
090 Han
Where'd you go, Bernadette
Author(s):
Semple, Maria
Wilhoite, Kathleen,
Description:
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears.
Format:
Audiobook
Call Number:
FIC Sem
Griffin & Sabine : an extraordinary correspondence
Author(s):
Description:
It all started with a mysterious and seemingly innocent postcard, but from that point nothing was to remain the same in the life of Griffin Moss, a quiet, solitary artist living in London. His logical, methodical world was suddenly turned upside down by a strangely exotic woman living on a tropical island thousands of miles away. Who is Sabine? How can she "see" what Griffin is painting when they have never met? Is she a long-lost twin? A clairvoyant? Or a malevolent angel? Are we witnessing the flowering of a magical relationship or a descent into madness? Inside the book, Griffin and Sabine's letters are to be found nestling in their envelopes, permitting the reader to examine the intimate correspondence of these inexplicably linked strangers
Format:
Book
Call Number:
FIC Ban
This is how you lose the time war
Author(s):
El-Mohtar, Amal
Gladstone, Max,
Description:
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
FIC El-M
Fantasticland : a novel
Author(s):
Description:
Since the 1970s, FantasticLand has been the theme park where "Fun is Guaranteed!" But when a hurricane ravages the Florida coast and isolates the park, the employees find it anything but fun. Five weeks later, the authorities who rescue the survivors encounter a scene of horror. Photos soon emerge online of heads on spikes outside of rides and viscera and human bones littering the gift shops, breaking records for hits, views, likes, clicks, and shares. How could a group of survivors, mostly teenagers, commit such terrible acts?
Format:
Book
Call Number:
FIC Boc
Jay's journal
Author(s):
Description:
A withdrawn adolescent boy's initiation into the occult draws him ever deeper into the bizarre world of witchcraft, voodoo, and satanism until, at age sixteen, he commits suicide.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
YA FIC Spa
Cinnamon and gunpowder
Author(s):
Description:
In 1819, kidnapped chef Owen Wedgwood transforms meager shipboard supplies into sumptuous meals at the behest of his kidnapper, pirate queen Mad Hannah Mabbot, while she pushes her exhausted crew to track down a deadly privateer.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
FIC Bro
Dear Henry, love Edith
Author(s):
Description:
"After a short and difficult marriage, recently widowed Edith Sherman has learned her lesson. Forget love. Forget marriage. She plans to fill her thirties with adventure. As she awaits the final paperwork for a humanitarian trip to South Africa, she accepts a short-term nursing position in a small Midwestern town. The last thing she needs is a handsome local catching her eye. How inconvenient is that?"--back cover.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
FIC Kin
House Of Leaves
Author(s):
Mark Z. Danielewski
Zampano
Description:
Format:
Book
Call Number:
FIC Dan
Beneath
Author(s):
Description:
Pat O'Toole has always idolized his older brother, Coop, right up until the day Coop ran away from their home just outside Washington, D.C. Now, a year later, he has received a package containing a digital voice recorder and a cryptic message from his brother, which will lead Pat on a strange and dangerous journey to the mysterious Community living beneath the streets of New York.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
YA FIC Smi
Yours from the tower
Author(s):
Description:
"In 1896, three best friends--Tirzah, Sophia and Polly--who are leading very different lives after boarding school share their dreams, hopes, frustrations and romances through a series of letters as they search for happiness and love near the dawn of the Edwardian era"--
Format:
Book
Call Number:
YA FIC Nic
Good different
Author(s):
Description:
Seventh-grader Selah Godfrey knows that to be "normal" she has to keep her feelings tightly controlled when people are around, but after hitting a fellow student, she needs to figure out just what makes her different--and why that is ok. Told in verse.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
J FIC Kuy
Monster
Author(s):
Myers, Walter Dean, 1937-2014
Myers, Christopher,
Description:
While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
YA FIC Mye
Love, Agnes : postcards from an octopus
Author(s):
Latham, Irene
Baker, Thea,
Description:
In California, Agnes, a giant Pacific octopus, pens a series of postcards to strangers from both above and below the pier.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
E Lat
Brave like my brother
Author(s):
Description:
When Charlie's older brother Joe is called up in 1942, Charlie learns about the tedium and dangers of war through Joe's letters--and his brother's bravery in dealing with a spy as D-Day approaches, finally gives Charlie the strength to stand up to the local bully.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
J FIC Nob
Unusual chickens for the exceptional poultry farmer
Author(s):
Jones, Kelly (Kelly Anne), 1976-
Kath, Katie,
Description:
Through a series of letters, Sophie Brown, age twelve, tells of her family's move to her Great Uncle Jim's farm, where she begins taking care of some unusual chickens with help from neighbors and friends.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
J FIC Jon
Letters from the inside
Author(s):
Description:
The relationship between two teenage girls who become acquainted through letters intensifies as their correspondence reveals some of the terrible problems of their lives.
Format:
Book
Call Number:
YA FIC Mar
