8 Books Set in a Museum
Hello lovely readers! I hope you are as excited as I am about the Read & Go Reading Challenge! If you haven’t already done so, be sure to join the Read & Go Members-Only Facebook Group to share challenge ideas and reading suggestions with like-minded friends! It’s officially 2018 now and time to tackle the first challenge. I’m totally down with the curl-up-under-a-blanket and read part, but the get-up-and-go part is a little trickier! Since the temps here in Philadelphia are in the single digits, I’m not too keen on adventuring outside. So, I figured for January I’ll choose a book category that will match up with an indoor activity. If that’s your plan, I got ya covered! With its priceless collection warranting protection from the elements, what could be more indoor and climate controlled than a museum! Yep, I’m choosing January to take on the challenge to read books set in a museum.
Museums capture the weirdest stuff
One of the things I love to do when traveling to new places is to visit the local museum. The little guys. Don’t get me wrong, the giants of the museum world, like the Met and the Louvre, are fantastic! I just have a special affection for the museums standing guard over the funky stuff that we humans collect and consider carefully curated relics. There’s one little museum in Brooklyn, for instance, that houses old-school seltzer bottles and cheesy Statue of Liberty souvenirs in its collection of “New York City artifacts.” To each his own, I say. One man’s trash is another’s treasure!, right? One of my favorite the grossest museum collections I know of is here, in Philadelphia, in the Mütter museum. The Mütter is filled with more than 20,000 items from medical history that would make even Dr. Frankenstein blush! From a wall of skulls, whose owners died of afflictions such as cholera or idiocy, to shelves of floating body parts, the Mütter is pretty famous for creeping people out! If you get a chance to visit, you should!
Anyway, if you are looking for a book set in a museum and you love mysteries, you are in luck. Museums seem to be author favorites for strange-thing-happens-in-public-location-and-noone-knows-why stories. In fact, Goodreads dedicates a whole category for mystery books set in a museum! But, don’t worry, no matter your favorite genre, there are books set in a museum for just about everyone. Here’s a few that I thought looked pretty interesting.
Just for you: 8 Books Set in a Museum
Affiliate Disclosure: If you click on any of any book cover below it will take you to an Amazon link to purchase the book. Making your purchase through my link helps defray the cost of running this site at no cost to you. I very much appreciate your support! But, I’m a huge fan of the library and if you’d rather borrow than buy go for it!
1. Dr. Mütter’s Marvels
Genre: Biography
Of course, I can’t help but start with a book featuring a museum in Philadelphia! If this reads anything like The Devil in the White City, I know you will love it.
From the publisher:
A mesmerizing biography of the brilliant and eccentric medical innovator who revolutionized American surgery and founded the country’s most famous museum of medical oddities
Imagine undergoing an operation without anesthesia, performed by a surgeon who refuses to sterilize his tools—or even wash his hands. This was the world of medicine when Thomas Dent Mütter began his trailblazing career as a plastic surgeon in Philadelphia during the mid-nineteenth century.
Although he died at just forty-eight, Mütter was an audacious medical innovator who pioneered the use of ether as anesthesia, the sterilization of surgical tools, and a compassion-based vision for helping the severely deformed, which clashed spectacularly with the sentiments of his time. Brilliant, outspoken, and brazenly handsome, Mütter was flamboyant in every aspect of his life. He wore pink silk suits to perform surgery, added an umlaut to his last name just because he could, and amassed an immense collection of medical oddities that would later form the basis of Philadelphia’s renowned Mütter Museum.
Award-winning writer Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz vividly chronicles how Mütter’s efforts helped establish Philadelphia as a global mecca for medical innovation—despite intense resistance from his numerous rivals. (Foremost among them: Charles D. Meigs, an influential obstetrician who loathed Mütter’s “overly modern” medical opinions.) In the narrative spirit of The Devil in the White City, Dr. Mütter’s Marvels interweaves an eye-opening portrait of nineteenth-century medicine with the riveting biography of a man once described as the “[P. T.] Barnum of the surgery room.”
2. The Museum of Extraordinary Things
Genre: Historical Fiction
From the publisher:
Coralie Sardie is the daughter of the sinister impresario behind The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a Coney Island freak show that thrills the masses. An exceptional swimmer, Coralie appears as the Mermaid in her father’s “museum,” alongside performers like the Wolfman and the Butterfly Girl. One night Coralie stumbles upon a striking young man taking pictures of moonlit trees in the woods off the Hudson River.
The dashing photographer is Eddie Cohen, a Russian immigrant who has run away from his community and his job as a tailor’s apprentice. When Eddie photographs the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, he becomes embroiled in the mystery behind a young woman’s disappearance. And he ignites the heart of Coralie.
Alice Hoffman weaves her trademark magic, romance, and masterful storytelling to unite Coralie and Eddie in a tender and moving story of young love in tumultuous times. The Museum of Extraordinary Things is, “a lavish tale about strange yet sympathetic people” (The New York Times Book Review).
3. From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
From the publisher:
2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the beloved classic From the Mixed-up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. In this winner of the Newbery Medal from E.L. Konigsburg, when suburban Claudia Kincaid decides to run away, she knows she doesn’t just want to run from somewhere, she wants to run to somewhere—to a place that is comfortable, beautiful, and, preferably, elegant.
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away…so she decided not to run FROM somewhere, but TO somewhere. And so, after some careful planning, she and her younger brother, Jamie, escaped — right into a mystery that made headlines!
4. Relic
Genre: Mystery (Series)
If you are a fan of series books, Relic is the first book in the popular Pendergast series. This is set in one of the world famous museums in New York – The Museum of Natural History. Another great museum to check out when in New York!
From the publisher:
Relic: The #1 New York Times bestselling thriller by Douglas Preston’s and Lincoln Child, with more than one million copies sold to date
Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum’s dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human…
But the museum’s directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.
Museum researcher Margo Green must find out who–or what–is doing the killing. But can she do it in time to stop the massacre?
5. Awake by Melanie Surani
Genre: Mystery
6. Heist Society
Genre: Young Adult (Series)
This YA thriller takes place all over the world, but features a high stakes theft at The Louvre, in Paris, France. My daughter’s best friend has been longing to visit Paris. I think this challenge means it may be high time for another Moms and Daughters adventure! The last time Susan, Nayeli, Avery and I went on an international adventure to Guatemala we got stranded!! I love traveling with them! Anyway, if you like YA series books, this one has some great reviews!
From the publisher:
For as long as she can remember, Katarina has been a part of the family business-thieving. When Kat tries to leave “the life” for a normal life, her old friend Hale conspires to bring her back into the fold. Why? A mobster’s art collection has been stolen, and Kat’s father is the only suspect. Caught between Interpol and a far more deadly enemy, Kat’s dad needs her help.
7. The Garden Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft
Genre: True Crime
The year? 1990. The location? The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. THe crime? The largest art heist in history! This is the spellbinding true crime history of the unsolved 1990 museum burglary. It’s a real-life who-done-it! Can you figure it out?
From the publisher:
Shortly after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and committed the largest art heist in history. They stole a dozen masterpieces, including one Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and five Degas. But after thousands of leads—and a $5 million reward—none of the paintings have been recovered. Worth as much as $500 million, the missing masterpieces have become one of the nation’s most extraordinary unsolved mysteries.
After the death of famed art detective Harold Smith, reporter Ulrich Boser decided to take up the case. Exploring Smith’s unfinished leads, Boser travels deep into the art underworld and comes across a remarkable cast of characters, including a brilliant rock ‘n’ roll thief, a gangster who professes his innocence in rhyming verse, and the enigmatic late Boston heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner herself. Boser becomes increasingly obsessed with the case and eventually uncovers startling new evidence about the identities of the thieves. A tale of art and greed, of obsession and loss, The Gardner Heist is as compelling as the stolen masterpieces themselves.
8. Alena
Genre: Thriller
Alena takes place at the fictional Nauk museum on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The book was written as a homage to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, a book considered by many to be a masterpiece. Sadly, Rebecca isn’t set in a museum, but that doesn’t mean you can’t read it!
From the publisher:
In an inspired restaging of Daphne du Maurier’s classic Rebecca, a young curator finds herself haunted by the legacy of her predecessor.
At the Venice Biennale, an aspiring assistant curator from the Midwest meets Bernard Augustin, the wealthy, enigmatic founder of the Nauk, a cutting-edge art museum on Cape Cod. It’s been two years since the tragic death of the Nauk’s chief curator, Augustin’s childhood friend and muse, Alena. When Augustin offers the position to our heroine (who, like du Maurier’s original, remains nameless) she dives at the chance—and quickly finds herself well out of her depth.
The Nauk echoes with phantoms of the past—a past obsessively preserved by the museum’s business manager and the rest of the staff. Their devotion to the memory of the charismatic Alena threatens to stifle the new curator’s efforts to realize her own creative vision, and her every move mires her more deeply in artistic, erotic, and emotional entanglements. When new evidence calls into question the circumstances of Alena’s death, her loyalty, integrity, and courage are put to the test, and shattering secrets surface.
Stirring and provocative, Alena is the result of a delicious visitation of one of the most popular novels of the twentieth century on a brilliant and inventive novelist of the twenty-first.
Sooooo, what do you think? I know which one I’m picking! My trip to the Mütter museum this past October left me so curious about the good doctor…. Oh, but wait, I’m also intrigued by the last one, Alena. And, what about the Louvre book? Or, oh my gosh, a trip down the easy streets of childhood with Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler sounds fun, too!
Okay, so maybe I don’t know which one I’m choosing to fill the challenge to read a book “set in a museum,” but I do know that I’m looking forward to an indoor – warm! – stroll through one of Philly’s finest museums. I’m marking my calendar right now for January 27! What museum is on your list to visit to complete the challenge?
If you have a suggestion for a different book set in a museum, please share in the comments below or, if you haven’t already done so, join the rest of us Read & Go challenge fans in the members-only Facebook group and post it there. We’d love to add your ideas to the list!
Happy Reading, Lovelies!
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