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One of the benefits of working at a library is the access to so many wonderful books, albums, tools, films, and more. At the end of 2025, we asked the library staff to select titles they enjoyed that debuted throughout the year. Here’s a selection of books and music picked by staff across all locations and service areas.
Click on any title to load the catalog record, find a copy, and place a hold. You can find more information in each record – including professional reviews – from Syndetics Unbound, EBSCO NoveList Plus, and other sources.
Don’t forget: our catalog also features reviews from other readers from Goodreads. Many titles also show point breakdowns for Accelerated Reader ® for students as well.
Not all titles will be suitable for all audiences. Parental discretion is advised.
Music
Snipe Hunter by Tyler Childers
Snipe Hunter is the seventh studio album by American country musician Tyler Childers, released on July 25, 2025, via Hickman Holler Records and RCA Records. Produced by Rick Rubin, the album marks a new creative direction for Childers, blending Appalachian storytelling, experimental rock, gospel, psychedelia, and spiritual inquiry. The album received widespread critical acclaim upon release. (Wikipedia)
I Barely Know Her by Sombr
I Barely Know Her is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter Sombr, released on August 22, 2025, through Warner Records and Sombr’s own imprint, SMB. The album combines elements of pop and indie rock and features lyrics exploring themes of heartbreak, longing, self-reflection, and life in New York City. (Wikipedia)
Figure In Blue by Charles Lloyd
In March 2025, the legendary saxophonist Charles Lloyd convened a new trio of musical explorers with Jason Moran on piano and Marvin Sewell on guitar for his 87th birthday concert at the Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara and immediately brought them into the studio to record his remarkable twelfth Blue Note album, Figure In Blue. The spacious double album travels wide expanses of musical terrain from beautiful ballads to raw Delta blues and includes stunning homages to Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Zakir Hussain. (Blue Note Records)
Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party by Hayley Williams
Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party is the third studio album by the American singer-songwriter Hayley Williams. It is an alternative pop album, which features elements of alternative rock, trip hop, indie rock, folk, synth-pop, and shoegaze. (Wikipedia)
Everyone’s a Star by 5 Seconds of Summer
Everyone’s a Star! is the sixth studio album by the Australian pop rock band 5 Seconds of Summer, released on 14 November 2025 as their first record under Republic Records. It was preceded by the singles “Not OK”, “Boyband”, and “Telephone Busy”. (Wikipedia)
Automatic by The Lumineers
Automatic is the fifth studio album by American indie folk band the Lumineers. It was released on February 14, 2025, through Dualtone Records. The album was produced by David Baron, who produced the Lumineers’ previous studio album, Brightside (2022). (Wikipedia)
American Heart by Benson Boone
American Heart is the second studio album by American singer-songwriter Benson Boone, released on June 20, 2025, through Night Street and Warner Records. It debuted at number two on the US Billboard 200 with 61,000 album-equivalent units, becoming Boone’s second top-ten album in the United States. (Wikipedia)
Books
The Trouble with Heroes by Kate Messner
Finn Connelly is nothing like his dad, a star athlete and firefighter hero who always ran toward danger until he died two years ago. Finn is about to fail seventh grade and has never made headlines…until now. Caught on camera vandalizing a cemetery, he’s in big trouble for knocking down some dead old lady’s headstone. Turns out that grave belongs to a legendary local mountain climber, and her daughter makes Finn an unusual offer: she’ll drop all the charges if he agrees to climb all forty-six Adirondack High Peaks in a single summer. And there’s just one more thing — he has to bring along the dead woman’s dog. In a wild three months of misadventures, mountain mud, and unexpected mentors, Finn begins to find his way on the trails. At the top of each peak, he can see for miles and slowly begins to understand more about himself and his dad. But the mountains don’t care about any of that, and as the clock ticks down to September, they have more surprises in store. Finn’s final summit challenge may be more than even a hero can face. (Publisher)
Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove
The queer love child of pulp horror and classic sci-fi, Of Monsters and Mainframes is a dazzling, heartfelt odyssey that probes what it means to be one of society’s monsters—and explores the many types of friendship that make us human. (Goodreads)
First-Time Caller by B.K. Borison
Aiden Valentine has a secret: he’s fallen out of love with love. And as the host of Baltimore’s romance hotline, that’s a bit of a problem. But when a young girl calls into the station asking for dating advice for her mom, the interview goes viral, thrusting Aiden and Heartstrings into the limelight. Lucie Stone thought she was doing just fine. She has a good job, an incredible family, and a smart, if slightly devious kid. But when all of Baltimore is suddenly scrutinizing her love life-or lack thereof-she begins to question if she’s as happy as she thought. Maybe a little more romance wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Everyone wants Lucie to find her happy ending…even the handsome, temperamental man calling the shots. But when sparks start to fly behind the scenes, Lucie must make the final call between the radio-sponsored happily ever after, or the man in the headphones next to her. (Publisher)
The Women of Wild Hill by Kristen Miller
For generations, the Duncan women of Wild Hill have carried gifts both wondrous and dangerous. But tragedy fractured the family, scattering the sisters and leaving their legacy untended. Now Brigid, Phoebe, and Phoebe’s daughter Sybil — who has never been told of the bloodline she carries — are called home. To reclaim their heritage, they must face old wounds, long-buried secrets, and the powerful ties that bind them as family. (Publisher)
Heartbreaker: A Memoir by Mike Campbell, with Ari Surdoval
A fast-paced, tender-hearted rock ’n’ roll memoir for the ages, Mike Campbell’s Heartbreaker is part rags-to-riches story and part raucous, seat-of-the-pants adventure, recounting Campbell’s life and times as lead guitarist of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. (Da Capo / Hachette Book Group)
Play Nice by Rachel Harrison
Clio Louise Barnes leads a picture-perfect life as a stylist and influencer, but beneath the glossy veneer she harbors a not-so-glamorous secret: she grew up in a haunted house. Well, not haunted. Possessed. After Clio’s parent’s messy divorce, her mother, Alex, moved Clio and her sisters into a house occupied by a demon. Or so Alex claimed. That’s not what Clio’s sisters remember or what the courts determined when they stripped Alex of custody after she went off the deep end. But Alex was insistent; she even wrote a book about her experience in the house. After Alex’s sudden death, the supposedly possessed house passes to Clio and her sisters. Where her sisters see childhood trauma, Clio sees an opportunity for house-flipping content. Only, as the home makeover process begins, Clio discovers there might be some truth to her mother’s claims. As memories resurface and Clio finally reads her mother’s book, the presence in the house becomes more real, and more sinister, revealing ugly truths that threaten to shake Clio’s beautiful life to its very foundation. (Publisher)
Black Woods, Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey
Birdie splits her days between caring for her six-year-old daughter, Emaleen, and working as a waitress at a roadside lodge in Alaska. But this is not the life she’d dreamed of as a child. Back then, she had fantasized about being free in the world of nature. Arthur is a soft-spoken recluse–adopted as a boy under mysterious circumstances by a local couple who raised him as their own but understood that he could never fully fit into their world. He calls the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River his home and lives completely off the grid, appearing in the town at random intervals. But when he shows up at Birdie’s lodge one day and she serves him honey and tea, the two form a friendship, and as they eventually fall in love Birdie begins to imagine a different life for herself and her daughter. When Birdie and Emaleen move to Arthur’s remote cabin life initially seems idyllic; they spend their days catching fish, picking berries, and playing games in the sunshine. But as the days shorten Birdie begins to realize that the truth of Arthur’s life is much more complicated and mysterious than she understood, and that the reality of who he is may be putting her and her daughter’s life in danger. (Publisher)
The Missing Half by Ashley Flowers
Nicole Monroe, still haunted by her sister Kasey’s unexplained disappearance seven years ago, teams up with Jenna Connor, whose sister vanished under similar circumstances, as they unravel buried secrets and risk everything to uncover the truth about their missing loved ones. (Publisher)
To Clutch A Razor by Veronica Roth
A funeral. A heist. A desperate mission. When Dymitr is called back to the old country for the empty night, a funeral rite intended to keep evil at bay, it’s the perfect opportunity for him to get his hands on his family’s most guarded relic–a book of curses that could satisfy the debt he owes legendary witch Baba Jaga. But first he’ll have to survive a night with his dangerous, monster-hunting kin. As the sun sets, the line between enemies and allies becomes razor-thin, and Dymitr’s new loyalties are pushed to their breaking point. Family gatherings can be brutal. Dymitr’s might just be fatal. (Publisher)
Onyx Storms by Rebecca Yarros
After nearly eighteen months at Basgiath War College, Violet Sorrengail knows there’s no more time for lessons. No more time for uncertainty. Because the battle has truly begun, and with enemies closing in from outside their walls and within their ranks, it’s impossible to know who to trust. Now Violet must journey beyond the failing Aretian wards to seek allies from unfamiliar lands to stand with Navarre. The trip will test every bit of her wit, luck, and strength, but she will do anything to save what she loves–her dragons, her family, her home, and him. Even if it means keeping a secret so big, it could destroy everything. They need an army. They need power. They need magic. And they need the one thing only Violet can find–the truth. But a storm is coming … and not everyone can survive its wrath. (Publisher)
The Lilac People by Milo Todd
In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin’s thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond, but everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm. There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation.
In the final days of the war, with their freedom in sight, Bertie and Sofie find a young trans man collapsed on their property, still dressed in Holocaust prison clothes. They vow to protect him—not from the Nazis, but from the Allied forces who are arresting queer prisoners while liberating the rest of the country. Ironically, as the Allies’ vise grip closes on Bertie and his family, their only salvation becomes fleeing to the United States.
Brimming with hope, resilience, and the enduring power of community, The Lilac People tells an extraordinary story inspired by real events and recovers an occluded moment of trans history. (Publisher, via Goodreads)
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
From the author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.“Thrilling . . . heartbreaking . . . uplifting . . . the fast-paced, emotionally charged story of one ambitious young woman, finding both her voice and her passion. (Publisher)
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow
When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he was not just finding a funner way to say ‘things are getting worse.’ He was making a specific diagnosis about the state of the digital world and how it is affecting all of our lives (and not for the better). The once-glorious internet was colonized by platforms that made all-but-magical promises to their users–and, at least initially, seemed to deliver on them. But once users were locked in, the platforms turned on them to make their business customers happy. Then the platforms turned to abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. In the end, the platforms die. Doctorow’s argument clearly resonated. Once named, it became obvious that enshittification is everywhere, so much so that the American Dialect Society named it its 2023 Word of the Year, and was cited as an inspiration for the 2025 season of Black Mirror. Here, now, in Enshittification the book, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and–most important–how they can be undone. (Publisher)
Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution by Amy Coney Barrett
From Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a glimpse of her journey to the Court and an account of her approach to the Constitution since her confirmation hearing, Americans have peppered Justice Amy Coney Barrett with questions. How has she adjusted to the Court? What is it like to be a Supreme Court justice with school-age children? Do the justices get along? What does her normal day look like? How does the Court get its cases? How does it decide them? How does she decide? In Listening to the Law, Justice Barrett answers these questions and more. She lays out her role (and daily life) as a justice, touching on everything from her deliberation process to dealing with media scrutiny. (Publisher)
The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle over Power in America by Jeffrey Rosen
Jefferson championed states’ rights and individual liberties, while Hamilton pushed for a strong Federal government and a powerful executive. This ongoing tug-of-war has shaped all the pivotal moments in American history, including Abraham Lincoln’s fight against slavery and southern secession, the expansion of federal power under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Ronald Reagan’s and Donald Trump’s conservative push to shrink the size of the federal government. (Publisher)
Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year. In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis. (Publisher)
John Green is a resident of Indianapolis, Indiana.
The Book of Sheen: A Memoir by Charlie Sheen
For the first time, the star of Platoon, Wall Street, Major League, and Two and a Half Men writes the story of his extraordinary life in an unfiltered memoir. (Publisher)
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Sybil is seventy-three years old, in the winter of her life. Sybil has always made sense of the world through writing letters, and through this epistolary novel, we see how she comes to terms with her past and present and learns forgiveness. (Publisher)
Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual gift: She is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship, out of harm’s way–until a telegram suggests that the unthinkable might have happened. Later, as the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie–but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Against the backdrop of some of the most transformative decades in modern America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter ripple through the next generation of both families, compelling them to reexamine who they thought they were and what the future might hold. Sweeping yet intimate, rich with piercing observation and the warmth that comes from profound understanding of the human spirit, Buckeye captures the universal longing for love and for goodness. (Publisher)
The Names by Florence Knapp
A dazzling debut that asks: Can a name shape the course of a life? In the wake of an enormous, history-making storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son’s birth. Her husband Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to follow his family tradition going back generations, and name the child Gordon. But on the journey there, Cora wonders if it’s right to impose the burden of this name and its legacy onto her tiny newborn son. She herself has Julian in mind, and Maia offers up her own suggestion: Bear. What follows are three alternate and alternating versions of both Cora’s life and her young son’s life shaped by her brave, last-minute choice of name. Spanning thirty-five years, the novel draws us in from the first page, as we follow three unforgettable journeys of one young man, but also his mother, grandmother, and sister. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing. With exceptional sensitivity and depth, Knapp draws us into the story of one family told through a prism of what-ifs, and shows us what we each can do with the “one precious life” we are given. (Publisher)
The Rebel’s Guide to Pride by Matthew Hubbard
There’s nothing Zeke Chapman wants more than to tarnish the perfect reputation his father is so obsessed with. When the mayor of a small Alabama town starts targeting Pride events, Zeke begins hosting a series of “Pride Speakeasies” in this joyful queer coming-of-age novel.
Absolute Batman Vol. 1: The Zoo by Scott Snyder
A gang of masked killers terrorizes the streets of Gotham. A vigilante fights for his city-but he’s not the Batman you know. The Absolute Universe, born out of the Justice League’s apocalyptic battle with Darkseid, ushers in a set of brand-new realities that reimagine your favorite heroes as you’ve never seen them before. In Absolute Batman, meet a young Bruce Wayne with no Wayne Manor, no Alfred by his side, and a different axe to grind as the Dark Knight. (Publisher)
Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett
At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of immigrants only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter’s numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him. Ann, his mother, who runs a women’s retreat center she founded after leaving his father, is hurt by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago put behind her the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the fraught memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart. With unsurpassed emotional depth, Mothers and Sons reveals all that is lost by looking away from the past and the love that might be restored by facing it. (Publisher)
