Fall is setting in, and it’s almost time to get serious — serious about planning your Halloween costume! Until then, I’ve got a little bit more time to look for silly library books. Of course, we like to think we know the library pretty well, but with more than 61,000 items in our collection – and more than 9 million across the IHLS system as a whole – we’re always seeing something fun or unexpected popping up on the holds shelf. Here are a couple of the most fun (or funny) finds we’ve come across this month: 

The gentle art of making enemies : as pleasingly exemplified in many instances, wherein the serious ones of this earth, carefully exasperated, have been prettily spurred on to unseemliness and indiscretion, while overcome by an undue sense of right, by James McNeill Whistler. If you’ve been making enemies too violently, this may be just the tome to teach you how to take it down a notch.

Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, by Ursula Nordstrom. This is how I’ve been trying to get my co-workers to address their emails to me, but so far I’ve been unsuccessful.

Donner Dinner Party: A Pioneer Tale, by Nathan Hale. Honestly, not a dinner party I would want to be invited to.

Gustav is Missing: A Tale of Friendship and Bravery, by Andrea Zuill. There’s not mush-room for error when you have a friend as good as Gustav.

P is for pterodactyl: The worst alphabet book ever: All the letters that misbehave and make words nearly impossible to pronounce, by Raj Haldar. Recommended to me by my good friend Ptolemy after he swatted the gnats away from his herd of gnu.

Looking for your next read? These items (and millions more) are available here at the O’Fallon Public Library, or through Interlibrary Loan. Check one out on your online account, via our new SHARE app, or by asking one of your friendly local librarians!