Favorite All-time Reads from OPL’s Danielle McDonald

Hello to all cardholders and everyone in the OPL community. I am the CEO of the Ottawa Public Library and, as you can imagine, I love to read!

Here are some of my favorites from over the years that I’d like to share with you!

My all-time favorite is Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery.  I even have the special Green Gables Edition from a visit to Anne’s house in PEI; both the book and my travel memories are treasures to me.

Tami Hoag is my favorite one of my favorite mystery writers.  I have recently enjoyed the series with the detectives Nick Fourcade and Annie Broussard: A Thin Dark Line and The Boy.

Other mystery writers I love are Harlen Coben, notably The Boy from the Woods and Linwood Barclay, especially The Accident.

I love reading novels set in and about South Carolina, a beautiful place I`ve been able to visit, specifically Charleston and Isle of Palm.  I was introduced to several authors that wrote about the area: Pat Conroy’s South of Broad is one of my favorites – such a great book.  Dorothea Benton Frank wrote many books situated in South Carolina with a lot of humour in them.  She also blends in information to educate her readers, for example about sea turtles, in one and honey bees, in another. I loved the last book I read by her called Queen Bee. In fact it was her last book as she passed away in 2019, something I found out when reading Elin Hilderbrand’s 2020 novel Troubles in Paradise.

Of course, I am not the only one who read and loved Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.

A new author I discovered in our eBook collection is Kelly Rimmer when I read The Truths I Never Told You.  That was a very good book and I`ll look out for more from her.

Some historical fiction titles I’ve been enjoying include Gill Paul’s Jackie and Maria – about Jacqueline Kennedy and Maria Callas.  She has written fiction based on other famous women as well, such as Princess Diana and Wallis Simpson.

I love to cook and bought the new Ina Garten Cookbook, Modern Comfort Food. I actually read the entire cookbook and loved the piece on “staying engaged” (p. 101).  My parents are elderly and I really appreciated the piece about loneliness in elderly people, and the importance of staying engaged and having people over to dinner – COVID aside of course. 

Meantime, as we weather another province-wide lockdown let’s cosy up to a book over the holidays, and escape to other places and other lives!