Find Good Books

By Margareet Green, Library Committee

"Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read."  ​—Groucho Marx

Looking for a good book to read? How do you decide what book to take when you head to warmer weather or take off for a long weekend? When I’m looking for a good read, I like to look at lists of award winners to see if there are any I have missed. I love a good mystery on vacation and my brain needs the stimulus of the occasional hit of “serious” fiction or nonfiction. Also, I’m on an ongoing project to increase my knowledge about my adopted home, Minnesota, so I’m always looking for a good book that takes place in Minnesota.

One of the selection criteria that the Coffman Library uses for new book purchases or reviewing donations is whether or not the title has won one of the “big” awards: National Book Award, 

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Pulitzer,  Booker, Edgar Award for Best Mystery, Pen/Faulkner, Nobel Prize, and Minnesota Book Award. Keeping track of these is not easy, relying on the memories of Library Committee members and doing the research.

A few months ago I did a review of our collection coverage on major winners published in the last five years, just to see how we were doing. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many we owned, except for the Edgars. Given that Mystery/Spy is our highest circulating collection, how did that happen? It was quickly rectified, and we now have the last five Edgar winners, and they are waiting for you in Mystery/Spy!

Here are a few good reading options from our award winners. Summaries assisted by Gemini, Google’s AI.

Edgar Award for Best Novel, chosen by the Mystery Writers of America. All of these are in Mystery/Spy in the Coffman Library:

• Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke. Considered by many, including Burke, to be his best work. Historical fiction, Louisiana 1863, explores themes of slavery, freedom, violence, and unlikely love.
• Five Decembers by James Kestrel. Blends hardboiled noir, historical fiction, and a love story, following Detective Joe McGrady over five transformative years in Hawaii, Hong Kong, and Japan. From the brink of WWII to its aftermath.
• Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka. A literary tale that flips the serial killer trope and focuses on the lives of the women he impacted. Setting is upstate New York and Texas.
• Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara. Set in a bustling Indian slum, the story follows nine-year-old Jai and his friends as they set out to find a missing classmate. Poignant look at childhood resilience and marginalized communities through the lens of a mystery.
• The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths.  Intertwines a present-day murder of an English teacher with a classic Victorian ghost story. Set on the West Sussex coast.

Nobel Prize, given for a writer’s body of collective works.

• Abdulrazak Gurnah, won in 2021. Paradise is considered Gurnah’s breakthrough work. This title chronicles an African boy’s coming of age, a tragic love story, and the tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism. Call number: Fiction (Gurn)
• Annie Ernaux, won in 2022. The Years is cited as Ernaux’s masterpiece. An innovative memoir blends personal experience with a history of French society from 1940 to the 2000s through the lens of memory, photographs, and cultural artifacts, all while eschewing the use of the “I” pronoun. Call number: Biography (Ernaux)

National Book Award, books nominated by publishers to celebrate the best literature in America. Selected by a group of writers, librarians, booksellers, and critics.

• The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. A tour-de-force of historical reportage, this title follows a dozen families and their Great Plains communities through the terrifying drama of catastrophe. Call number: US History (Egan)
• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. This title looks at what the author calls “the gap between the West’s lofty ideals and its bloodstained reality.” Call number: Biography (El Akkad)

Here are some of the awards won by a few of our most popular authors.

• Samantha Harvey, Orbital, 2024 Booker, Fiction (Harv)
• Percival Everett, James, 2025 Pulitzer and 2024 National Book Award, Fiction (Jame)
• William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace,  2014 Edgar Fiction (Kreu); Iron Lake, Minnesota Book Award for First Novel 1999    Mystery/ Spy (Krue). Also won the Minnesota Book Award for Purgatory Ridge, Copper River, and Thunder Bay
• David Housewright, Penance, 1996 Edgar, Mystery/Spy (Hous); Jelly’s Gold,  2009 Minnesota Book Award for First Novel, Mystery/Spy (Hous)

To find titles, authors or subjects in our online catalog, TinyCat, type in the search box your title or whatever.  You can find this at 1666 Coffman Library Find and Check Out Books, then “Use our Online Catalog.” You do not need to log into Residents Realm.  This should get you started on some good reading!