Garden City Library Offers Advice For Summer Reading

Waves whispering in your ear . . . your toes in the warm sand . . . an umbrella to keep you cool as you lean back in your chair with the ice rattling in your glass - what could complete this picture better than a good book in your lap? But what to read next?

The Garden City Library offers a free electronic newsletter called NextReads that recommends good books on your favorite topics. If you have an eMail address, you can subscribe to any of 25 annotated subject lists. Fiction and nonfiction newsletter topics include Biography and Memoir, Fantasy, Mystery, Nature and Science, NY Times Bestsellers, and Audiobooks, as well as two children's newsletters and one for teens. Newsletters are emailed on a monthly or bimonthly basis. Each one describes up to 12 books, with links to the Library catalog, so that subscribers can place a hold on a title. If you don't have an eMail address, you can view the newsletters as web pages from any computer in the Library or at home from any computer with Internet access.

If you prefer to search for books within a genre, you can use another of the Library's online resources, NoveList Plus. If you enter your favorite types of books (biography, history, mystery, science fiction, etc.), NoveList Plus will find similar books in its database of 200,000 fiction and nonfiction titles. You can also search by author, series, or even setting. Updated monthly, the database includes more than 30,000 full-text reviews and descriptions, with links to the Library catalog to help you locate a book of interest. For children, NoveList K-8 Plus includes fiction and nonfiction, picture books, children's "chapter" books, and young-adult titles.

For a full listing of the Library's electronic services, visit the Library website at www.gardencitypl.org and click on the link to "Databases." Most of these resources are available both in the Library and at home. For remote access, enter the barcode number from your Garden City Public Library card when prompted.