The Summer Reading Program Has Arrived!

The third National Library Service (NLS) Summer Reading Program for children and adults will run Monday, June 16, through Friday, August 15, 2025. The theme this year is Color Our World, and the current planned events include a discussion with blind chef (and cookbook author) Christine Ha and a presentation by storyteller Donna Washington. 

Also, there will be online programming that includes authors, knitters, musicians, container gardening, and interactive art activities. For more information about this summer’s featured authors, booklists, and events, see the NLS Summer Reading page at the following link:

Click here for the NLS Summer Reading program 

If you would like to become part of an email list for reminders about these events, please give us a call at 505-476-9770 or email us at sl.lbpd@dca.nm.gov.

Braille Reading Room

This summer The Braille Institute of Los Angeles is hosting weekly online conversations, author discussions, and engaging book groups. Access specially curated reading lists through your local NLS regional library and receive personalized accessibility assistance from expert library staff. The Braille Institute Library is dedicated to serving blind, low-vision, and print-disabled readers.

To register for the Braille Institute’s summer reading program, email Nate Kurth at nkurth@brailleinstitute.org or call 323-210-2622. You can also learn more by visiting their website at the following link:

Braille Institute’s summer reading program

Schedule for the Braille Institutes Summer Reading Program

WEEK 1: MEMOIRS (June 8–14)

Author Talk: Tuesday, June 10, 10 AM PST
Rodrigo García, author of A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir (DB127842), discusses family, literature, and memory.

Click here to learn more about the author Rodrigo García

Book Group: Friday, June 13, 10 AM PST

Discuss A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes (DB127842).

Click here to learn download A Son’s Memoir (DB127842) from BARD

WEEK 2: WHY READING MATTERS (June 15–21)

Author Panel: Thursday, June 19, 10 AM PST
Join Raymond Mar, Susan Orlean, Lynne Thomas, and Catherynne M. Valente for a dialogue on the cognitive and emotional importance of reading.

Click here to learn more about author Raymond Mar
Click here to learn more about author Susan Orlean
Click here to learn more about author Lynne Thomas
Click here to learn more about author Catherynne M. Valente

Book Group: Friday, June 20, 10 AM PST

Discuss The Library Book by Susan Orlean (DB092869).

Click here to download The Library Book DB092869 from BARD.

WEEK 3: SHORT STORIES (June 22–28)

Author Panel: Thursday, June 26, 10 AM PST
A deep dive into short storytelling with Elizabeth Bear, Jendayi Brooks-Flemister, and Tananarive Due.

Click here to learn more about author Elizabeth Bear

Click here to learn more about author Jendayi Brooks-Flemister

Click here to learn more about author Tananarive Due

Book Group: Friday, June 27, 10 AM PST

Discuss A People’s Future of the United States edited by Victor LaValle (DB093997).

Click here to download A People’s Future of the United States DB093997 on BARD.

New From Our Recording Studio.

DBC10465– No Place for a Lady

By Shelby J. Tisdale; read by Ellen Humphreys

Marjorie Lambert’s life story is intricately involved in the development of archaeology and institutional building in the American Southwest. She became a professional archaeologist and museum curator and was successful at both when relatively few women were able to enter either of these professions. Some violence.

Click here to download DBC10465 from BARD.

DBC10463 – The Foundations of the Glen Canyon Dam

By Erika Marie Bsumek; read by Robert Zimmerman

The second highest concrete-arch dam in the United States, Glen Canyon Dam was built to control the flow of the Colorado River throughout the Western United States. Completed in 1966, the dam continues to serve as a water storage facility for residents, industries, and agricultural use across the American West and to generate hydroelectric power for residents in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Nebraska. More than a massive piece of physical infrastructure and an engineering feat, the dam also exposes the cultural structures and complex regional power relations that both relied on Indigenous knowledge and labor while simultaneously dispossessing the Indigenous communities of their land and resources across the Colorado Plateau. Unrated.

Click here to download DBC10463 from BARD.

DBC10477 – Under the Palace Portal: Native American Artists in Santa Fe

By Karl A. Hoerig; read by Bruce Herr

A history and ethnological study of the Native American art market at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Unrated.

Click here to download DBC10477 from BARD.

DBC10448 – The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico

By Bernal Díaz del Castillo; read by John Pound

Bernal Díaz del Castillo served under Cortés through the entire Mexican campaign, and his narrative, one of only four extant firsthand accounts, is a valuable historical document. He was privy to the counsels of the leaders and was at hand when Montezuma was made a prisoner in his own palace. Adult. Some Violence.

Click here to download DBC10448 from BARD.

DBC10472 – Women, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition in Spain and the New World

edited by María Jesús Zamora Calvo; read by Ellen Humphreys

This book offers a balanced portrayal of the mystery and unease surrounding the issue of women called before the Inquisition in Spain and its colonial territories in the Americas, including Mexico and Cartagena de Indias. This collection considers how the Holy Office of the Inquisition functioned as a closed, secret world defined by patriarchal hierarchy and grounded in misogynistic standards. Ten essays present portraits of women who, under accusations as diverse as witchcraft, bigamy, false beatitude, and heresy, faced the Spanish and New World Inquisitions to account for their lives. Each essay draws on the documentary record of trials, confessions, letters, diaries, and other primary materials. Focusing on individual cases of women brought before the Inquisition, the authors study their subjects’ social status, particularize their motivations, determine the characteristics of their prosecution, and deduce the reasons used to justify violence against them. Adult. Descriptions of sex. Violence.

Click here to download DBC10472 from BARD.

DBC10479 – The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement

by Lorena Oropeza; read by Bruce Herr

This title offers a fresh and unvarnished look at the life of Reies López Tijerina (1926-2015), one of the most controversial, criticized, and misunderstood Chicano Movement leaders of the 1960s. Directly addressing allegations of anti-Semitism, accusations of sexual abuse, as well as evidence of extreme religiosity and possible mental illness, the book captures the life of a man who changed our understanding of the American West.  Unrated.

Click here to download DBC10479 from BARD.

DBC10332 – La Conquistadora: Unveiling the History of Santa Fe’s Six Hundred Year Old Religious Icon

by Jaima Chevalier; read by William Scheer

An overview of the physical and cultural history of La Conquistadora, Santa Fe’s (and America’s) oldest Madonna, already aged when she reached Santa Fe in 1626. Scientific discoveries are melded with stories and legends providing glimpses of her history across two continents and amidst several cultures. Unrated.

Click here to download DBC10332 from BARD.

DBC10486 – Georgia’s Bones

by Jennifer Bryant; read by Ellen Humphreys

An illustrated children’s book about the famed painter, with detailed descriptions of these illustrations read by the narrator. From childhood, artist Georgia O’Keeffe is interested in natural shapes she encounters around her and does her best to depict them in her work. Juvenile.

Click here to download DBC10486 from BARD.

DBC10485 – The Imagination Warriors

by Marc Romanelli; read by Marc Romanelli

A psychic tabby cat from New York City teams up with a feisty nine-year-old girl living in Lamy, New Mexico, to solve multiple mysteries involving paintings that serve as portals through time and space. Juvenile.

Click here to download DBC10485 from BARD.

New Recordings from Network Libraries.

DBC19029 – Pistols for Hire

by Nelson C. Nye; read by Michael Memmo

Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory. Flick Farsom didn’t always think before he spoke. His drunken boast about going after Billy the Kid landed him in the middle of a range war. Adult.

Click here to download DBC19029 from BARD.

DBC30767 – Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film

by Julie Goldsmith Gilbert; read by Maggi-Meg Reed

A book that explores the great American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, whose work was made into many Academy Award-winning movies; the writing of her controversial, international best-selling novel about Texas, and the making of George Stevens’s Academy Award-winning epic film of the same name, Giant. The stupendous publication of Edna Ferber’s Giant in 1952 set off a storm of protest over the novel’s portrayal of Texas manners, money and mores with oil-rich Texans threatening to shoot, lynch or ban Ferber from ever entering the state again. In Giant Love, Julie Gilbert writes of the internationally best-selling Ferber, one of the most widely read writers in the first half of the 20th Century her evolution from mid-west maverick girl-reporter to Pulitzer Prize winning, beloved American novelist, from her want-to-be actress days to becoming Broadway’s acclaimed prize-winning playwright whose collaborators – George S. Kauffman and Moss Hart, among them, were, along with Ferber, herself, the most successful playwrights of their time. Adult.

Click here to download DBC30767 from BARD.

What is the LBPD Staff Reading?

Jon Caro

DB042650  – The Golden Spiders

By Rex Stout; read by Jim Zeiger

Nero Wolfe is a conceited, arrogant, and lazy genius who works as a detective while never leaving his house on business. To ensure that he can afford his luxurious lifestyle – gourmet food, total control of his own schedule and a private greenhouse with 10,000 orchids – he employs another detective, Archie Goodwin, to do all the legwork. While Wolfe might be mistaken for Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft, Goodwin is a hardboiled detective in the mold of Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe, though a bit more cheerful and better dressed.

The combination of these two mystery traditions, the drawing room and the mean streets, plus a rich description of mid-twentieth century New York City and lively dialogue, create a unique series of mystery stories that I find both enjoyable and re-readable.

The Golden Spiders finds Wolfe driven by his own sense of honor to solve a murder case with no fee in sight and is a great entry point into a series of 33 novels and 41 novellas and short stories (all available).

Click here to download DB042650 from BARD.

Yavar Moradi

DB127815 – A Stitch in Time

By Andrew J. Robinson; read by the Author

While the NLS Collection only contains a small fraction of the many hundreds of Star Trek tie-in novels which have been published over the past six decades, one of the series’ most beloved and critically-acclaimed books was added just recently in audio form: the 2000 novel A Stitch in Time (DB127815), told from the point of view of Elim Garak, an enigmatic former Cardassian spy and my personal favorite character from the 1990s spinoff series Deep Space Nine. In it Garak recounts his life story, including events which both precede and follow the series proper. Notably, the novel was entirely written by actor Andrew Robinson, who portrayed the character on screen for seven seasons and originally created a rough version of the character’s fictional biography in order to assist his filmed performance.

Click here to download DB127815 from BARD.

Jeremy Zeilik

DB125459 – Glorious Exploits

By Ferdia Lennon; read by the Author
Tragedy and comedy slam into one another in Glorious Exploits (DB125459) by Ferdia Lennon, a historical farce that sees two malingering citizens of ancient Syracuse come together to put on the greatest performance of Medea the world has ever known. Funny, biting, and insightful about the aftermath of war and the importance of art in hard times.

Click here to download DB125459 from BARD.

Thank you and Happy Reading!

Please call us at 1-800-456-5515 or 505-476-9770 or email us at sl.lbpd@dca.nm.gov to request of this newsletter in  large print, braille or audio cartridge or if you have any other questions or concerns.