September 10, 2015 - Summer Reading Re-cap

I can’t believe it’s the second week of September already and I haven’t done my annual Summer Reading re-cap. All the books have been counted, all the pages and minutes read accounted for, and I can finally give you all of the amazing numbers about how many people read how many books! Every year, for more years than I care to remember, I have been reporting the number of pages read in concrete terms. I have converted the number of pages read (or pages listened to, or time spent reading) into inches, then converted those inches into miles, and then plotted that number of miles on a map. Since I have been doing this annually for enough years for this to have become a tradition, and since I’m wise enough not to tamper with a fine tradition, here goes!

This year 357 people participated in the Summer Reading Program. Those participants managed to read 1,107,735 pages, which is quite an impressive number! Now, on to the calculations which begin with this question: “If you laid all the pages of the books that were read end-to-end how many miles would they stretch?” The average size of a page is 9 inches tall which gives us (1,107,735 times 9” or 9,969,615 inches—always show your work if you want to receive full credit.). Then we take those 9,969,615 inches and divide by 12 to give us 830,801 feet and then divide by 5,280 to give us 157.4 miles. And, voilà! If you laid all the pages read during the Summer Reading Program end to end and drove east on I-90, you would end up about 3 miles west of the Oak Lawn Public Library. Or heading north and west on I-90 you’d end up about a three miles south of Winona, MN. Any way you look at it, that’s a whole lot of reading was done this summer! Congratulations to all the Summer Reading participants.

New Non-Fiction

New Fiction

  • cover art Aftermath: Star Wars : Journey to the Force Awakens. by Chuck Wendig. A story bridging the period between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens follows the efforts of the Rebel Alliance to defeat the fracturing forces of a desperate Empire.
  • cover art Archmage / by R.A. Salvatore. Preparing for an attack by the powerful Archmage Gromph and his dark elves, Drizzt and his companions find themselves confronting demonic forces from the deepest reaches of the Abyss. By the best-selling author of Night of the Hunter.
  • cover art After you : a novel / by Jojo Moyes. A sequel to Me Before You continues the stories of Lou, her family and the Traynors as they confront new challenges. By the best-selling author of The Ship of Brides.
  • cover art Purity : a novel / by Jonathan Franzen. Struggling with identity issues and student loans as the daughter of a mother who hides a mysterious past, Pip takes an internship with an illicit activist group and falls for its charismatic fugitive leader. By the author of Freedom.
  • cover art Two years eight months and twenty-eight nights : a novel / by Salman Rushdie. A modern fairy tale by the award-winning author of Midnight's Children is set in a world of religious dominance where mystical acts and supernatural abilities shape a war over control of Fairyland.
  • cover art See me / by Nicholas Sparks. A young man with a dark, destructive past has his plans to remain single challenged by a hardworking lawyer. By the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Notebook.
  • cover art The gilded hour / by Sara Donati. Haunted by childhood losses in spite of successful medical careers in 1883 New York City, surgeon Anna Savard and her obstetrician cousin, Sophie, consider taking in a child and helping a desperate woman who would escape a dangerous man.
  • cover art Girl waits with gun / by Amy Stewart. Living in virtual isolation years after the revelation of a painful family secret, Constance is terrorized by a belligerent silk factory owner and fights back in ways outside the confines of early 20th-century women.
  • cover art Driving heat / by Richard Castle. After being promoted to captain, NYPD’s top homicide detective, Nikki Heat, finds her relationship being tested when her reporter fiancé becomes a major obstacle in her investigation. By the author of Raging Heat.