While you’re waiting for Kai Con, check out one of these books that were new and fresh when the first Karate Kid came out! The library also has several key movies from 1984 avalible for check out as well as books, from Amadeus to Ghostbusters to Footloose and more!

The hunt for Red October / Tom Clancy.

Here is the runaway bestseller that launched Tom Clancy’s phenomenal career. A military thriller so gripping in its action and so convincing in its accuracy that the author was rumored to have been debriefed by the White House. Its theme: the greatest espionage coup in history. Its story: the chase for a top secret Russian missile sub. Lauded by the Washington Post as “breathlessly exciting.” The Hunt for Red October remains a masterpiece of military fiction by one of the world’s most popular authors, a man whose shockingly realistic scenarios continue to hold us in thrall.

Somewhere under the Atlantic, a Soviet sub commander has just made a fateful decision. The Red October is heading west. The Americans want her. The Russians want her back. And the most incredible chase in history is on… (Description from Goodreads)

The house on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros.

A novel of a young girl, Esperanza Cordero, growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. Her neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn’t want to belong – not to her run-down neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her.

The talisman / Stephen King, Peter Straub.

On a brisk autumn day, a twelve-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: his father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America–and into another realm.

Thinner / by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman.

Billy Halleck, good husband and loving father, is both beneficiary and victim of the American good life: He has an expensive home, a nice family, and a rewarding career as a lawyer…but he is also fifty pounds overweight and edging into heart attack country. (Description from Goodreads)

The unbearable lightness of being / Milan Kundera ; translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim.

Interweaves story and dream, past and present, and philosophy and poetry in the sardonic and erotic tale of two couples–Tomas and Teresa, and Sabina and her Swiss lover, Gerhart.