Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

Today is National Library Day. To align with today’s theme, I am featuring books with the word “library” and/or “book” in their titles. Without ado, here are some “library” books.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you choose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: The Midnight Library
Author: Matt Haig

Synopsis: 

Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets? A novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: The Paris Library
Author: Janet Skeslien Charles

Synopsis: 

Based on the true World War II story of the heroic librarians at the American Library in Paris, this is an unforgettable story of romance, friendship, family, and the power of literature to bring us together, perfect for fans of The Lilac Girls and The Paris Wife.

Paris, 1939: Young and ambitious Odile Souchet has it all: her handsome police officer beau and a dream job at the American Library in Paris. When the Nazis march into Paris, Odile stands to lose everything she holds dear, including her beloved library. Together with her fellow librarians, Odile joins the Resistance with the best weapons she has: books. But when the war finally ends, instead of freedom, Odile tastes the bitter sting of unspeakable betrayal.

Montana, 1983: Lily is a lonely teenager looking for adventure in small-town Montana. Her interest is piqued by her solitary, elderly neighbor. As Lily uncovers more about her neighbor’s mysterious past, she finds that they share a love of language, the same longings, and the same intense jealousy, never suspecting that a dark secret from the past connects them.

A powerful novel that explores the consequences of our choices and the relationships that make us who we are—family, friends, and favorite authors—The Paris Library shows that extraordinary heroism can sometimes be found in the quietest of places. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Dina’s Book
Author: Herbjørg Wassmo
Translator (from Norwegian): Nadia M. Christensen
Publisher: Black Swan
Publishing Date: 1996 (1989)
No. of Pages: 527

Synopsis:

Set in Norway in the mid-nineteenth century – a land of short, blazing, idyllic summers and dark, frost-rimed winters, of mountains, bear-hunts and hazardous sea voyages – Dina’s Book centres around a beautiful, eccentric and unpredictable woman who bewitches everyone she meets.

At the age of five Dina unwittingly causes her mother’s death. Blamed by her father and banished to a farm, she grows up untamed and untaught. Her guilt becomes her obsession: her unforgiving mother haunts her every day.

When she finally returns home she is like a wolf cub, tamed only by her tutor, Lorch, who is able to reach through music. Married off at sixteen to a wealthy fifty-year-old landowner, Jacob, she becomes sexually obsessive and wild. Jacob dies under odd circumstances and Dina becomes mute. When finally she emerges from her trauma, she runs his estate with an iron hand. But still Dina wrestles with her two unappeased ghosts: Jacob and her mother. Until one day a mysterious stranger, the Russian wanderer, Leo, enters her life and changes it forever…

Title: The Book of Intimate Grammar
Author: David Grossman
Translator (from Hebrew): Betsy Rosenberg
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publishing Date: 1994 (1991)
No. of Pages: 343

Synopsis:

David Grossman, the leading Israeli novelist of his generation, showed himself in his internationally acclaimed novel, See Under: LOVE, to be a consummate artist of the inner life of the child. Now, in his most moving and accessible novel yet, he gives us the story of the greatest and most universal tragedy, the loss of that childhood world. At twelve, Aron Kleinfeld is the ringleader among the boys in his Jerusalem neighborhood, their inspiration in dreaming up games and adventures. But as his friends begin to mature, Aron remains imprisoned for three long years in the body of a child. While Israel inches toward the Six-Day War, and while the voices of his friends change and become strange to him, Aron lives in his child body as though in a nightmare. Like a spy in enemy territory, he learns to decipher the internal codes of sexuality and desire, to understand the unyielding bureaucracy of the human body. Hurled between childhood and adulthood, between the pure and the profane, he is like a volcano of emotions and impulses. But, like his hero Houdini, Aron still struggles to escape from the trap of growing up.

The Book of Intimate Grammar is about the alchemy of childhood, which transforms loneliness and fear into creation, and about the struggle to emerge as an artist. Funny, painful, and passionate, it is a work of enormous intensity and beauty.

Title: The Bookshop
Author: Penelope Fitzgerald
Publisher: Mariner Books
Publishing Date: September 1997
No. of Pages: 123

Synopsis:

In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop – the only bookshop – in the seaside town of Harddborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town’s less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbor’s lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Her warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently… haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: that a town that lacks a bookshop isn’t always a town that wants one.

Balzac, an expert on how nasty people can be to one another in small country places, once said that the ordinariness of human lives can never be a measure of the effort it takes to keep them going. Anyone who has found this to be true will admire Florence Green for her wit and her innocent courage, a courage that comes from simply choosing to survive.