Marc Levy “Measuring Up” by MIT grad Jenny Lacika is displayed Sunday at Porter Square Books in Cambridge.

“Love Story” was published 55 years ago and “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 1998. We went looking for more recent books that walk our halls, cross our bridges and get stuck in our traffic. Here are a couple for sale in local bookstores.

“Measuring Up: How Oliver Smoot Became a Standard Unit of Measurement” (2025) by Jenny Lacika and illustrator Anna Bron

A clever idea that plays with the principle of nonstandard measurements by telling how Oliver Smoot, a first-year frat pledge at MIT in 1958, got laid down repeatedly along the length of the Harvard Bridge, with paint being used along the way to mark off every 5-foot-7 of his height. (The bridge is roughly 364.4 smoots.) Now he’s in

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