Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande (non-fiction, about aging, death, and end-of-life care)

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune Truth and Faith in The New China, by Evan Osnos (non-fiction, a National Book Award-winner about life in today's China, by the former New Yorker correspondent there, who now covers DC politics)

Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson (fiction, a National Book Award-winner about growing up black in 1960s and '70s America)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan (fiction, a Man Booker Prize-winner about an Australian surgeon held in a WW2 Japanese POW camp)

The Laughing Monsters, by Denis Johnson (fiction, about two illicit businessmen in Sierra Leone and Uganda)

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (fiction, about a blind French girl and German orphan boy in Nazi-occupied France)

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad (fiction, the classic 1899 novel about a European steamboater finding madness and brutality in colonial Congo)

Nora Webster, by Colm Toibin (fiction, about a widowed young mother struggling in Ireland)

Young adult books

Redwall, by Brian Jacques

Mossflower (#2 in the Redwall series), by Brian Jacques

Mattimeo (#3 in the Redwall series), by Brian Jacques

Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, by Katherine Rundell

Nuts To You, by Lynn Rae Perkins

Childrens' books

Junie B. Jones and a Little Monkey Business, by Barbara Park

Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus, by Barbara Park

A Barnyard Collection: Click, Clack, Moo, and More, by Doreen Cronin

I Spy Sticker Book and Picture Riddles, by Jean Morzollo