One of the biggest advantages of reading older books is being able to avoid waitlists; like most people, I don’t really like waiting for things. But sometimes, when I read an older book, I start thinking the opposite: why did I wait so long to read this? So I decided to collect some of the older books that I waited too long to read – and encourage everyone else to read them too.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

I could not tell you why I hadn’t read this book before, but I can tell you that it is a classic for a reason – the story itself is still relevant today, but its depth makes it timeless as well. A police shooting involving an unarmed black man and the ensuing reaction in the larger community? Conflicts between political organizations arguing about whether class or race is a more important way to define (and divide) people? If you read a one-page summary of the plot of this book, you might believe it had been written in the past few years.

But even those events in the book are only parts of the greater whole: an examination on the role and construction of a person’s identity and sense of self. And did I mention that the prose is so beautiful that I found myself reading it out loud in my head, paragraph by paragraph? If you haven’t read it (or disliked it because you were forced to read it for school), give it a shot. It is one of the greatest American novels of all time.

Did you know that Mead Public Library subscribes to a service that can give you book recommendations? It’s called Novelist, and it will let you enter the title of a book and then suggest “read-alikes” for that book! To give you an idea of what it can do for you, I’ve put a list of the current Top 5 Books in the Monarch System!

These are the five books with the longest waitlists in our library system. Under each one, you can see five more books that Novelist recommends. So get on these waitlists now – and then check out those other books while you wait!

It’s also always a good idea to check out our Lucky Day display when you stop by the library – we have special non-waitlist copies of new books and DVDs that are set aside for this display, so you might be able to skip the line if you’re lucky! (But read or watch it fast – they also can’t be renewed.)

Blue Moon by Lee Child

• Orphan X by Gregg Andrew Hurwitz
• Hot Springs by Stephen Hunter
• The Drifter by Nicholas Petrie
• Adrenaline by Jeff Abbott
• Zero Day by David Baldacci