
Digital Archives of the Cedar Rapids Public Library
Learn more about Cedar Rapids history by accessing local historical newspapers and telephone books.

Morningstar Investment Center
Research stocks, mutual funds, and investments, and access tools like retirement and college cost calculators and investment tutorials.

Cloud Library
Find your next favorite mystery series or historical fiction with Cloud Library’s collection of ebooks and audiobooks.
Staff Picks for Adults
-
A House With Good Bones
A haunting Southern Gothic from an award-winning master of suspense, A House With Good Bones explores the dark, twisted roots lurking just beneath the veneer of a perfect home and family.
"Mom seems off."
Her brother's words echo in Sam Montgomery's ear as she turns onto the quiet North Carolina street where their mother lives alone.
She brushes the thought away as she climbs the front steps. Sam's excited for this rare extended visit, and looking forward to nights with just the two of them, drinking boxed wine, watching murder mystery shows, and guessing who the killer is long before the characters figure it out.
But stepping inside, she quickly realizes home isn’t what it used to be. Gone is the warm, cluttered charm her mom is known for; now the walls are painted a sterile white. Her mom jumps at the smallest noises and looks over her shoulder even when she’s the only person in the room. And when Sam steps out back to clear her head, she finds a jar of teeth hidden beneath the magazine-worthy rose bushes, and vultures are circling the garden from above.
To find out what’s got her mom so frightened in her own home, Sam will go digging for the truth. But some secrets are better left buried. -
Miss Peregrine's Museum of Wonders
“Incredibly immersive. The newest installment to the Miss Peregrine universe is stunning.”
A deluxe companion to the #1 bestselling Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series. Everything you need to know about the peculiar world, written by Miss Peregrine herself. A gloriously rich and utterly delightful handbook perfect for longtime fans and new readers alike.
Gloriously rich and utterly delightful, Miss Peregrine’s Museum of Wonders is an indispensable guide to the peculiar world, perfect for longtime fans and new readers alike. Covering everything from how to blend in with suspicious normals to the most popular time loops to visit as a temporal tourist, this essential volume is ideal for anyone curious about the world of Miss Peregrine: its strange history, curious practices, fascinating places, most famous (and infamous) names, and much more.
Written in Miss Peregrine’s inimitable style, it’s also a dramatic expansion of the universe fans have already come to love, introducing countless new peculiars, enemies, time loops, stories, and secrets, in addition to hundreds of never-before-seen vintage found photographs and select illustrations. -
Batman: Beyond the White Knight
A lot can change in 10 years, especially in Gotham! Batman, a.k.a. Bruce Wayne, may be behind bars, but the real criminals are still out there.
Gotham Motors CEO Derek Powers has seized control of the Wayne family’s assets and is using them to transform the GTO and the city they’ve sworn to protect. Crime is down, but at what cost? A new Batman has emerged in Powers’s city, and only Bruce is fully aware of the dangers to come. It’s time to destroy the mantle for good, but he’ll need one of his forgotten sons’ help to do so. Enter Jason Todd…the first Robin?!
In this thrilling sequel to the blockbuster comic book hits Batman: White Knight and Batman: Curse of the White Knight, writer/artist Sean Murphy invites the audience to go beyond the Gotham they know to discover an engrossing new take on the city and its heroes. Welcome to Neo-Gotham and the world of Beyond the White Knight! This collection includes Batman: Beyond the White Knight #1-8; Batman: White Knight Presents: Red Hood #1-2. -
Mob Psycho 100
From the creator of One-Punch Man and now a Netflix Live Action Series! Do you or someone you know need an exorcist who works cheap? Reigen's your guy!
What's his secret to busting ghosts while keeping prices low? Well, first, he's a fraud, and second, he pays the guy who's got the real psychic power--his student assistant Shigeo--less than minimum wage. Shigeo is an awkward but kind boy whose urge to help others and get along with them is bound up with the mental safety locks he's placed on his own emotions. Reigen knows he needs to exploit Shigeo to stay in business, yet for better or worse he's also his mentor and counselor. And he also knows whenever the normally repressed kid's emotions reach level 100, it may unleash more psychic energy than either of them can handle!
Winner of the 2017 Shogakukan Prize for Best Shonen Manga. -
Miss Peregrine's Museum of Wonders
“Incredibly immersive. The newest installment to the Miss Peregrine universe is stunning.”
A deluxe companion to the #1 bestselling Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series. Everything you need to know about the peculiar world, written by Miss Peregrine herself. A gloriously rich and utterly delightful handbook perfect for longtime fans and new readers alike.
Gloriously rich and utterly delightful, Miss Peregrine’s Museum of Wonders is an indispensable guide to the peculiar world, perfect for longtime fans and new readers alike. Covering everything from how to blend in with suspicious normals to the most popular time loops to visit as a temporal tourist, this essential volume is ideal for anyone curious about the world of Miss Peregrine: its strange history, curious practices, fascinating places, most famous (and infamous) names, and much more.
Written in Miss Peregrine’s inimitable style, it’s also a dramatic expansion of the universe fans have already come to love, introducing countless new peculiars, enemies, time loops, stories, and secrets, in addition to hundreds of never-before-seen vintage found photographs and select illustrations. -
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, Vol. 1 (light novel)
NOW streaming on Hulu!
Orario, fearless adventurers band together in search of fame and fortune within the monstrous underground labyrinth known as Dungeon.
But while riches and renown are incentive enough for most, Bell Cranel, would-be hero extraordinaire, has bigger plans.
He wants to pick up girls.
Is it wrong to face the perils of Dungeon alone, in a single-member guild blessed by a failed goddess? Maybe. Is it wrong to dream of playing hero to hapless maidens in Dungeon? Maybe not. After one misguided adventure, Bell quickly discovers that anything can happen in the labyrinth--even chance encounters with beautiful women. The only problem? He's the one who winds up the damsel in distress! -
Don't Think, Dear
"Neither romanticizing or decrying the dance world, Robb beautifully explores the push-pull of masochism and perfectionism--preoccupations not just relevant to aspiring dancers, but to anyone who's ever pursued an almost-impossible dream." ?-- Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can't Sleep and Also a Poet
An incisive exploration of ballet's role in the modern world, told through the experience of the author and her classmates at the most elite ballet school in the country: the School of American Ballet.
Growing up, Alice Robb dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer. But by age fifteen, she had to face the reality that she would never meet the impossibly high standards of the hyper-competitive ballet world. After she quit, she tried to avoid ballet--only to realize, years later, that she was still haunted by the lessons she had absorbed in the mirror-lined studios of Lincoln Center, and that they had served her well in the wider world. The traits ballet takes to an extreme--stoicism, silence, submission--are valued in girls and women everywhere.
Profound, nuanced, and passionately researched, Don't Think, Dear is Robb's excavation of her adolescent years as a dancer and an exploration of how those days informed her life for years to come.
As she grapples with the pressure she faced as a student at the School of American Ballet, she investigates the fates of her former classmates as well. From sweet and innocent Emily, whose body was deemed thin enough only when she was too ill to eat, to precocious and talented Meiying, who was thrilled to be cast as the young star of the Nutcracker but dismayed to see Asians stereotyped onstage, and Lily, who won the carrot they had all been chasing--an apprenticeship with the New York City Ballet--only to spend her first season dancing eight shows a week on a broken foot.
Theirs are stories of heartbreak and resilience, of reinvention and regret. Along the way, Robb weaves in the myths of famous ballet personalities past and present, from the groundbreaking Misty Copeland, who rose from poverty to become an icon of American ballet, to the blind diva Alicia Alonso, who used the heat of the spotlights and the vibrations of the music to navigate space onstage. By examining the psyche of a dancer, Don't Think, Dear grapples with the contradictions and challenges of being a woman today.
-
Borne
From the author of the Southern Reach Trilogy comes Jeff VanderMeer's Borne, a story about two humans and two creatures.
“Am I a person?” Borne asked me.
“Yes, you are a person,” I told him. “But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.”
In Borne, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined city half destroyed by drought and conflict. The city is dangerous, littered with discarded experiments from the Company—a biotech firm now derelict—and punished by the unpredictable predations of a giant bear. Rachel ekes out an existence in the shelter of a run-down sanctuary she shares with her partner, Wick, who deals his own homegrown psychoactive biotech.
One day, Rachel finds Borne during a scavenging mission and takes him home. Borne as salvage is little more than a green lump—plant or animal?—but exudes a strange charisma. Borne reminds Rachel of the marine life from the island nation of her birth, now lost to rising seas. There is an attachment she resents: in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet, against her instincts—and definitely against Wick’s wishes—Rachel keeps Borne. She cannot help herself. Borne, learning to speak, learning about the world, is fun to be with, and in a world so broken that innocence is a precious thing. For Borne makes Rachel see beauty in the desolation around her. She begins to feel a protectiveness she can ill afford.
“He was born, but I had borne him.”
But as Borne grows, he begins to threaten the balance of power in the city and to put the security of her sanctuary with Wick at risk. For the Company, it seems, may not be truly dead, and new enemies are creeping in. What Borne will lay bare to Rachel as he changes is how precarious her existence has been, and how dependent on subterfuge and secrets. In the aftermath, nothing may ever be the same. -
Dark Spaces: Wildfire
Legendary writer Scott Snyder presents DARK SPACES--a thrilling new anthology series exploring our deepest fears of the unknown, beginning in the smoldering hills of California in DARK SPACES: WILDFIRE!
Six weeks into the slow burn of the historic Arroyo Fire, a crew of women from an inmate firefighting program are risking everything on the frontlines when their newest recruit--a white-collar convict with a deep network of shady dealers--discovers they're mere miles from her crooked former associate's abandoned mansion. When she proposes a plan to abandon their duties and hunt for riches under cover of smoke and ash, the team must decide if they're ready to jeopardize their one sure path back to normalcy for a shot at a score that would truly change their lives...but is this a flicker of fortune, or a deadly trap?Scott Snyder and breakout artist Hayden Sherman craft an unforgettable heist for a new age in DARK SPACES: WILDFIRE, a collection of the five-issue debut of Scott Snyder's DARK SPACES anthology!
-
Survival Street
Survival Street is a unrepentant action satire tearing through a dystopia packed with economic and humanistic cautionary tales.
After an unbridled wave of corporations take over America, the country is left completely deregulated and effectively carved up into feudal states where billionaires and businesses make their own laws. Among the wreckage, mass privatization shuts down public broadcasting forcing all the beloved edu-tainers out on the down and dirty streets. One group of them stick together, determined to keep helping kids across the country and do it by becoming an A-Team-esque band of mercenaries fighting for (and educating!) kids in the crumbling, corporate war zone of New Best America.
A candy coating of pop culture madness, humor, cartoonishly absurd hyper-violence, and just enough hope to keep holding on. Collects Survival Street #1–#4.
News & Updates

Kids Books for National Hispanic Heritage Month
Sept. 18, 2023 – September 15 to October 15 is National Hispanic American Heritage Month, and Cedar Rapids Public Library Materials librarian Kim Martens-Tyo selected 16 children's book to celebrate.

Check These Out: Cozy Mysteries for Pumpkin Season
Sept. 11, 2023 – Fall is here, and Pumpkin Spice season with it. To help you get in the mood for cozy season - we're talking sweaters and baked goods fresh from the oven - we've collected a list of fall themed cozy mysteries, many prominently featuring pumpkins.

Check These Out: Stories about Libraries
Sept. 6, 2023 – September is Library Card Sign Up Month, so for this week's "Check These Out" column, we're highlighting books featuring libraries and librarians.