Jessup Journal

     T he time has arrived for creepy stories, and embracing the monsters that walk the pages of our books and roam in the supernatural world. October is the time for  crunchy fall leaves, Halloween costumes, and staying indoors and reading a horror book or two.  Immerse yourself in the spooky, from the gothic novel by Shirley Jackson We Have Always Lived in the Castle , which follows the tale of a young girl and her rather dark and creepy family, to the classic horror of Edgar Allan Poe in his tale The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings . There is the horror in Junji Ito's graphic novel Lovesickness about the mysterious deaths of young girls after meeting a charismatic young man. In Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic , enjoy reading a modern gothic horror novel set in a mansion in 1950s Mexico.  If non-fiction is more palatable to you, Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal's book The Super Natural is an exploration of the strangeness that ...

Happy Fall 2025! Whether it is your first or thousandth time on campus, we are glad to see you here!  In the spirit of a new semester, the New Books section is all about learning new skills and hobbies.  Maybe you're interested in AI or programming? Check out   Hands-on large language models: language understanding and generation  by Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst. This book is designed to help you u nderstand the architecture of Transformer language models that specialize in at text generation and copywriting. Through a mixture of pictures, diagrams, and text,  readers will learn all the practical tools and concepts needed to excel at large language model programming. Or perhaps you want to expand your cooking knowledge?  Tanoreen: Palestinian home cooking in diaspora: a new and expanded edition of Olives, Lemons and Za'atar by Rawia Bishara; photography by Peter Cassidy, can help  with traditional middle eastern recipes and dishes that have a ...

Andrew Wyeth       American art, like all things, has evolved over the centuries from classical to modern, and everything in-between. This August we would like to celebrate the artists that come from the American tradition and have created a new way of seeing the world through their art.  To start with we have a few American writers who use fiction to transport us to the artists of the past, in Tracy Chevalier's Girl With A Pearl Earring , a novel about the young woman who posed as the model for Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. This is an imagining of what the young woman's life may have been like in the 1600s Netherlands as she works for a tempestuous artist and his wife. Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy is a New York Times Best Seller that follows the life of artist Michelangelo Buonarroti and his interactions with the famous leaders of the day, including the de Medici family. On the nonfiction side, we have The Practical Handbook for the Emerging Artist , ...

T his June, we are celebrating the start of summer with a stack of good books! Summer is the time for entertaining reads on the beach (or in the mountains) and lazing in the hammock.  Find enjoyment in reading, and explore enchanting Italy in The House At the Edge of Night by Catherine Banner, or the marshy shores of North Carolina in Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. Stand in the beauty of the untamed waters of Montana in Norman Mclean's classic memoir A River Runs Through It , an exploration of the complex and beautiful relationship between brothers and fishing. Learn all about The Year Without Summer in 1816 due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, resulting in excessive rain, snow and famine. Or, if you feel adventurous, read Fat Girls Hiking and find out how anyone can hike, and embrace that the outdoors are for everyone! Enjoy your summer reading! 📖              

  S pring is upon us and in full bloom! Spring is a great time to pick up a good book and lose yourself in the pages! This May at Jessup Library we are celebrating the newness of spring and jumping into good books that entertain!  Walk through The Secret Garden on the Yorkshire Moors with Mary Lennox, or learn how to be a beekeeper in '60s South Carolina with young Lily and her adopted family of African American beekeeping women, who teach her about the world of bees, honey, and the Black Madonna in The Secret Life of Bees . If you prefer something a bit more noir, check out Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl about the mysterious disappearance of a wife from a seemingly perfect marriage. If you are a nonfiction reader, Tyler Anbinder's City of Dreams: the 400-year epic history of immigrant New York is an easy-to-read, interesting book about the history of the ancient city. In Princesses Behaving Badly: real stories from history--without the fairy-tale endings , you can learn abou...