Lost in the Stacks

One of the most popular literary genres in Ladino was the detective novel. This genre first emerged in Western Europe in the nineteenth century. Published in 2014, Julie Scolnik's study, Nat Pinkerton: Diez Novelas Policíacas en Lengua Sefaradí, examines a set of Ladino detective novels and offers Spanish translations, which make them more accessible to contemporary readers and scholars.

Many consider Ladino, the traditional vernacular of Sephardi Jews, a dead language. However, the growing interest in the language and its culture creates opportunities to learn more about it and even read some of its literature. Recently added to the catalog, Ladino novels originally published in the 1930s and now reprinted in new editions provide a glimpse into the fascinating world of Sephardi Jews in the 20th century.

Each year, the United States celebrates Women’s Equality Day on August 26th in recognition of the anniversary of women’s suffrage. This is an excellent opportunity to reflect on the strengths and shortcomings of women’s movements in the U.S. through the lens of intersectionality, which calls on us to understand the interweaving impact of all of our identities on how we experience the world.

Shutter is a thrilling, suspenseful novel about Rita, a Navajo woman who is a forensic photographer and who can see and talk to ghosts. Her unique ability helps her when investigating crime scenes, but she has to keep it secret. The ghost of a murder victim haunts Rita and insists that she find her killer, or she will make Rita's life a misery. The murder story is interspersed with the story of Rita's childhood on the Navajo Reservation and her relationship with her grandmother.

With the start of the school year just under 4 weeks away, it’s a great time to sneak in those last summer reads before recreational reading takes the back burner to school-related reading this fall. What better way to find your next summer book than this list of books that U of M Librarians, UMSI students, and famous authors love to read?

Did you know July is National Parks & Recreation Month? To celebrate, we recommend the books below to help you reconnect with the natural world around you. The Ann Arbor area is full of beautiful parks to read in on a sunny afternoon,and you can access any of these books easily electronically while you lounge outside! Not on campus? Since these books are online, you can read any of them from your favorite park wherever you are. Happy summer reading!

As July begins, it feels as though the summer continues to speed by at an alarming rate – but there’s always time to pause to recognize Disability Pride Month! To mark Disability Pride Month at the library, you can find a display of books by disabled authors and/or featuring disabled characters on the first floor of Shapiro throughout July. Not on campus? This mix of fiction and nonfiction titles in the display are also available online now.

In 2021, at least partially due to the reckonings of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, the United States recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday. While this holiday may be new to some people, many Black Americans have been celebrating this day commemorating emancipation for centuries, and there is a wealth of writing on its history and significance. With this in mind, though Juneteenth may have passed on Monday, it’s always the right time to educate ourselves on the history of race and racism in this country.

Celebrating Pride feels more important than ever, as we’ve seen a significant rise in cultural and political attacks on queer and particularly trans people over the past year. Those attacks have included a surge in attempts to ban books with LGBTQ+ content in schools -- check out some of these banned titles online or in Shapiro now!

Dance Hall of the Dead is the second book in Tony Hillerman's best-selling mystery series featuring Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn. (It can easily be read without having read the first.) Leaphorn investigates the disappearance of two boys, one Zuñi and one Navajo. The strength of Hillerman's writing is in his descriptions of the locations in New Mexico and Arizona, and of the religion, mythology, and ceremonies of the Navajo and Zuñi. A beautifully-written book!