The Cartographers - by Peng Shepherd

This supernatural story about the Map Division at the New York Public Library was a natural choice for this librarian to read aloud to her geographer husband. The book was recommended to us by one of our friends.

While we are hardly experts, we do know a bit more than your average Joe about maps and mapmaking, so we were familiar with the concept of a phantom settlement - a place on a map that doesn't exist in real life. Mapmakers of yore sometimes included these "paper towns" in order to catch copyright infringers. 

But what if the phantom settlements were real, if only a person had the right map that could lead them there? Some spunky graduate students (aka "The Cartographers)" discover just such a place on a decades-old gas station highway map. Nell Young discovers a rare copy of the map after her father dies in his office at the New York Public Library. Her investigation into his death leads her to some impossible places!

While the Map Division of the NYPL is at the center of this mystery, there are other libraries in this work as well: 

• Nell reads her mother's obituary using old library microfilm machines.
• A robbery at a high school in Scranton, Pennsylvania left an employee with a broken leg and the geography section in shambles. 
• The Cartographers, doing some research through newspapers stories in the Rockland (NY) Public Library, learn of a string of robberies nationwide in libraries, schools, gas stations, museums, and even private homes. They suspect that someone is hunting down copies of what they call the "Agloe map".

A fun summer read.

The Adjunct - by Maria Adelmann

This dark satire about the Academy's gig economy tells the story of Samantha, a PhD living in Baltimore, Maryland (my home town) trying to teach enough classes at two different colleges to keep the wolves at bay. Sam's plight, and that of her fellow adjuncts, is becoming more common as colleges and universities eschew hiring tenure track faculty and rely more on part-time contract faculty. As my husband (James) and I listened to the audiobook we reflected on our own times working as adjunct faculty. While we would never suggest that we were paid well for the work, for us it was never about survival. My contract teaching work was done at a time when a part-time job was exactly what I needed while I was the primary caregiver for our young child. James' part-time teaching was done while he was finishing his PhD and he had a full-time job in IT. He took evening teaching jobs so as to have recent teaching experience when he started looking for a tenure track job. We were lucky. Many of our colleagues had no health insurance, no spouse's salary to fall back on, and no guarantee that they would even have jobs at the end of any given semester.

As a "campus novel" libraries are sprinkled throughout the work providing insight into their myriad uses, including as a student job, a meeting place, and a space for study. Sam also borrows a Chromebook from the Baltimore Public Library because although her department expects her to have one, they do not provide her with one. 

There is a lot of "meta" in this work, including a meta librarian. Sam is an aspiring writer and describes a romance she wrote in which a librarian (who doesn't like romance novels) befriends her stalker, unaware that he is stalking her. Once they develop a relationship he loses interest, and she begins to take an interest in romances.

Of course I always like reading about a library in any book, but it is especially fun when one I've actually been to is mentioned. In this book the Enoch Pratt Free Library was given a shout out.