Celebrate the passing of summer with a Labor Day Weekend cookout. The tomatoes are abundant this year, local corn is ripe and waiting to be doused in butter. Three cookbooks from the Library's collection that will undoubtedly add to the fun:
I needed something pleasant to read the other day, so I picked up Eva Ibbotson’s 1985 romance, A Company of Swans. I was as charmed as I had hoped to be. Ibbotson’s romances are as sweet and elegant as meringues.
Harriet Morton is the dutiful daughter of a stern Cambridge don in the early years of the twentieth century. Since her mother died, her life is grey and repressed (so is the aunt who looks after her), and the only joy she has is her dance classes with a Russian prima ballerina.
An impresario comes to her class to recruit members of a company to tour South America. Of course, her father and aunt are horrified at the suggestion, but Harriet, obedient Harriet, rebels and runs away to join the troupe.
Naturally, she finds romance as well. She meets Rom Verney, who ran away himself many years before after a love affair went bad. Now he’s one of the leading citizens in his English expatriate community in Brazil.
This romance doesn’t run smoothly either, but of course any reader of the genre knows that all will end well. And sometimes that’s just what you want.
For a debut novel, Precious Blood exceeded my expectations. Medical examiner Edward Jenner was hired to investigate the exceedingly gruesome murder of a young woman in New York City. Needless to say, other murders follow and as the numbers mount, the severity of cruelty increases. There are decapitated heads soaking in deep puddles of milk, pole impalements and a creative new use for an ice cream scooper other than dipping ice cream.
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It’s too bad Steven Johnson’s name is so generic. I just read his 2004 Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life from cover to cover before realizing that he is the same author who wrote two other recent favorites of mine.
You can look back at my entry on The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, which was a marvelous work of science history and big-picture thought. (Do you remember that old TV series, Connections, and how it tied together wide-ranging theories to explain the sweep of history? You’ll love The Ghost Map.)
The other book I didn’t post about, but I recommend it, too—in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Johnson argues persuasively that videogames and other much-maligned forms of popular culture are far more cognitively challenging than we credit.
In Mind Wide Open, he reviews the science of how our brains work.
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Tighten your toe tags, there’s a new breed of zombie in town. Pan’s Labyrinth creator slash (pun intended) Hellboy director Guillermo Del Toro and Hammett Award winning Prince of Thieves author Chuck Hogan collaborate to invent a voracious vampire-zombie hybrid like nothing else in The Strain.
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I just finished two books with something in common. They’re really good tales told by master storytellers, and they’re both in their own ways also about the importance of storytelling.
Both books are a little different from the last novel you may have read, but both will take you back to the enchantment of “once upon a time” and make you think about why those are such magical words.
The first is Here Lies Arthur, by Philip Reeve, based on a story we all know. The other is Nation, by Terry Pratchett, which bears some similarity to history as we know it but turns out rather differently in the inimitable Pratchett’s hands.
It makes for a long post to tell you about both of them, but I can’t resist, so read on.
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