There’s no shortage of “Best Of” lists going around this time of year. Amazon, NPR, and The New York Times are great ones to start with if you’re looking for a good book.

This year we thought we’d give you an inside peek at what the Nielsen Library staff read and loved this year. If you’re looking for something to read over Winter Break here’s 14 places to start:

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant “New York Times” bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Recommended by: Carol Smith, Library Director

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, by Robert B. Reich

A brilliant new reading of the economic crisis–and a plan for dealing with the challenge of its aftermath–by one of our most trenchant and informed experts.

Recommended by: Carol Smith, Library Director

Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn

Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in “The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas.” She survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details.

Recommended by: Rosanna Backen, Access Services and Distance Learning Librarian

Egg : A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient, by Michael Ruhlman

Offers over one hundred recipes for dishes featuring eggs, from simple techniques for making poached and scrambled eggs, to recipes for brioche and soufflés, covering a wide variety of sweet and savory creations.

Recommended by: Mary Walsh, Cataloging and Acquisitions Librarian

Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and The Battle for Modern New Orleans, by Gary Krist

A vibrant and immersive account of New Orleans’ other civil war, at a time when commercialized vice, jazz culture, and endemic crime defined the battlegrounds of the Crescent City. Empire of Sin re-creates the remarkable story of New Orleans’ thirty-years war against itself, pitting the city’s elite ‘better half’ against its powerful and long-entrenched underworld of vice, perversity, and crime.

 Recommended by Jordan Gortmaker, Circulation Supervisor

The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd

Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.

Recommended by: Mary Walsh, Cataloging and Acquisitions Librarian

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild

In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million–all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian.

Recommended by: Carol Smith, Library Director

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, by Hampton Sides

A dramatic account of the ill-fated 19th-century naval expedition to the North Pole cites the contributions of German cartographer August Peterman, New York Herald owner James Gordon Bennett and famed naval officer George Washington De Long in the team’s efforts to survive brutal environmental conditions.

Recommended by Jordan Gortmaker, Circulation Supervisor

The Martian, by Andy Weir

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive–and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive.

Recommended by: Stacy Taylor, Emerging Technologies Librarian

The Museum of Extraordinary Things, by Alice Hoffman

Mesmerizing and illuminating, Alice Hoffman’s The Museum of Extraordinary Things is the story of an electric and impassioned love between two vastly different souls in New York during the volatile first decades of the twentieth century.

Recommended by: Mary Walsh, Cataloging and Acquisitions Librarian

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman

A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother.

Recommended by: Rosanna Backen, Access Services and Distance Learning Librarian

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Recommended by: Stacy Taylor, Emerging Technologies Librarian

Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir, by Liz Prince

Eschewing female stereotypes throughout her early years and failing to gain acceptance on the boys’ baseball team, Liz learns to embrace her own views on gender as she comes of age, in an anecdotal graphic novel memoir.

Recommended by: Stacy Taylor, Emerging Technologies Librarian

 White Fire, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Special Agent Pendergast arrives at an exclusive Colorado ski resort to rescue his protégée, Corrie Swanson, from serious trouble with the law. His sudden appearance coincides with the first attack of a murderous arsonist who–with brutal precision–begins burning down multimillion-dollar mansions with the families locked inside.

Recommended by Jordan Gortmaker, Circulation Supervisor