1960s Harlem, an Ojibwe reservation, and a tiny apartment in Seoul, South Korea. A loyal android, a Chippewa council member, and a young girl experiencing homelessness. These are just a few of the places and people we meet in the library's collection of the best books of 2021.

This month's display includes picks from "Best of 2021" lists from the New York Times, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Time, AbeBooks, and Goodreads. It also includes winners and finalists of the year's big book awards, including the National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prize, and the Booker Prize.

Check out our display and take home a guaranteed good read!

January 1st of every year marks Public Domain Day, when new works of literature, music, film, and more enter the public domain.

On January 1, 2022 works published in 1926 entered into the public domain. A few of the book titles include:

Look for these titles to be available to read and download for free on sites like Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive in the near future.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land

(HD6072.2.U5 L36 2019)

This memoir released in 2019 chronicles the author's struggles as a single mother earning poverty wages cleaning houses in the Pacific Northwest. She relies on an unreliable social safety net to survive and care for her daughter while also dealing with all the stigmas that poverty and social assistance entail.

Maid isn't a Cinderella story about overcoming adversity or pulling oneself self up by the bootstraps. As a Washington Post review notes, the book "isn’t about how hard work can save you but about how false that idea is. It’s one woman’s story of inching out of the dirt and how the middle class turns a blind eye to the poverty lurking just a few rungs below — and it’s one worth reading."

Land's memoir has also been turned into a mini-series on Netflix!