Books to Keep on the Bedside Table

Summer is here and with the season comes summer reading time!

Fill your bedside table with these new books for adults, recommended by your Diane Bondi, a librarian at the Merrick Library.

Bossypants, by Tina Fey

This hilarious memoir delightfully covers Tina Fey, from her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon. Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.

Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, by Deborah Feldman

Unorthodox is a captivating story, tracing the author's upbringing in the Hasidic community of Satmar in Brooklyn's Williamsburg.  Feldman describes the strict rules that governed every aspect of her life, denial of a traditional education and arranged marriage at 17 to a stranger before the birth of her son led to her plan to escape her cloistered world.

I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron

This collection of witty essays by Nora Ephron offers a hilarious look at the ups and downs of being a woman of a certain age, discussing the tribulations of maintenance and trying to stop the clock, menopause, empty nests, her experiences of being a White House intern during the JFK years and more.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg

A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed. Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

Duhigg shares this and many other stories showing how those achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape their lives. They succeeded by transforming habits. At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. Habits aren't destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.