2025 Summer Reading: Level Up at Your Library is based around puzzles and games. The titles below embrace competitive spirit.
The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer
Years ago, a reclusive mega-bestselling children’s author quit writing under mysterious circumstances. Suddenly he resurfaces with a brand-new book and a one-of-a-kind competition, offering a prize that will change the winner’s life in this absorbing and whimsical novel.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Hiro spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary. But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state).
The Long Game by Elena Armas
Adalyn Reyes has spent years perfecting her daily routine: wake up at dawn, drive to the Miami Flames FC offices, try her hardest to leave a mark, go home, and repeat. But her routine is disrupted when a video of her in an altercation with the team’s mascot goes viral. Rather than fire her, the team’s owner sends her to North Carolina and tasks her with turning around a struggling soccer team as a way to redeem herself.
What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
For trivia buffs. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions: What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? What would happen if the moon went away? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, complemented by his signature xkcd comics.
Origin: A Novel by Dan Brown
Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconology, arrives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to attend the unveiling of a discovery that “will change the face of science forever”. Edmond Kirsch, who was one of Langdon’s first students at Harvard two decades earlier, is about to reveal an astonishing breakthrough…one that will answer two of the fundamental questions of human existence.
