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That Time of Year

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It's that time of year again!  I'm not talking jolly old elves or Dick Clark on Times Square.  It's time for the annual "best of" lists.

I can't get enough of these lists, though I often violently disagree with them.  I have only read a handful of the fiction titles on Publisher's Weekly's Best Books of 2009 list, and I thought one of them was terrible.  (I'm not telling which one unless you confess likewise!)  On the other hand, my absolute favorite novel of the entire year is Amazon's number one pick.

Anyway, if you're a list addict like me, take a look at Early Word, which is a book buzz blog for librarians.  Along the right side of the page, they keep track of best lists from a variety of sources. 

What was your best book of the year so far? 

The Hidden Man

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I’m not sure how I heard about David Ellis’s new legal suspense novel, The Hidden Man, but you’re hearing it here: go and find a copy of this one—it’s a very clever and enjoyable read.

Jason Kolarich escaped the old neighborhood on a football scholarship, and then became a lawyer. A pretty successful one, till his life was derailed by the traffic death of his wife and daughter. Now he’s just hanging on.

So he can’t say no when an old friend who was also the victim of family tragedy desperately needs his help. His childhood friend, Sammy Cutler, has been accused of murdering the pedophile, Griffin Perlini, who killed Sammy’s baby sister, Audrey, all those years ago.

Strangely, it’s not Sammy who contacts Kolarich for help, but a mysterious Mr. Smith.

Written on the Body

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The Birthing House

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The Monster in the Box

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Ruth Rendell writes both intense psychological suspense novels and a traditional British police procedural mystery series. I have to confess that I can’t take the psychothrillers (some written under the name Barbara Vine), since I really don’t want to enter the mind of a serial killer, thank you. I prefer her Inspector Wexford mysteries.

But what I like most about the new Wexford novel, The Monster in the Box, is its odd little psychological twist on a serial killer plot.

Wexford sees a man get out of a van and cross the road, and it’s a man with whom he has a long though unacknowledged history. The man, Eric Targo, stared at him outside a murder scene years before; he walked his dog near Wexford’s windows; he nodded at him across the bar.

And these tiny connections over a long and relatively uneventful span of years have convinced Wexford that the man is a multiple murderer.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

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If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now

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The slightly warped logic of that sentence (what is it, a developer’s advertising tag?) has been popping into my mind lately. For a slightly warped reason, I admit.

I’m rereading Flashforward, the 1999 novel by Robert J. Sawyer that is of course the basis for the hot new TV series of the same name.

What’s the connection? Just that the book has been in the library’s collection for ten years, a long time before Hollywood discovered it.

So why wait for blockbuster adaptations or bestseller lists or any of the other indications of mass demand? Come talk to your librarian if you want a good recommendation. There are all kinds of great books that are sitting waiting for you in the library stacks, and we’re happy to talk to you about them. If you can tell us about a few books you have enjoyed, we can find you others that you may love as much. Works for music and movies, too.

Hey, you’ll be so far ahead of the crowd that you could even go off and pitch adaptations to movie and TV studios. (Someone needs to tell George Clooney about Alan Furst’s The World at Night.)

Or you’ll just be snugly curled up in your own home with something wonderful to read.

Gillian Flynn's Dark Places

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Ever wonder what happens to the survivors of a murdered family?  Usually, one family member survives.  How are they?  How do they live?  DO they live?  Flynn answers these questions and many more of the like in her incredible second outing, Dark Places.

Four Freedoms

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I posted several months ago about John Crowley’s Lord Byron’s Novel, a complex literary/historical puzzler about Byron and his mathematically-minded daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace.

Crowley’s new novel, Four Freedoms, is very different, a very American story. It’s set on the homefront during World War II, when people’s lives were tossed up like decks of cards and came down in configurations they could not previously have imagined.

The novel’s main character is Prosper Olander, a young man with a severe curvature of the spine. Despite the botched operation that has left him unable to walk without crutches, he is an optimistic and curious person—qualities that make him more successful with women than other men might imagine.

Prosper has escaped his hometown and a charity job to work at a huge bomber manufacturing plant in Oklahoma. The prefab town that has mushroomed overnight to house the plant’s thousands of workers is home to many others who have left their pasts behind.

Lehane's Haven for the Criminally Insane

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Best of the National Book Awards Fiction

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The National Book Foundation is celebrating its 60th anniversary by asking readers to pick their favorite National Book Award fiction winner from the past 60 years.  This is the first time in the Foundation's history that an award is open to a public vote.  The six finalists, selected by 140 writers from across the country, are:

The Stories of John Cheever (1981), Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1953), The Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1951), The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1972), Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1974) and The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1983).

All the Living

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I’ve written posts about a few novels set in the Appalachian mountains—Serena, The Well and the Mine, the novels of Silas House—and here’s another one.  Kentucky writer C. E. Morgan’s All the Living is another beautiful work with that setting.

Orphaned young, Aloma was sent to a mission school by her aunt and uncle, so she’s not quite as native to her native mountains as she was.  She poured her heart and soul into her piano lessons, having few other joys or attachments in life, until agriculture student Orren Bell swept her up at a school dance, and they began an intoxicating affair.

Now, after his own family’s sudden death, Orren has inherited his family’s mountain farm, and Aloma has come to live with him, daringly unmarried.  But the house is so grim, the work so unrelenting, and the piano he promised her an untuneable wreck.  She learns to work in the house, at least, but her dreams of getting out clash with Orren’s dreams of rescuing his family farm.

Keeping You a Secret

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Chasing Shakespeares

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The publishing news of the day is The Lost Symbol, the new novel by Dan Brown of (need I tell you?) The Da Vinci Code fame.  Harry Potter himself hardly got more hype than symbologist Robert Langdon is getting this week.

If you're in the line for Brown's book--or have no intention of getting in line for it!--there are plenty of other historical puzzlers to enjoy.  We posted a list  back in 2004.

One of my favorites is Sarah Smith's Chasing Shakespeares.  It's a really enjoyable work of scholarly conjecture and chase.  About that other famous controversy, you know. 

"Librarians Not to Mess With"

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From "Eleven Things", a weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle  - writer Louis Peitzman offers his list of Librarians Not to Mess With.  Although I know plenty of real librarians who might easily fit into this category (myself included?), Peitzman's list is littered with fictional librarians who may present a calm demeanor until decisive action is called for, and then they are transformed into Those Who Can Take Care of Things When Necessary.

From the list, these "Superheroes of the Stacks" are represented in the Library's collection:

1.   The Time Traveler's Wife; a novel by Audrey Niffenegger

2.   Tales of the Slayers; a graphic novel based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

3.   The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor; starring Brendan Fraser, on DVD

4.   "The Librarian" series starring Noah Wyle on DVD: Quest for the Spear, Return to King Solomon's Mines, and Curse of the Judas Chalice

5.   The Marvel Comics Encyclopedia, where you can find Karma the Librarian

6.   The Art of Discworld; a companion to the Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett

7.   The Music Man on DVD, featuring the oh-so-stereotypical "Marian the Librarian"

8.   Black Mask; starring Jet Li, on DVD

9.  It; a novel by Stephen King

Indivisible Invisible Life

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Deliciously Dismantled

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Trust No One

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2:18 a.m.  It’s a great time for a suspense novel to start.  Greg Hurwitz's Trust No One opens on that moment. 

Nick Horrigan is used to waking up at 2:18.  It’s the time his stepfather, Secret Service Agent Frank Durant, bled to death in his arms.  The 17-year-old Nick had snuck out of the house to meet a woman, undoing all of Frank’s elaborate security locks, and came back to find Frank shot. 

The guilt has snapped Nick awake at that time nightly, his one faithful companion on his wanderings since that night when his stepdad’s colleagues on VP Jasper Caruthers’ security detail showed him a jail cell, bought him a plane ticket, and told him to go away. 

The life Nick has finally begun to remake for himself in LA is shattered at 2:18 again when a SWAT team rappels onto his apartment balcony and takes him.  It seems there is a terrorist threatening to take out a nuclear power plant, and he has said he will only talk to Frank Durant’s son. 

Inky Side of Midnight

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A Company of Swans

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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. 

Bloody Precious

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No Strain, No Gain

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Storytelling

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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.

John Hart's Last Child

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Sailing on a Sea of Poppies

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Good historical fiction serves several functions: it transports you to a different place and time, it expands your knowledge of that place and time, and it (usually) makes you feel grateful to be living in the here and now, by comparison.  Sea of Poppies is a splendid historical novel that, in addition, takes the English language and makes it flow like water. 

Let the Great World Spin

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Several writers have tried to write about the World Trade Center since 2001.  I hope you have read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for example, which was a deeply moving novel that addressed that grief head on.

Colum McCann does so only indirectly in his new book, Let the Great World Spin, which is set in 1974.  But the gorgeous complexity and emotional depth of his novel can’t help but be a tribute to the towers and the city and all of the lives lost.  As the author says in his endnote, “Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down:  there are still so many stories to be told.”

On the day when a daring funambulist walks a tightrope between the newly built Twin Towers, the lives of several characters intersect in unforeseen ways. 

Sum of David Eagleman

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 What happens after we die is all summed up in forty scientifically sporty vignettes written and compiled by David Eagleman.  The stories are concise, creative and air-tight.  Thought provoking and based on science as well as religion, Eagleman's debut conjures seizmic blips on the radar the size of Everest.  Things that we’ve never thought of are happening in our afterlives according to David Eagleman’s dazzling debut, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.  

Charleston in Fiction

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Celebrated southern writer Pat Conroy became a legend with The Prince of Tides in 1986.  Since then he has published both fiction and nonficton, but the buzz going on right now involves his latest epic southern family saga.  South of Broad will be published in early August, and it promises to be vintage Conroy.  With its setting in Charleston, South Carolina - Broad Street being one of its main thoroughfares - the story could be as colorful as the old mansions on Rainbow Row.

Charleston is such a lovely and storied old city, it easily lends itself to fiction.  While you're waiting for Conroy's next adventure, take a look at another recent novel set in Charleston: The House on Tradd Street by Karen White (2008) features ghosts, old houses, and romance amidst the charm of the city itself. 

Sacred Hearts

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There has been so much interest in the past few years in women’s stories from history. Sarah Dunant has written some wonderful ones—In the Company of the Courtesan, The Birth of Venus. Here’s another, Sacred Hearts.

Suora Zuana is a nun in the convent of Santa Caterina in Ferrara, Italy, in 1570. She didn’t enter the convent willingly, but there was nowhere else for her to go after the death of her father and teacher, a medical scholar.

But Zuana has come to terms with her destiny, and she now runs Santa Caterina’s infirmary and dispensary. Now she is called on to help another reluctant novice, young noblewoman Serafina, whose rebellion is upsetting the whole convent.

Serafina has brought the convent a dowry and the promise of the most splendid voice their famous choir has ever heard, but her voice is only being raised in furious screaming. She has been torn away from her lover, her old music master, to hush up scandal. The close community of Santa Caterina is unbalanced by Serafina’s fierce rebellion and by the power struggle to control her fate.

Company Max Barry

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Bleed to Love Beth Cooper

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 I laughed until I cried. Denis Cooverman, delivers a valedictory speech of a lifetime that includes outing a closeted homosexual, exposing clandestine teacher's affairs and exposing the truth about rumors.  He airs his own dirty laundry when he makes the simple declaration, " I Love You, Beth Cooper."  And then the novel rockets off into oblivion via VW Cabriolet convertible. 

The Signal

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Here's another wonderful regional novel, The Signal, by Ron Carlson. 

Mack knows this is the last hiking trip he will get to make into the Wyoming mountains with his ex—Vonnie agreed to come when Mack was at his lowest, in jail for smashing her boyfriend’s windshield.

What Vonnie doesn’t know is that Mack has a second purpose for the trip.  He’s making some cash from a rather shady military man by tracking a signal from a downed aircraft.

What neither of them knows is that the trip is going to go terribly wrong.  Besides the secret of the aircraft, there’s a group of poachers on the mountain.  They’re willing to go to criminal lengths to keep their secret, too.

The Missing

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Here’s a lovely book.  If you enjoyed Serena or The Well and the Mine recently, try this wonderfully moving novel, The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux, set a few years earlier in a nearby part of the South.

Sam Simoneaux gets the nickname “Lucky” in France, where his troopship lands just as the armistice is declared in 1918.  He doesn’t leave the war entirely unscathed—a few weeks of clearing ordnance and an injury he causes to a little French girl haunt him—but he gets to go home to his wife.

But much of his life doesn’t seem quite that lucky.  He was orphaned as a baby when a backwoods Arkansas family took vengeance against his Cajun father and slaughtered the rest of the family. 

And now, though he has a nice job as a department store floorwalker, chance and a mistake give his life a painful new turn—a couple’s young girl is kidnapped in the store on his watch.

Figures in Silk

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I was at the Art Museum last Saturday, talking at the From Author to Artist Book Club, which pairs books from the library to artworks in the museum.  Do you know about the program? 

We were discussing Portrait of an Unknown Woman, by Vanora Bennett.  It’s a novel about Thomas More and one of his wards, and about the family portrait of the Mores that Hans Holbein painted during the reign of Henry VIII. 

Bennett wrote the novel based on a theory she had read, that the symbols in the painting indicate a secret identity for one of the figures.  To reveal more would be to say Too Much, but fans of historical conspiracies will enjoy that part of the plot.  Readers interested in the roles of women in historical times will find lots more to enjoy.

It was an interesting discussion, and Libby from the Art Museum showed us some fascinating things about northern Renaissance painting.

But if you’re picking a Vanora Bennett novel to read, I actually liked her new novel, Figures in Silk, much better. 

Book Lovers, Library Lovers--Bad News

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Remember a few weeks ago, when I posted about how you can find people who love books, music, and movies as much as you do, here at the library?

Now I'm hoping you're out there, too. 

We just heard on Saturday that the governor's proposed budget, which will be finalized by June 30, will cut state library funding by 50%. 

Just to clarify:  this is entirely separate from the issue of a local library levy proposed for this November's ballot. 

Since almost all of our library's funding currently comes from the state, you can imagine how catastrophic this change would be. 

So, book lovers, library lovers, we're hoping for your support.  We're asking that people contact their legislators before June 30 to make their concern known about the proposed cut.

For more information, take a look at the Call to Action posted on our homepage. 

Meanwhile, I hope you're all enjoying the good reads you find in this blog.  I felt triumphant last week when so many of you requested The Gone-Away World.  Do you like it?

The Gone-Away World

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Don’t stop reading when I say this one’s science fiction.  It’s for all of you who loved Catch-22, The Three Musketeers, Hunter S. Thompson, P. G. Wodehouse, Russell Hoban, and, well—hard to say what else.  It’s a larger-than-life war story, a scathing satire told in laugh-out-loud-clever wordplay, and a postapocalyptic tale of friendship in the best buddy pic tradition—The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway.

The Haulage and HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company is as usual gathered in the Nameless Bar when they see on TV that the Jorgmund Pipe is on fire. 

It can’t be on fire.  It’s the only thing that’s holding back the strangeness that has swept the world since the recent war.  The very unusual war in which Gonzo Lubitsch and his pals performed various raucously heroic and occasionally unspeakable acts, and formed their mercenary gang.

Naturally, they suit up to go to the rescue.  And our narrator, Gonzo’s best friend and sidekick, fills us in on how the Pipe came to be, what the horrors are that it keeps at bay, and why this particular band of friends is the only hope to set the world at right again.

Bloomsday

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I have a confession to make: I've never read James Joyce's Ulysses, have not so much as scanned a few pages in order to get through a literature course.  And so today, Bloomsday 2009, I shall attempt to rectify this situation.

Upon initial inspection, I can see what all of the fuss is about.  Joyce stirred up the literary world with his story of a few people who make their way through a day in Dublin on June 16, 1904. Beyond that, it is obvious that it could take a lifetime to get a grip on this novel, which required a decision from the US District Court in December 1933 to be published legally in the United States. 

Murder, English Style

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Here are a couple of peculiarly enjoyable little mysteries set in England. The instantly inimitable voice of the eleven-year-old narrator of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley, will leave you in no doubt that it’s in a class of its own. And the George Booth cartoon on the cover of The Herring-Seller’s Apprentice, by L. C. Tyler, will clue you in that it isn’t the usual sort of cozy either.

Flavia de Luce is overjoyed to stumble on a dying man in the garden of their English country house in the middle of the night. Along with her passion for chemistry and poisons, she has always wanted to solve a murder.

The man is an apparent stranger, but the enterprising Flavia suspects he is connected to the dead jacksnipe her father found on the doorstep a few days before with a penny stamp impaled on its beak.

Read Books ! Win Prizes !

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Summer Reading Programs have become a mainstay for public library systems everywhere.  Kids love to go to their local library during the summer to check out books and earn prizes for reading. 

But why should kids have all the fun?  The Library's summer reading program for 2009 includes adults (ages 18 and up), and the entry forms are available online as well as at any branch library.  Audio books count too!  The program runs from June 1 to July 31.

Our good friends at Joseph Beth Booksellers will be hosting the adult summer reading kickoff party -  a "Beach Blanket Book Bash" - on Saturday June 13.  To assist in your book selections, we've put together a deliciously diverse list of titles to consider for lazy summer reading.  Enjoy!  

The Little Stranger

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Here's an eerie novel to put a chill in a hot summer day. It’s Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.

Dr. Faraday, the son of a former maid at Hundreds, a country house in Warwickshire, remembers vividly when he entered the house as a boy, just after World War I. He was entranced by its grandeur and the glimpse of the family life he saw.

Now he’s entering the house as an adult, called in to replace the Ayres family’s usual practitioner.

The old house is a wreck, the family just barely able to keep it open. The son of the family, Roderick, still suffers from the injuries and shellshock he suffered as an RAF pilot; his mother seems out of place in the now-crumbling house; and his sister, Caroline, a plain and awkward young woman, is struggling to keep them together.

Faraday is attracted to them all, and he can’t help feel pride that he, a boy of the servant class, is able to move in their social circle. He’s eager to step in when Roderick shows signs of nervous shock, imagining that an evil presence in the house is threatening the family.

Spelling Bee P-R-E-P-A-R-A-T-I-O-N

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I can trace my adult interest in spelling bees to my less-than-stellar performance at my sixth grade spelling bee circa 1983.  I can’t remember how many rounds I lasted (probably 1) or what word I misspelled (probably something not too difficult), but the perfectionist in me remembers I should have studied harder.  For 13-year-old Kavya Shivashanker, however, the word “Laodicean” earned her the title of 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion. 

For the rest of us, there’s always next year, so let the library give you a head start with these great books, recordings, and DVDs!

Beat the Reaper

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I should probably preface this by saying that on a zero to ten scale of inappropriate humor, Josh Bazell’s Beat the Reaper clocks about a twelve.  But if the image of yourself snickering madly over some truly appalling things doesn’t worry you, this is the book for you.

Peter Brown is an intern at a really bad New York City hospital, and he’s having a really, really bad day.  The mugger he beats half to death on the way in to work sets the tone (he does carry the would-be criminal in to the emergency room), and the delicate mix of drugs needed to balance the day from there is very hard to maintain.

That’s the least of Peter’s problems, though.  One of his new patients is a mobster, and the man recognizes Peter as Pietro “Bearclaw” Brwna, a mafia hitman who’s in witness protection after testifying in a notorious trial and throwing his best friend (son of a mob lawyer) out a sixth floor window.  For some very good reasons, but it’s kind of hard to explain while fending off disasters, medical and personal, and anticipating being whacked.

Book People Unite

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I was in Joseph Beth a couple of weeks ago, and the staff there made a point of telling me to read an upcoming book they just love:  The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe, which will be published in June.  Then I saw the book on our Hot Titles web page, too.   

The Physick Book is an appealing historical/supernatural/romantic story in which a modern student of American colonial history gets more than she bargained for when she starts researching witchcraft accusations in New England.  Because, it seems, one of the witches accused in Salem just might have been guilty after all.  

You can put an advance hold on the book through the Hot Titles page if that sounds intriguing to you.  

But my actual point is this:  the folks at Joseph Beth loved telling me about the book.  I won’t use the word fanatic (hi, Annette!  hi, Barb!), but some people just light up when they talk about a really good read. 

Naturally, you can find many more of those book people here at the library.

Why I Fight

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J. Adams Oaks’ Why I Fight is a teen novel, but it’s one that adults will find moving, too. It’s one of those stories about a young person where the difference between what the narrator understands and what the reader knows is a gaping chasm. Adult readers will find themselves on the right side of the gulf to recognize fully the story’s ironies and heartbreaks.

Wyatt Reaves starts the novel as a twelve year old, a big husky kid who is always mistaken for older. His Uncle Spade busts him out of a social worker’s office while his parents are screaming in the hallway, and they hit the road.

Life in the car and at his uncle’s various girlfriends’ houses seems pretty good to Wyatt, once his stomach settles down. And it all seems even better once Uncle Spade discovers something that Wyatt is really good at—bare knuckle fighting.

The Family Man

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Elinor Lipman is back and in top giggle-inducing form in her newest satire, The Family Man.  I might like this one even better than Isabel’s Bed.

Henry Archer, in a moment of weakness, sends his ex a note of condolence after her latest husband dies, even though Henry hasn’t spoken to her in years.  Henry has come out and moved on since their decades-ago marriage, but once that door’s open again, it’s not closing anytime soon.  Couldn’t Henry just take a look at Denise’s prenup and keep her greedy stepsons from selling her Park Avenue apartment?  And by the way, couldn’t she fix him up with just one or two of her gay friends?

Meanwhile, another door has opened.  The coat-check girl at Henry’s hair stylist’s turns out to be Thalia, Denise’s daughter, whom Henry adopted and then had to give up as a toddler when Denise divorced him.  Henry might have a second shot at fatherhood here. 

The Language of Bees

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Oh, goody is my reaction when I see there is a new Mary Russell novel by Laurie R. King.

If you don’t know, King is writing a continuation of the Sherlock Holmes canon from the point of view of Holmes’ much younger, half-American, Jewish wife.  And in The Language of Bees, she gives Holmes a son and a granddaughter, too.

Unlikely?  Yes, but marvelously clever. Mary Russell (who met the elderly beekeeper when she was a rebellious, grieving teenager in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice) is a match for her famous husband, a scholar and adventurer willing to research obscure languages, don disguises to roam London’s streets, or catch a fast camel or motorcar on a jaunt around the world.

Just back from a long international journey, Mary and Holmes are approached by the son of Irene Adler. A bohemian painter, an injured World War I vet, and the embittered child of that extraordinary woman, he is reluctant to acknowledge his famous father.

But he needs help.

Spring Reading: Mysteries, Happiness, and Poetry

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I realized that the nice weather brings out the Reading Bug in me. Sunny back porch days, rainy gloomy afternoons, or breezy evenings, I love to read and relax when Spring comes around. Here is what I've enjoyed so far this Spring:

Patricia Cornwell has written my favorite book of hers so far. Scarpetta (2009), all 512 pages of it, tells a braided up story of high technology and low-down betrayal. Available in large print and audio book as well.

Alexander McCall Smith has come through again (thank goodness!) with Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (2009), the latest installment in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. It's also available as an audio book (I highly recommend!) and a large print edition.

Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008) by Shaun Tan is a creative, fascinating novella by the author who gave us the outstanding The Arrival (2007).

Joyce Sidman's lovely children's poetry book, Red Sings from the Treetops (2009), is a beautiful tribute to the seasons. It's the perfect dessert to this feast of reading!

Prayers for Sale

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In the mood for something nice and old-fashioned? Sandra Dallas’s new book, Prayers for Sale, will fit the bill.

Hennie Comfort is an elderly woman living in the Colorado mining town of Middle Swan in the 1930s. A young woman stops by her house and asks Hennie to pray for her, having seen the sign, "Prayers for Sale," that Hennie’s husband jokingly put up on their fence years before to celebrate the fact that they had nothing to pray for themselves.

The girl, Nit Spindle, is new to town, lonesome and still grieving for her dead baby. Since Hennie herself arrived in town in that condition in her own youth, she decides to befriend the girl. Sharing her quilts, sharing her cooking, and above all sharing her decades of stories, she helps Nit settle in. And in the process she settles herself, too, finally letting go of an old secret sorrow.

If you like stories of women’s lives, you’ll find this comfortably appealing. Then try Nancy E. Turner’s These Is My Words and its sequels, more sweet and sturdy historical fiction with a real sense of what life was like for our grandmothers’ grandmothers.

Away

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I’m not sure what the gorgeous cover of this book signifies, except to signal the extravagant riches within. Amy Bloom writes like a magician, capable of pulling doves, scarves, and beautiful (if slightly bruise-mottled) fruit out of thin air.

I just read Away for my bookclub, and I kept telling myself to remember bits to discuss, thinking "This is my favorite part" each time. At one point I clapped my hand over my mouth and wailed, "Oh, no!" out loud, so absorbed was I in the story, which is both marvelously emotional and very deliberate in pacing and structure.

It’s the tale of a journey, and like the tale of every journey, it’s about coming home.

Trigger City

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Trigger City, by Sean Chercover, was the other great recommendation I mentioned last week.  It's a suspense novel that hits the genre bullseye:  tough but damaged hero still fighting flashbacks to his last case, mysterious enemies arrayed against him, helpless victims he has to keep from becoming collateral damage, and the girl he wants to win back.  Everything you need in a p.i. novel, with plenty of thrills and that essential spark.

Chicago PI Ray Dudgeon isn’t back to 100% after taking on the mob (Big City, Bad Blood), so he really needs the income when Colonel Isaac Richmond (US Army Ret.) asks him to look into his daughter’s death.

No one disputes how Joan Richmond died.  The computer expert she hired for her company’s payroll department shot her to death, raving obsessively, and then committed suicide.  It isn’t the facts of her death that the colonel wants to know, but more about his daughter’s life.  Their relationship wasn’t close, what with his wife’s death and his own close-mouthed career in military intelligence.

So Ray goes looking. And what he finds is not the random violence of a paranoid schizophrenic.

The Likeness

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I’m beginning to need one of those little admonitory signs, the kind you see in zoos:  Please do not feed the polar bears.  Mine would read:  Please do not recommend books to the librarian.

It’s not that I don’t love book recommendations (the polar bears would sympathize here), but I’ve been gobbling them up at an alarming rate.  And two of the most recent recommendations I received were for the second book in their respective series, which means that after I read them and adored them, I just had to go back and read the debuts, too.

I picked up Tana French’s The Likeness because one of my colleagues said it was one of her top three books of 2008.

The Well and the Mine

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If you don't mind standing in line a bit, here's a book worth standing in line for, Gin Phillips' debut novel The Well and the Mine.

This lovely short novel takes place during the Depression in the mountains of Alabama.  Tess, the younger daughter of a coal miner, is sitting on the back porch of her family’s cabin, where she often goes to be alone.  A woman she does not know walks up to the porch, takes the lid off the well, and drops her baby in.  Then she disappears into the night.

The family at first doesn’t believe Tess’s story, but it turns out tragically to be true.  Tess starts to suffer from nightmares.  For the whole family, this act seems to undercut the solidity of what had seemed to be a good life.

The novel, which is told by turn from each family member's point of view, quietly takes them through this period of frightening uncertainty.

Barbara Pym

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There are certain authors whose works seem so exactly observant that you can imagine them as anthropologists studying these strange creatures, human beings, and making field notes. 

Barbara Pym, who wrote in England in the 1950s and (after a break of being considered old-fashioned and unpublishable) in the late 1970s and 1980s, is one of them.  Her astringently fond satires of a certain segment of English society make me smile with their perceptive sharpness.

Which makes it all the more appropriate that some of her characters actually are anthropologists.  Rather vague, scholarly types caught up in footnotes and interdepartmental warfare, but still, anthropologists.  The rest of her characters are what she would (and does) call Excellent Women, those indispensable women, spinsters or clergymen's daughters, who make the tea for church fetes and staff the charity booths in jumble sales.

Diary of a Good Book

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Despite J.M. Coetzee's reputation and numerous awards, I only discovered him a few weeks ago. "Diary of a Bad Year," published in 2008, is a lovely book.

The main character is an aging writer, with many biographical similarities to Coetzee himself, who has been asked to write "Strong Opinions" about the state of the world to contribute to a larger collection.  The top half of each page are his "strong opinions," written in very broad, formal language about everything from torture and war to religion and democracy. At the bottom of each page is a personal, first-person narration from the main character. We discover that he is a lonely and even frail man. He asks a young woman to transcribe his "strong opinions" and, page after page, we read his public, intellectual voice while simultaneously following his day-to-day life, told in a private and almost intimate voice. We get to know Anya, his typist, as well as the man she lives with, a loud and unthoughtful man who is quite the opposite of the narrator.

Big Thick Irish Historical Novels

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The history of Ireland is thick with political and religious oppression, magical folklore, and Guinness, of course.  Everyone I know who claims an Irish ancestry has a bit of a rebellious streak and they are damned proud of it.  What makes them tick?  Is it the Guinness, or is it their long and cherished history of fighting for freedom?  Probably a little - or maybe a lot - of both.

There are two "big names" in Irish historical fiction: Frank Delaney and Edward Rutherfurd.  Each of these authors has written a few big thick tomes weaving fact and folklore into fascinating tales just right for the month of March:  

Getting on the Bandwagon

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As I confessed a couple of weeks ago, I’m still catching up on the 2008 novels I had scribbled myself notes about last year. Of course, the most common reason for scribbling those notes was that somebody else had reviewed the books and made them sound wonderfully tempting to me.

Well, here are a couple of 2009 books that have already gotten many tempting reviews, including mentions elsewhere on our webpage. (Are you familiar with our Reading Recommendations page?)

That makes me feel a little sheepish blogging them—do you already have your own scribbled notes on these books, and will you all roll your virtual eyes if I add another review recommending them?

On the other hand, I really enjoyed these books and I’d hate for you to miss them! So on the principles of a) this blog is all about celebrating wonderful books, even if they are celebrated elsewhere, too, and b) it’s hardly the first time in my life that I’m behind the times, here are two gentle boosts onto the bandwagon for those of you who may want just one more nudge to place your holds on these books.

Required Reading

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When I hear the words "high school," certain memories spring to mind: catching the city bus each morning, memorizing those French verb conjugations, and putting off "required reading"--the tedious Shakespeare plays, Melville stories, and the Dickens novels--as long as possible.

I wasn't averted to reading; after all, my bedside was cluttered with books by Amy Tan and John Grisham, among others. But the idea that I was required to read certain books because they were "important" always bothered the teen-aged me. 

Luckily, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County provides ample opportunities to discover (or rediscover) classic literature, old and new. Today, for example, not only can I read the library's copy of Hamlet and watch it performed by Patrick Stewart, but also I can download an audio-recording of the play from NetLibrary or a video study guide from MyLibraryDV and gain an even better understanding of this classic that became one of my favorites, long after I had to read it for eleventh-grade English.

The short story index, one of the many internet databases to which the library subscribes, allows users to read entire short stories from their home computer or on one of the library's public terminals. I found some of wonderful stories there, including Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find." And after rereading that classic, be sure to check out this recent biography of O'Connor, simply titled, Flannery.

The Road Home

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2008 was a very good year for books.  Unfortunately, it wasn't any longer than the average year, so I am behind, behind, behind in reading all of the 2008 titles I have had on my must list for months.

Rose Tremain's The Road Home (which was actually published in England in 2007, but let's not make me feel any tardier) was one I wrote down as soon as I saw the first notices, since her gorgeously literary and quirkily original novels always appeal to me.

I'm glad I finally got to it.  It was a deeply satisfying read.  And it's less odd than some of her other work, so it would be a good place to start if you haven't read any of her books.

Lev is an immigrant from eastern Europe to London.  He has left his mother, young daughter, and best friend back home where work is scarce (the sawmill has closed) and he is lonely (his wife has died) to try his fortune in England.

Sandwich and Popcorn Books

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Despite the food in the title of this post, I'm not talking cooking here! 

I went to a workshop where library staff talked about their favorite books of 2008.  One of the librarians described a nice, old-fashioned book as a sandwich:  "It's like a really good sandwich.  You finish it and you say to yourself, ‘Boy, that was a good sandwich.’"  I thought it was a great way to describe the book:  unpretentious, wholesome and satisfying. 

A food metaphor I often use is "popcorn books."  I mean those light, compulsive reads you finish in an evening.  Maybe they're not great literature, but there’s something to them, and you've just got to have them.  A little bit nutritious, tasty, and easy to devour.

Read on for one of my favorite popcorn authors and the title of the sandwich book.

The King's Last Song, or, Kraing Meas

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The King’s Last Song, or, Kraing Meas, Geoff Ryman’s historical novel about twelfth- and twenty-first-century Cambodia was published here in paperback in 2008.  Like each of his preceding works, it’s arrestingly original and very different from the book before it. 

Ryman gave us, for instance, speculative short fiction in The Child Garden; a heartbreaking riff on AIDS and The Wizard of Oz in Was; one of the first hyperlinked novels in 253; and science fiction both personal and political in an exotic near-future setting in Air, or Have Not Have. 

This novel centers around an archaeological artifact, a book inscribed on golden leaves, found buried in a Cambodian field in 2004.  It is the record of the almost-legendary King Jayavarman VII, who freed his country from a foreign usurper and tried to convert it to Buddhism.

Winter World

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Although winter presents plenty of challenges, it brings pleasures as well; a cozy spot by the fireplace and a savory bowl of soup, for instance, if you are lucky enough to have them.  To enhance your enjoyment of the season, here is a smattering of titles from The Library's collection that evoke some of the best that winter has to offer.

Where do such creatures as ladybugs and turtles go in winter?  Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich explains it all. 

Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season is an anthology of essays and poems dedicated to the harshness and the beauty of the natural world.

Designer Charlotte Moss offers ideas for creating seasonal warmth indoors in her decorating book, Winter House.

Winter House is also the title of a mystery by Carol O'Connell, featuring detective Kathleen Mallory, the wealthy and enigmatic Winter family, and an ice pick.

And finally, for those who would rather stay home and watch other people defy gravity via skis and snowboards there is Warren Miller's Cold Fusion: The Power of Snow on DVD.

Company of Liars

Categories Fiction

Karen Maitland takes a familiar literary form–the tale of a group pilgrimage in medieval England—and gives it spooky little twist in her entertaining historical novel, Company of Liars.

A camelot (peddler of holy relics) reluctantly ends up shepherding a group of strangers toward the shrine of St. John Shorne as they all flee the terrible illness seeping inland from England’s port towns.  It’s a difficult journey, as months of rain reduce the countryside to starvation and angry locals seek scapegoats for the coming of the plague.

Besides the camelot, we have a courtly musician and his passionate young apprentice; a fairground trickster with a wagon full of wonders; a storyteller with a swan’s wing in place of one arm; a young painter and his pregnant wife; and a ghostly, eerie girl who reads runes and predicts an evil fate for all of them. 

Each of the characters has a secret, and the events of the journey expose each one in turn as misfortune and death snap at their heels like the wolves they hear in the night.

Tailing the Spellmans

Categories Fiction

Now in her late 20's, Isabel "Izzy" Spellman joined her family's private investigation firm when she was 12 years old.  Her tendency toward subterfuge comes to her genetically:  Mom and Dad are PI's, Uncle Ray as well, brother David is an annoyingly perfect attorney, and, not to be outdone, little sister Rae started in the family business at the age of six.  As a group, they are smart, sneaky, cynical, above the law, and very very funny.  Author Lisa Lutz has invented a family that puts the fun back in dysfunctional. 

Winter Range

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Okay, this one’s not new, but it’s very seasonal.  You’ll feel positively cozy during our current heat wave reading the bitter winter scenes in Claire Davis’s 2000 debut novel, Winter Range.

Sheriff Ike Parsons is an outsider in his small Montana town.  He married a local girl, Pattiann, the daughter of one of the cattle ranching families, and has patiently tried to make a place for himself among the locals.  They like him and tolerate him, and he likes and admires them, but he knows he still isn't one of them.

Now an unusually long, harsh winter is dragging toward spring.  Chas Stubblefield, the son of one of the county's sternest ranchers, has given up the fight.  He is letting his cattle slowly starve to death in a desperate, angry, shamed gesture toward the bankers and feed mill owners who have finally cut off his credit. 

Ike can't let the situation continue. 

Serena

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It’s 1929, and in the North Carolina mountains, George Pemberton brings his new bride, Serena, to his timber camp.  A bold and unconventional woman, the daughter of a timber baron, Serena seems a good match for the hard young man who has worked beside his logging crews as well as run them. 

And she quickly proves her toughness.  Fifteen-year-old Rachel Harmon, pregnant with Pemberton’s bastard, approaches him at the rail head with her father.  A knife fight between the two men ends in Abe Harmon’s death, and Serena coolly faces down the sheriff and dresses her husband’s wound.

That’s the first scene in Ron Rash’s novel Serena, a shockingly good historical novel.  Read this for its gorgeous North Carolina mountain, Depression-era setting; read it for its chillingly vivid character study of the ambitious young couple; read it for the suspense (what will happen to Rachel and her baby?); read it for the grand end-of-days story as a magnificent American forest is laid waste and the livelihood of the mountain men goes with it.  Definitely, read it. 

The Hunger Games

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When Katniss Everdeen volunteers to be a tribute for the Hunger Games in place of her sister, it is an honor only in the eyes of the Capitol. The Hunger Games are an annual game of survival for children living in the Districts surrounding the Capitol as punishment for an uprising almost 75 years ago. Every year, a raffle for children ages 12-18 is conducted to see who fights to the death on national television for the entertainment of all citizens.

But the poor have a higher chance of their names being drawn - because if you put your name in more than the single entry required by law (which increases every year), you can earn extra food for your starving family. Even though some Districts produce food, people are still starving due to strict theft laws.

So when Katniss volunteers, she does so with the full knowledge that she will probably not survive, but at least she has saved her sister for another year. But the knowledge that her government continues to condone the killing of children for entertainment leads to a new twist on the game...

Suzanne Collins, author of the popular Gregor the Overlander series, has outdone herself with this stunning portrayal of true survival of the fittest. The Hunger Games is a fast-paced thriller set in an oddly familiar world, where killing your neighbor may be your only chance to survive.

The Northern Clemency

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Some books pull you so deep inside the lives of nonexistent people that you have to shake yourself when you come up for air in real life again. Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency is one of those.

The story begins in 1974, as Katherine Glover throws a cocktail party for her neighbors in the northern English coal town of Sheffield. It’s a slightly unusual social occasion for the street, so everyone except the teenagers has on their party manners.

What they don’t know (and the reader gradually learns) is that their hostess’s bright chattiness is because she has invited Nick, her boss at the flower shop, with whom she is infatuated. And their host’s gentle but equally artificial pleasantness is because he believes that Katherine has taken Nick for a lover.

The way Hensher skims among the thoughts of the party guests and hints at the complicated relationships in the Glover family should set you right up for this rich, sympathetic, comic and tragic novel.

Newes from the Dead

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The Teen historical novel Newes from the Dead (2008) by Mary Hooper is absolutely fascinating. It carries the flavor of life in 1650 England, retelling the true story of Ann Greene, a young woman who was hung as a murderess for killing her newborn (actually stillborn).

The story starts with Ann gradually waking in her coffin, which is sitting in a medical dissection laboratory. She is unable to move and feels neither terror nor joy. She does not realize where she is, at first believing herself to be in bed and then, remembering her execution, believing herself to be in purgatory. Ann muses on her past, observes "angels", and hears distant voices.

Hooper interweaves Ann's past with her present in a fascinating can't-put-it-down read. The compassion of the doctors and the heartless cruelty of prison are both brought to life through Ann's story. Contemporary pamphlets were printed telling about Ann's "miracle", one of which is reprinted in the back of the book.

Another Elderly Detective

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I’ve written about Stuart Kaminsky’s Chicago police detective Abe Lieberman, but there’s another elderly detective closer to home, Ronald Tierney’s Deets Shanahan. The seventy-year-old Indianapolis p.i.’s latest appearance is in Bloody Palms. I just read that one, and then I just had to go pick up the couple that I had missed before it.

In Bloody Palms, Shanahan gets a call to come to Mexico for a meeting with his old army major, Jack Wenders. It’s been since Korea, so Shanahan is a bit surprised to hear from him. Wenders, it turns out, wants Shanahan’s help to deal with an international conspiracy. Which would seem a little over the top, except that the next day Wenders is murdered.

Meanwhile, back in Indiana, Shanahan’s younger fellow p.i. and friend Howie Cross suddenly has a case to investigate, too. His mother wakes him to tell him that his daughter, Maya, has disappeared from their farmhouse.

The Good Thief

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For a novel about orphans, thieves, and grave robbers, The Good Thief, by Hannah Tinti, is a suprisingly buoyant book.  You can get a glimpse of its quirky, Dickensian charm from the marvelous jacket illustration.

Ren is one of the boys in St. Anthony's orphanage.  Because he is missing his left hand, he knows that he is never likely to be adopted, and that he will some day be given to the soldiers.  So he consoles himself with small thefts.

Then a man named Benjamin Nab shows up and claims that Ren is his little brother.  He spins a wild tale of how they were separated.  Perhaps no one quite believes it, but it solves the problem of Ren.  And it turns out that Ren's affliction is useful to Benjamin--a piteous crippled child is a good draw for a conman and thief.

The Wheelman

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"Caper novel" doesn’t seem like quite the right phrase to describe Duane Swierczynski’s debut crime novel, The Wheelman, since the body count is almost as high as the page count. But you’ll find yourself snickering anyway, and you’ll recognize the homage when the hero borrows a Donald Westlake pseudonym as an alias mid-novel.

Patrick Selway Lennon is the getaway car driver for a well-planned bank job in Philadelphia. The take is $650,000, and despite a few glitches, he gets them on the road out of town. But then the car is rammed by the Russian mob, and Lennon wakes up to find himself being dumped in a pipe on the construction site of the new children’s museum, along with a couple of other bodies.

Things only get worse from there.

What Books Are You Grateful For?

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At Halloween, I heard a radio story that asked people about the frightening movie scenes they remembered most vividly from childhood. (The flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz seem to have scarred many otherwise healthy adults.)

In the kinder, gentler spirit of Thanksgiving, I have a different question for you: what are the childhood books that made you grateful you learned to read? All the way back to Green Eggs and Ham, or whatever that very first book was for you.

It isn’t just Thanksgiving that has brought this to my mind lately. I’ve been recommending some favorite books for a third-grader (hi, Nathan!), and it has been a lot of fun to root through old memories for things he might like. It turns out that he loves some of them as much as I did.

So what books are you grateful for? What childhood favorites would you recommend?

I’ll just pick one. Well, I’ll cheat, since it has a sequel: Elizabeth Enright’s 1957 Gone-Away Lake and its sequel, Return to Gone-Away.

Jane Austen in Scarsdale

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Here’s something cheerful.

Paula Marantz Cohen writes charming modern-day Jane Austen tributes. Her Jane Austen in Boca was a very funny take-off on Pride and Prejudice, set in a Florida senior community, where any widower with any means at all must be in want of a wife.

Now with Jane Austen in Scarsdale, she takes on Persuasion, in a tale of a mild high school guidance counselor who has lost in love.

Anne was once talked out of marrying a young travel agent, Ben, by her imperious grandmother. Ben has since gone on to found a wildly successful line of cultural travel guides. Now he’s back in town to enroll his nephew in Fennimore High School. All of the required complications ensue.

It’s hard to capture the spirit of an Austen novel, as the many readers of the many, many recent knock-offs can attest. Cohen hits the mark. No assembly balls or empire dresses, but plenty of gentle satire (the book’s subtitle, Love, Death, and the SATs, hints at the mockery of the modern college application frenzy) and a satisfying romance.

Halloween Murder on the Menu

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This past weekend, I went to a family Halloween party.  There was plenty of food on hand, including my aunt’s famous iced pumpkin, bat, and ghost cookies.  If treats are on your menu this Halloween, I highly recommend these delicious new mysteries:

A Catered Halloween by Isis Crawford: Sisters Bernadette and Libby Simmons are hired to cater a haunted house fundraiser for the volunteer firemen of Longely, New York, at the old Peabody School.  The severed head that is found at the haunted house turns out to be real—and the victim, Amethyst Applegate, was a former student at the school and a classmate of Bessie Osgood, who died under suspicious circumstances years ago and whose ghost still haunts the place.  Bernie and Libby, along with their father, the town’s retired police chief, must solve this culinary cozy mystery. 

Working Stiff by Tori Carrington:  The week before Halloween, a body disappears from the funeral home of Greek American and Private Investigator Sofie Metropolis’s aunt.  While working on this case—which may be a holiday prank--Sofie is also trying to prove the innocence of teenager Johnny Laughton, about to go on trial for the murder of his girlfriend.  Complicating matters even further is her romantic interest in two men—family-approved Greek baker and pastry shop owner Dino Antonopoulous and the ever-mysterious Australian bounty hunter Jake Porter.

The Old American and Peter Loon

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I’ve been reading some old historical fiction lately since a friend encouraged me to try Kenneth Roberts’ novels of the American frontier and Revolution, which were written in the 1930s.

It’s taking me back to childhood, when that kind of sturdy, old-fashioned American adventure story was what I found on my parents’ and grandparents’ bookshelves.

Nowadays I’m seeing more books with courtiers and courtesans and queens on the covers than eighteenth-century American frontiersmen. But in recent years, there have been some American historical novels as transporting as any bestselling time travel romance. Very different from those earnest childhood tales, though.

Here are two splendid ones: The Old American, by Ernest Hebert, and Peter Loon, by Van Reid.

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize

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You may remember the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995, which resulted from high-level meetings in Dayton, Ohio and which led to the end of war in the Balkans?  Since that time, the Dayton Peace Prize has been created, and in 2006, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize was inaugurated, "the first and only annual U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace."   Awards are granted for both fiction and non-fiction books that were published in English during the previous year.  This year's list of nominated titles includes Robert Olmstead's Coal Black Horse, which was one of the titles for our On The Same Page Cincinnati community reading program during March 2008.  The Library holds copies of all of the titles on the list; the honors will be awarded at a banquet in Dayton on September 28.

The Revenant

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Okay, have you eaten your Wheaties this morning?  This novel based on a real-life survival story will make you want to start bulking up.

Michael Punke's 2002 novel The Revenant tells the story of frontiersman Hugh Glass.  Hired as a hunter for a trapping expedition into the northern Rocky Mountain reaches of the Louisiana Territory in 1823, he is attacked by a grizzly and horribly mauled. 

With winter coming on, hostile tribes nearby, and the expedition suffering from bad luck all around, the expedition leader makes the decision to move on, leaving two men to bury Glass after he dies of his wounds.

The two don't wait.  They strip Glass of his weapons and hurry to catch up with their comrades.

But Glass doesn't die.

Silas House's Appalachian Fiction

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I don't know which I like best of Silas House's books set in his native mountains of eastern Kentucky.  They're loosely linked by characters, but you don't have to read them in order.  The strong sense of connection between the people and the landscape they live in is vivid and deeply appealing in all three of the books.

The first book was Clay's Quilt, a surprisingly assured and graceful first novel, filled with deep affection for the mountain way of life.  Clay is a young man who was raised by relatives in tiny Free Creek after his mother's violent death at the hands of a jealous lover.  He finds what he has always felt was missing from life when he meets Alma, a fiddler who comes to the local honkytonk from another part of the county.  Their romance is complicated by her pending divorce and the jealousy of her ex.  Violence enters Clay's life a second time. 

Clara Callan

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I was talking about Richard B. Wright's 2002 Clara Callan with someone yesterday and realized I have never blogged it.  It's a gorgeous book, an absolutely transporting work of fiction, so here you go:

The title character is the older of two sisters, small-town Canadian girls in the 1930s.  Clara is a schoolteacher, living alone now that her father has died and now that her sister, Nora, has gone off to New York to work in radio.  Her story and Nora's are told through the letters they exchange and through Clara's diary entries. 

Compared to Nora's bit of glamor, Clara's life is very uneventful.  She reads, plays the piano, and writes a little poetry, but she burns that because it doesn't come up to her standards.  She struggles quietly with a sudden disillusionment about her faith and (slightly less quietly) with the cranky coal-burning furnace her father used to tend.

But this isn't a tidy little book.  Something shattering happens to Clara that irrevocably changes her life. 

Lit Life

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Okay, here's one you probably haven't read.  It's in a genre you may not have read in a while, either, the New York City satire of glittering literati and bright lights/big city excess.  It's Kurt Wenzel's punningly titled 2001 debut, Lit Life.

Seven years before, Kyle Clayton was the latest Bret Easton Ellis, a hip, young, party-going, literary superstar.  But he hasn't written a word to follow up his megabestseller, and he has just about hit bottom in drunken celebrity.

Richard Whitehurst is almost totally his opposite, a disciplined, prolific, literary writer who has achieved almost no recognition for his substantial oeuvre.

When the two meet at a disastrous PEN reception, Richard invites Kyle to stay at his house in the Hamptoms.  Richard hopes Kyle will be his literary heir and will write a scathing roman a clef to punish the New York literary establishment that has rejected them both.

Kyle, his imagination sparked by Richard's suggestion, hope to prove that he really does have what it takes.  But both pay a rather painful price for another go-round on the New York literary carousel.

Duma Key

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I love the ocean more than most people love the ocean. I am happiest on a little sandy island, surrounded by the ocean as far as the eye can see.

Somehow, in Duma Key Stephen King brought alive all the magic of being on an island in the ocean. Granted, Duma Key is creepy, and some of the ordeals of the main characters' lives are difficult at best to read about, but the underlying presence of the ocean permeates the book.

Edgar Freemantle discovers that he has the gift of art; he is terribly injured in an accident, and when he goes to Duma Key to rest and recuperate in beautiful seclusion, he suddenly starts producing amazing artwork. He develops close friends on the island, but the inevitable course their lives follow is sinister and threatening. I will not give away the terrible secret of Duma Key; I will only say that it is not what you expect it to be.

Just listen to the surf. Listen to the shells. They are warning you...

Baker Towers

Categories Fiction

My to-be-read shelf is so overloaded that I'm starting to feel guilty about it, so I haven't gotten in line yet for Jennifer Haigh's new book, The Condition.  But I remember her last one, Baker Towers, very fondly.  It was one of those quiet books that doesn't seem like much when you describe the plot but has an emotional resonance that stays with you.

So let me describe the plot anyway!  The Novaks are a family in a little Pennsylvania mining town.  Rose is the Italian bride of a Polish miner, so she doesn't fit tidily into the town's social circles.  Widowed young, she raises three daughters, Dorothy, Joyce, and Lucy.  Each of the girls has to make decisions about whether to stay in their hometown or venture out into the wide world:  Dorothy sees government service during World War II, Joyce dreams of escaping but finds it hard to cut family ties, and Lucy, much younger than her sisters, sees the town dying after the mines close. 

More Mysteries from the Masters

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I wrote last week about a John Harvey mystery, an expert British police procedural.  I’ve picked up two more dynamite mysteries since, one new, one old, also by masters of the genre.  Some writers really know how to do it—I hope you’re reading these series.

The first was Chasing Darkness, by Robert Crais.  Crais’s Elvis Cole mysteries just crackle with sharp writing, eerie violence, and a hero who hits the perfect note of sarcasm that so few have gotten right since the early days of that other p.i., Spenser. 

The second was Jan Burke’s Kidnapped, the 2005 volume in her series featuring California newspaperwoman Irene Kelly.  Once again, wow—Burke spins a complicated plot as breezily as though she’s spinning plates, but she’ll have you deeply invested in the fate of all of her characters.

Gone to Ground

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How did I miss this one?  One of my favorite mystery authors, John Harvey, has a new pair of detectives.  Here’s hoping 2007’s Gone to Ground will be a series debut to sit on the shelf beside his Charlie Resnick and Frank Elder series.

DI Will Grayson and his partner, Helen Walker, of the Cambridge Major Investigation Team, are investigating the brutal beating death of Stephen Bryant, a film studies lecturer and writer. 

The natural first suspect is Mark McKusick, the partner Stephen had recently broken up with.  Mark seems like a mild man, but there’s something so personal about the crime that Will and Helen have to consider the possibility of a jealous ex.  Or had Stephen picked up someone else?  A missing computer that contains Stephen’s research on sultry 1950s film star Stella Leonard could point to robbery.

Ice Station

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Golly.  That's all I've got to say.

I picked up Matthew Reilly's 1999 novel Ice Station because I had seen it listed on best lists for suspense and thriller novels over the years.  So I had some time for a quick book, and I thought, why not?

Golly.

The novel is set in Antarctica.  The scientists at an American research station are using a diving bell to explore a deep ice cavern. 

They find something. 

To tell you what would spoil the first of many plot surprises.  Anyway, they send out a distress signal, which they hope will get through the solar flare interference that has them locked down.  More than one set of ears is listening, and more than one country responds.  But not all of the listeners have rescue on their minds. 

City of Thieves

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The siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Stalingrad) by the Germans in 1941 has inspired many books.  From literary novels like Helen Dunmore’s achingly beautiful The Siege or Debra Dean’s poignant The Madonnas of Leningrad, to military thrillers like David L. Robbins’ War of the Rats or the movie Enemy at the Gates, and of course many histories, the books try to bring to life the terrible struggle for survival during that winter of starvation.

David Benioff’s new novel, City of Thieves, falls at the suspense end of the spectrum.  The narrator, a writer, decides to interview his grandfather, Lev Beniov, about Lev’s experiences during World War II.  Family legend has always said that Lev killed two Germans before he turned eighteen, but Lev’s grandson has never known the details.  Now Lev tells him how life changed when he stole a knife from a dead German paratrooper.

The House on Fortune Street

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Some books just make me grateful that I learned to read.  Being able to sit down, open a book, and be astonished by the master craftsmanship and the unimaginable imagination of a writer is such a glorious pleasure.  Ian McEwan’s Atonement made me think about that not too long ago.  (I finally read it, and if you’ve only seen the movie, you need to read it, too.)  Now Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street has made me grateful again.

This is a novel told from four viewpoints.  Sean is living with Abigail, for whom he left his wife.  Their relationship isn’t happy:  Abigail may be cheating on him, and she is certainly leaving him far behind as he drudges through his dissertation while she’s off running her theatre company.  Their downstairs neighbor, Dara, extends Sean some sympathy.  But then Dara commits suicide.

The Curse of Chalion

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Okay, I’m recommending a fantasy novel here, and I know that will have many of you scrolling on past.  Apart from the Harry Potter books or maybe Tolkien, fantasy is pretty hard to push.  But if you enjoy a writer who can twist familiar storytelling elements into something just a bit different, try Lois McMaster Bujold. 

Bujold is best known for her science fiction series, the energetically satiric Vorkosigan Saga (definitely something a bit different), but she has written a few volumes of fantasy, too.  I recommended her historical fantasy The Spirit Ring last year, and she’s currently writing a more traditional light-romantic fantasy series, The Sharing Knife. 

But I wish she’d find time to do more in the splendid series that began with The Curse of Chalion in 2001.  Its mix of old-fashioned fantasy and complicatedly original religious mythology was really intriguing.

Nameless Night

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G. M. Ford’s Leo Waterman and Frank Corso mystery series are good stuff.  Here he branches out on a stand-alone thriller. 

As Nameless Night opens, we meet Paul Hardy, a brain-damaged John Doe who was discovered next to a railroad car and has been living in a Seattle group home for the past seven years.  Now surgery for a second brain injury in a car accident has strangely resurrected parts of his memory.  Not, unfortunately, knowledge of his own identity, though he remembers a name that was important to him for some reason.

Who is he?  Why are government agents pounding on the door as soon as the group home's director googles the name Paul remembers?

Landing

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Smalltown Canadian girl meets cosmopolitan Dublin girl in Emma Donoghue's long-distance love story Landing. 

Jude is flying to London to bring her dying mother home.  Sile is the airline hostess on the flight.  Despite the circumstances and the complicated relationships they both are already involved in, they're attracted to each other. 

It’s impossible, of course.  Jude has hardly ever been out of spitting distance of her tiny town, where she is a museum curator.  Sile is in a settled relationship, is part of Dublin’s vibrant twenty-first-century urban scene, and knows from her own Anglo-Indian heritage how complicated long-distance, cross-cultural romance can be.

Late Nights on Air

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Maybe it’s something about radio.  I really loved Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices, a marvelous little novel about the BBC during World War II.  Now here’s a Canadian novel about a radio station crew, Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air, and I’m charmed and impressed by it, too.

It’s 1975 in the little town of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories.   Here we meet Harry Boyd, an old-time radio man who is acting as temporary station manager.  Harry was once a promising young broadcaster till he had a shameful failure in TV and got this second chance in this backwater radio station.  He and Eleanor Dew, the cool, competent receptionist, hold the station together as they wait for corporate decisions on its fate.  Two new staff members join them, rookie Gwen Symon and Dido Paris, a glamorous new announcer. 

Black Ships

Categories Fiction

Here’s one for readers who remember Mary Renault’s historical novels of the ancient world fondly.  It’s Jo Graham’s reworking of the tale of Aeneas, the fall of Troy, and the founding of Rome, Black Ships.

Gull is a slave, a child of rape, whose mother is one of the conquered people of Wilusa (Troy).  Lamed in an accident as a child, she faces a grim fate in her captors’ shore town of Pylos. 

But her mother takes her to the Pythian priestess who serves the goddess of death.  The visions Gull sees declare her the priestess’s successor as sibyl.

Growing up in her role as priestess, Gull continues to serve Pylos until a war party of Wilusans attacks to avenge further raids on their home and people.

Medieval Mysteries: The Fool's Guild

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Back in medieval times, it was very important to keep the Royalty happy, lest all hell break loose.  Therefore the King's fools, or court jesters, were no fools at all, since they played such an integral role in the well-being of the court.  Members of the Fool's Guild in the mystery series by Alan Gordon are especially savvy.  They use their inside knowledge and the anonymity of their masks to undermine all varieties of political trickery and deceit. 

Author Alan Gordon is a marvelously clever writer, who has a 'day job' as a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society in Queens, New York.  He has received praise for his series featuring the Fool's Guild, displaying a cunning group of unlikely heroes mixed in with history, suspense, and even a little Shakespeare before his time.  All six of Gordon's Medieval Mysteries are available at the Library:

The Italian Lover

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I’ve read a whole string of great new books lately.  Some I won’t blog, like Richard Price’s new novel, Lush Life, since you probably already have your place staked out in line for them (do if you don’t), but here’s one you may not have heard much about:  Robert Hellenga’s The Italian Lover. 

It’s a fairly direct sequel to his debut novel, The Sixteen Pleasures, but you don’t have to have read that novel (I haven’t yet), nor The Fall of a Sparrow (whose protagonist shows up in a major role here, too) to appreciate it.

Margot Harrington is an American book conservator living in Florence, where she came in 1966 to restore books damaged in the great flood of the Arno.  In 1975 she wrote a book about her experiences as one of the foreign “mud angels,” her discovery of a book of Renaissance erotica in the convent where she was working, and the grand love affair she had then with an Italian art conservator.  Now, some fifteen years later, there is going to be a film made of her memoir. 

City of the Sun

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Twelve-year-old Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike to run his morning paper route in the Indianapolis suburbs.  He never comes home.

If you can keep reading past that gut-wrenching premise, keep reading.  David Levien’s debut novel, City of the Sun, keeps tightening the suspense from there.

Jamie’s parents, Paul and Carol, spend a year anxiously following the police case on their son while their marriage falls to ashes and the case turns cold.  Then a sympathetic patrolman passes them the name of a private investigator.  Though they’ve already tried two, Paul finally makes the contact with p.i. Frank Behr.  Behr is reluctant to take the case, as the odds of finding any information (much less the boy himself) are so remote.  But Paul doesn’t know that the case has a hook that Behr can’t pull away from:  Behr’s own son died at the age of seven.

Darkmans for Dark Times

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Nicola Barker’s extraordinary novel, Darkmans, published in 2007 and short listed for the Man Booker Prize, didn’t reach my desk until January of this year.  So it’s still “new fiction” to me. I’ve been thinking about Darkmans for a while now since finishing it. There's a lot to consider.

The Little Lady Agency and the Prince

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Of all the literary sisters of Bridget Jones, Hester Browne’s Melissa Romney-Jones (a.k.a. Honey Blennerhesket) is one of the most charming. 

Not that Melissa would really find Bridget a kindred spirit.  Melissa is a more old-fashioned girl who would never let her standards down far enough to drink and smoke and slack off at work as much as Bridget and her friends, and she wouldn’t be at home with their sarcastic humor.  (Melissa never gets double entendres.)  Though of course she would make perfectly cheerful conversation with any of them at a party—nice girls do, after all.

But her spunky optimism and determination to find true love make Melissa Bridget’s sister under the skin.

We first met Melissa in The Little Lady Agency, when Melissa decided to put her unusual talents to use by opening a business under that name.  All of her old-fashioned domestic accomplishments (not to mention her busty figure that fits 1950s-era clothes better than modern fashions) and her firm belief in the social niceties made her the perfect advisor for London’s clueless bachelors. 

Best College-Admissions Novel Ever, Plus it's Not Plagiarized

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Joseph, protagonist of Bruce Jay Friedman's A Mother's Kisses was a good student in high school, but due to stiff competition from returning WWII soldiers, he finds himself in the summer after his senior year with nowhere to go next.  (These were the days before community colleges and proprietary schools with flexible deadlines.) Fortunately for Joseph (or maybe not), he's got his mother fighting for him.

You'll either love or hate this book.  I love it, but I'm not crazy about this particular cover, because I think the mother should be more glamorous.

A Q&A with Robert Olmstead, Author of On the Same Page Novel, "Coal Black Horse"

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Turning the Page had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Robert Olmstead, author of Coal Black Horse, Cincinnati’s 2008 On the Same Page novel for adults. We asked Mr. Olmstead some general questions, because we wouldn’t want to include spoilers for those of you who haven’t yet read this gripping tale of a young boy seeking his father across the landscape of the Civil War.  

But once you have read Coal Black Horse, be sure to bring your own questions to the book-signing with Mr. Olmstead at the Main Library on Sunday, February 24, or to one of the other events at which he’ll appear. Meanwhile, check out the official Web site for the book.  

TTP:  Where did you get the inspiration for Coal Black Horse?

RO:  In the 1980’s I was living in Pennsylvania not far from Gettysburg. Visiting the battlefield for the first time was a powerful experience. I didn’t know that much about the Civil War, just the usual stuff. So living there, walking that ground, it is my way that I wanted to know as much as I could. And of course everything I learned simply made me all the more curious to learn even more.

On The Same Page 2008

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It has been more than ten years since the first "One Book/One City" community reading program was launched in Seattle.  Since then, hundreds of similar events have been staged; some have lasted and some have not.  We like to think that our program here in Cincinnati has "legs", i.e., that it is an event that people around town look forward to each year. 

We started out in 2002, reading Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying, in an attempt to address the aftermath of the city's riots of 2001.  Over time, the program has become more of a reading event than a city-wide healing event, although the idea of "encouraging community dialogue" continues as a strong undercurrent.  For On The Same Page 2008, the challenge for readers is to experience the Civil War through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy from the mountains of Appalachia, in Robert Olmstead's spellbinding novel, Coal Black Horse.

Olmstead will be in town for several programs, begining with a Civil War History Day on Sunday February 24 from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. in the Main Library.  Discussion groups and special events will be held during the next six weeks throughout Hamilton County, featuring local Civil War history and concluding with a guided Civil War Tour of Spring Grove Cemetery on April 6. 

Each year, there are many ways in which schools, book clubs, and individual readers participate in On The Same Page, making it truly one of the most viable "One Book" programs in the country.  Look for upcoming posts about author Robert Olmstead (and about this year's title for teen readers, Bronx Masquerade).

Fool's Gold

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I keep seeing trailers for a new movie with Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, but the Fool's Gold that pops into my mind every time I see them is a completely unrelated 1993 novel of that title by Albert DiBartolomeo.  Only his second novel (and apparently his last), it was a crisp little mob thriller about a cache of gold coins.

As the book opens, Benny Bean, a violent young thug, steals those coins from a beach house.  But before he has even got them out the door, someone in turn steals them from him.  Furious, Benny tracks down the second thief and kidnaps his daughter, Claire, for ransom.  But the second thief has already been robbed of the coins, too.

Those are just the opening twists in a spirallingly complicated plot.  The coins (which belong to a mob boss) pass through several more pairs of hands while Benny keeps Claire a prisoner and Claire's boyfriend races to recover the coins that will buy her life. 

Fans of the genre will appreciate DiBartolomeo's snappy plotting.  I remember the book as being pretty violent, though with a comic edge, so keep that in mind.  But let me know whether it stands up to my memory of it.  And whether it would make a good movie itself. 

How to Avoid Making Art, and a New Book by Someone Who Hasn't

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It was kind of nice to read two books in a row that I could get through in a single sitting.  The first is Julia Cameron's 2005 book of cartoons, How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy).  The suggestions are funny but sobering, since I've independently discovered them all on my own.  Hang out with time-consuming people.  Think about your novel instead of writing it.  Write emails (or blogs) instead of your novel.  Tell yourself your job makes it too hard to write.  Tell yourself you've missed the boat and are too old anyway.

Sort of related is Charles Webb's Home School, a sequel to his 1963 The Graduate.  It's 11 years later, and Richard Nixon is president.  Benjamin and Elaine are happily married, living outside New York City.  Benjamin works as a library shelver (yay!), but mostly, they devote their lives to homeschooling their 2 sons.  Note that homeschooling once seemed stranger than it does now.  They haven't seen Elaine's mother in 7 years.  That, of course, is just about to change.

People of the Book

Categories Fiction

A very popular genre in recent years has been the history-hopping novel where the author tells a story by tracing a work of art or literature through the centuries and illuminating each generation’s response to it.  Girl in Hyacinth Blue, by Susan Vreeland, was one, The Dream of Scipio, by Iain Pears was another, and Lord Byron’s Novel, by John Crowley still another superb example.

Well, here’s a very readable and enjoyable novel based on the same premise, and this time the found object is both literature and art:  a rare illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain that finally turns up in twentieth-century Sarajevo.  The novel that tells that manuscript’s story is People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks.

Theft: A Love Story

Categories Fiction

I read Peter Carey's Jack Maggs years ago.  That great, fiendishly ebullient Dickensian riff is still my favorite of his many splendid novels, but here's another one that will grab you by the throat, slam you in your seat, and keep you there cover to cover.

Theft:  A Love Story is the tale of Michael "Butcher" Bones, a brilliant painter who has sabotaged his own career by his drinking, his scorching impatience with the Australian art scene, and a short stint in jail for ignoring the divorce court orders that keep him from his son and turned his works into his ex-wife's property. 

Now Butcher is living in a patron's backcountry house, reducing it to a shambles as he works, and looking after his big, thick brother, Hugh.  Into their lives walks gorgeous Marlene, who is attempting to reach the house on the next farm, where there's a painting by her father-in-law, the late, great Jacques Liebovitz. 

The Secret History

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“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation." 

That’s the first line of Donna Tartt’s cult classic The Secret History, and the first time I read the sentence, I was hooked.   

When narrator and native Californian Richard Papen transfers to Hampden College in Vermont, he joins an exclusive group of five other students studying ancient Greek taught by an eccentric professor.  Gradually Richard earns their trust and becomes privy to the group’s secret history: they accidentally murdered a farmer during their recreation of an ancient Greek bacchanal. 

One of the members, Bunny Corcorran, did not participate in the bacchanal and learns of the murder.  As Bunny threatens to reveal their secret, Richard must decide whether to go along with their decision to silence him.  

Sara Paretsky in Town

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Bestselling author Sara Paretsky will be in town next week, speaking at a program and book signing sponsored by the library on Thursday, January 17. 

She’s most famous of course as one of the “founding mothers” of crime fiction.  Her mystery series featuring Chicago private detective V. I. Warshawski  was one of the first to feature a female p.i., showing that a woman detective could be as at home on the mean streets as at the tea table.

In her latest novel, Bleeding Kansas, she returns to her roots for an eerie story of neighbor turned against neighbor.  Like her other non-series novel, the 1998 Ghost Country, the story is a showcase for her passionate social convictions.   

Paretsky draws on the legacy of violence in her home state—both the bloody battle over slavery in Kansas in the 1850s and the Civil Rights struggle and generational divide of the 1960s and 1970s. 

The novel’s contemporary story parallels those historic conflicts.  Paretsky sees another generation bitterly divided, this time over religious convictions, sexual practices, and the war in Iraq.

Emily on Fire

Categories Fiction

The Gathering

Categories Fiction ,

You don’t really need me to tell you about Anne Enright’s The Gathering, since it won this year’s Booker prize.  But I just read it in one big gulp, and I can’t resist telling you how gorgeous it is.  And I have another book to suggest while you wait for your copy to be available.

The Gathering is a story of family and memory.  An Irishwoman mourns her brother’s suicide while calling up the intensely tangible memories of him and their childhood and youth together, memories that coalesce around the year they spent living with their grandmother and what happened to them there.

Enright writes so beautifully, so specifically, evoking the dense physicality of memory and family emotions, that readers will be seduced with every perfect word and scene. 

Guppies for Tea

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I love minor novels.  Don’t get me wrong, I love major novels, too—big, muscular novels of ideas and literary bravura—but sometimes a small-scale work is just the right size.  Lately, that seems to be what I’ve been in the mood for.  (Did you like Moon Women and Uninvited Daughters?)

Englishwoman Marika Cobbold’s 1994 debut, Guppies for Tea, is another graceful, assured, and deliberately small-scale work.

Amelia Lindsey, by nature rather vague and irresolute, finds herself forced to take up the role of caretaker for her widowed grandmother, Selma.  The family has put Selma into a nursing home—nice enough in its way, but depressingly cheerful—and Selma hates it.

Moon Women

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Okay, last week’s entry was about a cool and formal book for readers who like to see how a writer thinks.

This week’s is for readers who like to plunge right into a sympathetic story about likeable characters.

Moon Women, by Pamela Duncan, is the story of three generations of Southern women learning to find peace with each other and with their changing lives. 

Middle-aged, divorced mill worker Ruth Ann Payne is going to pick up her daughter, nineteen-year-old Ashley, from a rehab center.  Ashley, always trouble, is now pregnant, too.  Meanwhile, Marvelle, Ruth Ann’s mother, who has begun to suffer from dementia, has wandered away from her other daughter’s house, determined to stay with Ruth Ann.  So Ruth Ann’s house becomes home for all three of them, and the delicate process of accommodating each other begins.

It Ended Badly

Categories Fiction

At a certain point in the days of my youth, Choose-your-own-Adventure books enjoyed a surge in popularity. I must admit I was one of the many in my generation who paged frantically back and forth exploring another planet or trying to find the lost treasure. I also have to admit that more often than not I was bitten by a poisonous creature or perished in a pit trap. 

I have to admit that my decision making, at least in novels of this sort, has a certain exuberance that overrides my common sense.  Offered the phrase You see a dark wood door;  from behind it comes the sound of uncanny howling.  Do you:

• Open the Door  (turn to page 58)
• Go back down the passage  (turn to page 84)

I'm going to almost always turn to page 58.  I've also now verified that this trait has continued into adulthood with my recent thumbing through several of the hundreds of available plots in Heather McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes.

The Air We Breathe

Categories Fiction

Some people don’t like fiction that feels “cool,” where there’s a sense that the author has stepped back a pace from her characters.   But it can be fascinating to watch a writer use the formalities of fiction to explore her subject.  If you agree, try Andrea Barrett’s elegant new historical, The Air We Breathe. 

The novel is set in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Adirondacks in 1916.  The inmates (who speak as a kind of Greek chorus in an unusual experiment in first person plural narration) are eagerly curious about the newest arrival amongst them.

How that new arrival changes their society results in personal tragedy for several.  And it serves Barrett as a catalyst to explore the interactions of science and social attitudes—attitudes toward medicine, poverty, immigration, patriotism, and war. 

Uninvited Daughters

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Odessa Levin lives in a Vermont saltbox cottage sparely furnished with Shaker pieces of the sort she always longed for during her Long Island-Jewish childhood, which was, let’s say, somewhat more baroque.

She’s single, and she has pared the complications of her life down almost to nothing.  But now she’s beginning to wonder whether that was a good idea.

Into her life walks Megan Vasquez, a lonely and eccentric ten-year-old who’s suffering through the divorce of her Mexican-American father and her New-Age, WASP-rebel stepmother.

Of course, as every experienced fiction reader or moviegoer can guess, befriending Megan will bring lots of sticky complications to Odessa’s tidy, pseudo-Yankee life.  But of course that’s the delight of Elinor Spielberg’s 1993 debut, Uninvited Daughters.

Three flavors of Apocalypse

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I've had this eerie relationship with apocalyptic fiction ever since I found Nevil Shute's On the Beach as a 11 or 12 year old kid. I'm not entirely sure how to describe what this unbearably grim story did to my young mind. Needless to say I had trouble getting to sleep for a week or two and spent the next year or so worried that the Russians were going to drop the bomb on us before I even got my first kiss. Luckily, after that year the Berlin Wall fell, and soon after that the Soviet Union split up, and then I got my first kiss, so there were a few less worries to plague my young mind. However, my thirst for fiction that proposes the worst began at that point and has never quite left me.

Any Requests Part III

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Here are the rest of the titles I previewed last week. 

The political love story is Letter to Lorenzo, by Amanda Prantera.  Julia, the English wife of a wealthy young Roman, is devastated when she is told that he has been killed by a car bomb.  Her agonizing grief for her husband is complicated by her bewilderment:  why would Red Brigade terrorists kill her husband when the two of them were known for their own socialist convictions?  It must be a neo-fascist plot to discredit him.  But careful, relentless interrogation by the investigating magistrate reveals that the police think her husband was a terrorist transporting the bomb himself.  Julia’s world is turned upside down again.  Her grief is powerfully portrayed, and her painfully honest attempts to understand her marriage and her politics are utterly persuasive, as is the subtle characterization of the magistrate who forces her into this possible reconsideration of everything she believed.

Any Requests, Part II

Categories Fiction ,

Last week I dug through my piles and files of books and reviews to post about some titles I thought you might have missed. 

I got a little bit of response, including a few emails, from people who were curious about what the titles might be (no guesses, though!).  No one commented about what kind of books they'd like to see more of in these posts, though, so I just want to repeat--don't be shy if there's something you're looking for.  There's always more where these came from! 

Anyway, read on if you were curious about any of the little blurbs and what the titles were.   Did any of you recognize these titles?

The Mapmaker's Opera

Categories Fiction

It's not really an opera, rather more of an often-told story from a grandmother to her grandchildren.  And in the telling of the story, she manages to convey the ethos of cultures from long ago and far away, and to plant in the childrens' minds an unshakeable memory of herself.  The Mapmaker's Opera is a charming story that winds from the crocus fields of La Mancha in rural Spain to the streets of Seville, and across the Atlantic to the Yucatan of Mexico.  In the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, where a single glimpse at one's true love can lead to a lifetime of sacrifice and suffering, this novel involves "forbidden love, unbearable grief, one country lost and another one found."  Author Bea Gonzalez, a native of Spain who now lives in Toronto, writes with a true appreciation for the beauty, pathos, and subtle humor that can be found in the classic novels of her homeland.  This is a delightful gem of a story, highly recommended.

Paranoid Park

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A suburban teen skater is haunted by the gruesome death of a security guard in Blake Nelson's tense little novel, Paranoid Park.  Marketed to teen readers, the book has just as much appeal for adults, and has recently been made into a film by director Gus Van Sant.  The film debuted at Cannes film festival in 2007, and is scheduled for limited release in the United States in March 2008. 

The story takes place in a downtown skate park in Portland.  The narrator hesitates to get involved with a street kid who tries to befriend him, and when a dare goes wrong, the narrator's life changes forever. You can't help but be drawn in by the guilt-ridden complexity of this teen's situation.  Recommended for skaters and non-skaters alike.

Any Requests?

Categories Fiction ,

I knew a regular library user who carried a tiny notebook in his jacket pocket.  It was the latest in a long line of notebooks he had kept over the years, stretching back to when he lived in Shanghai in 1945, neatly recording all of the books he had read since then.

I was always somewhat awestruck by this, but I couldn’t help but feel it was Too Late for me to follow his example, even if I weren’t Too Lazy to keep it up. 

The wonderful LibraryThing, a website that lets you catalog your library and share it, is the modern equivalent (and much more!) of those notebooks, but even that strikes me as Too Exhausting when I look around at all of the books I’d love to add to it.

Still, looking around at all of those books does make me want to share them with you. 

So here’s my question.  What kind of books would you most like me to post about?

Fantasy and a Little Romance

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Okay, I know it’s Halloween, but how about some romantic fantasy that’s a little less creature-of-the-night than the current crop of vampire romances? 

The authors of these books would describe themselves as fantasy writers rather than romance writers, but I think their books have plenty of appeal for readers of both genres.   Whether your heart lies with high fantasy or with grand romance, you’ll find yourself swept away.

I wrote last year about War for the Oaks, Emma Bull’s fantasy about a rocker chick who gets caught up in a faerie war.   Here are just a few more suggestions of fantasies with strong romantic elements—lots more where they came from!  Teen readers might enjoy these, too. 

Agatha Christie's Halloween Party

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During preparations for a Halloween party in the English village of Woodleigh Common, 13-year-old Joyce Reynolds boasts that she saw a murder years ago.  Nobody believes her, until she is found drowned during the party in a tub for bobbing apples.  Detective Hercule Poirot is on the scene to investigate in Halloween Party, another tale from master of suspense Agatha Christie. 

Want to curl up with more Halloween-themed murder mysteries on October 31st?  Try these spooky suggestions, also written by women:

Witches’ Bane by Susan Wittig Albert:  When a Halloween prank ends in murder, herb shop owner and private eye China Bayles’ friend Ruby becomes a prime suspect after being accused of practicing witchcraft.

Hallowed Bones by Carolyn Haines:  As Halloween approaches, Private Investigator Sarah Booth Delaney probes the controversial case of Doreen Mallory, accused of killing her handicapped infant daughter. 

Trick or Treat Murder by Leslie Meier:  While preparing for the annual Halloween festival in Tinker’s Cove, Maine, Lucy Stone investigates a series of arsons that are destroying the town’s historic homes, one of which claims the life of socialite Monica Mayes. 

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict

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I’ve read a couple of Jane Austen's novels and have seen many of them adapted on film, but author Laurie Viera Rigler is a self-proclaimed Jane Austen addict.  She has read and reread all six of Austen’s books and is a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America.  She has also just written her first novel, a charming romantic tale called Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict.  

After Courtney Stone finds her boyfriend Frank having an affair with their wedding cake designer, she nurses her rejection with a copy of Pride and Prejudice and a bottle of Absolut.  She wakes up to find herself in the body of Jane Mansfield, a 19th-century English woman.

Courtney is not prepared for the chamber pots, corsets, and endless embroidery that are a normal part of Jane’s life.  But living in Jane’s body does have its perks: servants wait on her hand and foot, there’s plenty of delicious food to eat and balls to attend, and the dashing Mr. Edgeworth makes her weak in the knees.  But can he be trusted?  And how will she ever return to her life in 21st-century Los Angeles? 

Elizabeth Gilbert's Stern Men and Not-So-Stern Women

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I haven’t read Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest, Eat, Pray, Love:  One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia, about the voyage of self-discovery she undertook after her marriage fell apart.  (I’m in line behind many of you!) 

But seeing her name in reviews brings back fond memories of her 2000 debut novel, Stern Men, a memorable coming of age story set in the islands off the coast of Maine.

Its heroine is young Ruth Thomas, born and bred on Fort Niles, one of two neighboring islands that survive on the lobster industry.  (The island’s other main industry is suspicion of outsiders, including those from the other island.)  Ruth is the daughter of a lobsterman and an outsider.

Ghosts, Vampires, and Witches, Oh My!

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Just in time for Halloween--a scintillating, sizzling, sexy array of paranormal chick lit.  Whether vampires are your thing, or demons turn you on, you're guaranteed to find something to read here:

• Real Vampires Live Large--Gerry Bartlett
• Sex and the Psychic Witch--Annette Blair
• Undead and Uneasy--MaryJanice Davidson
• Dead Sexy--Tate Hallaway
• Charmed & Deadly--Candace Havens
• Demons Are Forever--Julie Kenner
• My Sister Is a Werewolf--Kathy Love
• Bled Dry--Erin McCarthy
• Sex and the Single Ghost--Tawny Taylor

The Tenderness of Wolves

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The word “haunting” has shown up in virtually every review I’ve seen of The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney’s debut historical, which won the 2006 Costa first novel award (formerly the Whitbread). 

Partly, that may be because of the book’s ending, which isn’t entirely resolved—fair warning if you like to close a book and have things wrapped up.  But mostly it’s because the book is so eerily atmospheric.  Fair warning number two:  don’t read this book in February. 

Dove River is a nineteenth-century settlement in Canada’s Northern Territory.  Despite its tenderly peaceful name, it’s a harshly isolated place dominated by the majestic, menacing subarctic winter.

Mrs. Ross, one of the settlement wives, finds the murdered body of Laurent Jammet, a Hudson Bay voyageur turned hunter.  She rouses the authorities, but then realizes she has a stake in the investigation—her seventeen-year-old son, Francis, Laurent’s friend, has disappeared and is soon a suspect in Laurent’s murder.

The Reconstruction

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Here’s an oddball little title that has stuck with me for years:  Claudia Casper’s debut novel The Reconstruction.  It begins as a well-done but fairly predictable story of a woman at a loss at the loss of her marriage.  But midway through, things get considerably more quirky and charming.

Artist Margaret has been plunged into a stagnating depression since her marriage fell apart.  She’s not working or doing anything else too constructive until she is hired to make a museum diorama figure of a (presumed) female Australopithecus afarensis hominid.  This recreation is to show the hominid pausing, half-turned, as recorded in the famous fossil footprints of Laetoli. 

The Dead Don't Lie: An Abe Lieberman Mystery

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I just read Stuart M. Kaminsky’s The Dead Don’t Lie, the latest Abe Lieberman mystery.

I’ve enjoyed the series since its 1991 debut with Lieberman’s Folly.  That volume introduced the Chicago police detective—sixty-ish, feeling the first twinges of mortality in his arthritic knees, a world-weary basset hound of a man whose mild manner hid decades of street smarts.  We also met Lieberman’s partner, Bill Hanrahan, a decent but troubled man who was drinking too much since his wife left. 

Great minor characters rounded out the cast, from Lieberman’s energetic wife, Bess (leading light of their local temple); to Iris, the quiet Chinese waitress whom the Irish-Catholic Hanrahan found himself courting; to Lieberman’s brother, Maish, and the chorus of “alter cockers” who frequent Maish’s deli. 

In The Dead Don’t Lie, our heroes have a few more years on them.  And this time around, they’re working a pair of puzzling mysteries.

The Fencing Master

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I wrote last week about a tragedy in the classic American Western genre.  Here’s another elegant short novel that’s both adventure story and tragic character study.  A pretty different setting, though.

The book is The Fencing Master, by Arturo Perez-Reverte.

In a Spain racked by political upheaval and rumors of revolution (it’s 1868), fencing master Don Jaime Astarloa abstains from politics and devotes himself to his ancient and honorable art.  Though modern weapons are making sword work obsolete, Don Jaime continues to teach it to a small group of noble pupils, and still hopes to bring it to perfection by formulating the legendary unstoppable thrust.

Despite his academic isolation and his old-fashioned ideas of honor, he bends his principles enough to take on a very unusual pupil, the beautiful and mysterious Adela de Otero, who comes to him already an accomplished swordswoman and asks to learn his most advanced technique.

Unleash Your Inner Pirate on September 19

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Yes, I know, it is on the verge of being overdone, this pirate thing.  But, really, people do need to have fun, and dressing up like a Buccaneer or a Scurvy Wench only on Halloween is not enough for some.  So, now is the time get ready for Talk Like A Pirate Day on September 19.  Hide the treasure chests!  Protect the women and children!  Annoy your co-workers! 

Refugio, They Named You Wrong

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I’m glad the new version of 3:10 to Yuma is getting good reviews.  The Western is such a classic American genre, and it’s wonderful to see it rediscovered periodically both in film and on the page. 

I’ve blogged previously about Elmer Kelton and how much I like his Western novels, elegantly simple frontier tales that are somehow as grand as the landscape in which they’re set.

Refugio, They Named You Wrong, by Susan Clark Schofield, is another favorite of mine. 

An Arsonist's Guide...

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Brock Clarke, a Cincinnati writer and all-around good guy, does not promote arson or any other sorts of criminal activity, really.  It's just that the hero of his novel inadvertently started a fire at an important historical site, and things quickly went downhill from there.  In An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, Sam Pulsifer is an 'accidental arsonist', a self-professed 'bumbler', and sort of an everyman who seems to be sleepwalking through life.   He serves as a lightning rod for the trials and tribulations that commonly befall the modern American male.   

The Cockroaches of Stay More

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From Aesop to Animal Farm to the delightful mystery Mark blogged a few weeks ago, it’s a fine old literary tradition to dress up a sharp-toothed bit of satire in sheep’s clothing, so to speak, telling a telling tale by pretending you’re just talking about animals. 

Or even insects.  Yep, there’s precedent for that, too, of course. 

So readers of Donald Harington’s The Cockroaches of Stay More shouldn’t be surprised to find a sly literary spoof and social satire between the covers of this cult classic, an immensely clever and entertaining novel that pokes fun at a whole range of human foibles—literature, sex, class, religion, and the atom bomb—all from the point of view of cockroaches.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.

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I like baseball, but not nearly as much as the protagonist of Robert Coover's novel The Univeral Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.  The character's name is Henry Waugh, and he is not just a typical rabid Major League Baseball fan.  He has taken baseball fanaticism to new heights.  In fact, real life Major League Baseball isn't what he is concerned with, but a completely imagined league that is played as a game with dice.  And if even this doesn't sound too out of the ordinary, Henry's game is fabricated to such a degree that a whole universe has been created around every possible aspect of the experience.  For example, entire generations of players and seasons have already taken place and are established in his mind and all players past and present have fully realized personalities and histories that come to bear on the game itself.

Decline and Fall / Evelyn Waugh

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Paul Pennyfeather, an industrious third-year student at the College of Scone, Oxford, and the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, innocently crosses paths with members of the posh Bollinger Club.  Naturally, the next thing that happens is that Oxford administrators unfairly "send him down" for "indecent behavior," and Paul is forced to take work as an instructor at a Welsh preparatory school.  Since the novel is a dark comedy, Paul quiets his first class by offering a prize to the student who can write the longest essay, regardless of merit.

Interestingly, although Waugh certainly does not mean for us to respect Paul's teaching ability, this writing-instruction technique is quite popular among contemporary English composition instructors, including me. 

Hot and Steamy

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The weather's not the only thing that's hot and steamy these days.  This summer's batch of new romances are just as sultry.  If you're in the mood for a little romance (and perhaps one or two or ten scorching love scenes), check out these latest titles.  They're guaranteed to raise your temperature a degree or two.

Historical Romance:

• Passion for the Game--Sylvia Day
• Sins of a Duke--Suzanne Enoch
• Desperate Duchesses--Eloisa James

Romantic Suspense:

• Into the Dark--Cindy Gerard
• Abandon--Carla Neggers
• Whisper My Name--Maureen Smith

Arkady Renko and Stalin's Ghost

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Twenty-six years ago, Gorky Park transported American readers to a frozen crime scene in Moscow and introduced Senior Inspector Arkady Renko, a homicide specialist in a country "that had little organized crime and no talent for finesse." A murderer is frequently a drunk nearby.   

But evidence of a triple murder has emerged in the thawing ice and snow of April.  A KGB major is already on the scene when Renko arrives.  Renko's relationship with the KGB is testy and antagonistic.   The victims—two men, and a woman wearing ice skates—will be difficult to identify.  Each has a gunshot wound in the head and in the heart.  The hands have been removed to prevent fingerprinting.  

Renko lights a cigarette.  His job is to find killers, but he can’t stand the sight of a dead body.   

The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

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I suppose there’s a downside to being a literary wonder boy.  Each of Michael Chabon’s novels has been so extraordinary (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Summerland, and more--not to mention Wonder Boys) that I’m sure he’s kept awake nights thinking how to top them.

His newest, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is probably not my favorite, though for sheer whiz-bang originality it’s tough to beat—it’s a playfully sophisticated, Yiddish-drenched, noir, alternate-world satire.  Sitka, Alaska, was designated a protectorate for Jews displaced during World War II , but sixty years later it’s about to be reassimilated into America, along with its melancholy protagonist, policeman Meyer Landsman—a process hardly likely to go smoothly. 

I admired it more than I liked it.  But the author of the 2004 The Final Solution:  A Story of Detection can rest on his laurels for the rest of his literary career, as far as I’m concerned (though I’m glad he doesn’t).  It’s another highly literary and original takeoff on a familiar genre, though it, too, got mixed reviews.  I think it’s breathtaking.

Celebrate Shark Week!

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The Discovery Channel is in the midst of their annual Shark Week celebration.  From July 29th-August 4th, Discovery is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Shark Week.  Tonight's episode, "Perfect Predators", airs at 9 pm.  The Newport Aquarium is also getting in on the fun with Shark Fest.  Receive free giveaways, pet sharks, and see sharks fed daily.  For those of you obsessed with shark attacks (and I know you're out there), check out the International Shark Attack File.  It might surprise some of you to learn that Florida, not Australia, leads the world in shark attacks.  Since 1990, Florida has seen 365 attacks, compared to Australia's 94.

Consequences

Categories Fiction

The lives of three generations of women are the fodder for British writer Penelope Lively’s latest rich and subtle work of fiction, Consequences.

Lorna, the diffidently rebellious daughter of well-to-do parents, sits weeping on a London park bench in 1935 after yet another pointless argument with her socially ambitious and conventional mother. 

Matt Faraday is sketching nearby for a series of woodcuts he is working on.  (Art college was his path out of a working-class life in a Welsh village.) 

Their meeting leads to an unconventional marriage, launching a family quiet unlike the one either was born into.  World War II, which cuts short their life together, brings changes to British society that make their descendants’ lives in turn unimaginably different from their own.  But the bonds of love and family transcend the generations.

Timothy and the Sleuthing Sheep

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In the category of winsome, anthropomorphic nature fiction, Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg was last year's unexpected and delightful prize.  This little study, translated from the German, is narrated by a tortoise named Timothy, who lived, in fact, in a garden belonging Gilbert White, an 18th century British curate and naturalist.  White wrote The Natural History of Selborne, an enduringly popular work of scholarship, and recorded his observations of Timothy in his journals. 

Verlyn Klinkenborg slyly turns Timothy, the object of scientific inquiry, into a watchful chronicler of the Selborne environs and a commentator on the strange ways of its human population.  The action, if a turtle’s meander can be so characterized, occurs during a week of freedom that Timothy spends beyond the garden gate.  I recommended Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile as an irresistible little gem in 2006.

Man about Town

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Joe Lingeman is a mid-level advisor on legislative matters to Congress.  It’s an interesting job, but not exactly earth-shaking. 

He has been in a relationship with his lover, Sam, for fifteen years.  Again, comfortable, but the earth doesn’t really move.

Then Sam leaves him.  And on the job, he’s suddenly in bed (legislatively speaking) with a homophobic senator who wants to ban Medicare payments to gay AIDS patients.  Joe is forced to face the fact that he doesn’t have any of the things he wanted to have by midlife. 

And what were those things?  He remembers the glimpse of infinite possibilities he got at fourteen, when he came across the photo of a beautiful youth in a swimsuit ad at the back of a suave men’s magazine.  It seemed like a window into another world to the naïve, repressed boy he was. 

The King is Bach

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There is one corpse in the body count and the novel isn't open yet.  Richard Bachman, pseudonym for Stephen King, died of cancer of the pseudonym back in 1985. This novel, Blaze, was unearthed by Stephen King and published just this year.  It's about a dead guy and written by a different dead guy yet the codex exists right here in my hot little hands in all it's jacketed black and orange glory.

Clayton Blaisdell Jr. is one of the most unfortunate characters of the lot of Stephen King's books.  His mother dies and Clayton is left with his alcoholic and abusive father who throws him down the apartment stairs one time too many. 

Then She Found Me

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Thirty-something high school Latin teacher April Epner has never had any desire to find the woman who gave her up for adoption.  Her adoptive parents were perfectly loving, if rather restrained, and she is contented with her single state and quiet career.

But into her tidy life bursts Bernice Graverman, a flamboyantly self-dramatizing woman who wears “toad sized clip-on earrings” and “wet-look white eyeshadow.”  Bernice, who is a local talk show host, confessed to her TV audience that she once gave up a child for adoption, and the ratings were so good (“You didn’t happen to see the show, did you?”) that tracking down April was the inevitable next step.

That’s how Elinor Lipman’s 1990 debut novel Then She Found Me begins.  The rest of it is just as wryly funny and perfectly pitched. 

Paul Christopher's Ghosts

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Shortly before the outbreak of Word War II, 16-year-old Paul Christopher resides in Berlin with his American father, Hubbard, and his beautiful German mother, Lori, a baroness.  It’s a time of great tension for Jews and non-Germans in Berlin, especially for the Hubbards.  They have helped Jewish families escape the Reich to Denmark on their small sailboat.  The secret police, directed by an SS officer named Stutzer, are watching them.

The danger for the family increases after Paul meets Rima, a Jewish girl, and he falls in love.  Their relationship possesses a fatalistic gravity far beyond their adolescent years. As the threat of arrest increases, Paul’s parents send him home to New York City for safety.  But Paul can think only of Rima's safety, and he returns to Germany.   

The Edible Woman

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I recently joined a book club where the members are all (we would admit this) women of a certain age.  While we were making our list of must-reads, scribbling down titles of great books we always wished we had read, we discovered that not everyone in the group had read Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman. 

Well, that was that.  Half the room leaned forward and said in chorus, “Oh, you’ve got to read it!” 

There’s something about living through an era of social change that makes you want to tell people about it and gives you an enormous camaraderie with other people who went through it, too.  (Any social change—this summer, ask someone older what life was like before air conditioning, for example.) 

If someone can do that telling as vividly and hilariously as Atwood does in this 1969 classic of the early women’s movement, you’ve just got to pay attention.

Devils in the Sugar Shop

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Detective in a Strange Land

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I love a good mystery novel.  Likewise, a piece of science fiction, especially one with an anthropological bent, really makes me want to curl up and read all night.  Books that straddle the gap between these two genres:  pure bliss.

I recently found Paloma, a new book in the Retrieval Artist series by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.  I was so happy to see a new one is out, because I tore through the other four in the series last summer, reveling in the mystery plots centered around humanity's interaction with various species of aliens and the ensuing political and legal conflicts. 

Cut to the Quick

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I’ve been blogging mystery and suspense novels for the past few weeks.  This one’s a mystery, too, but a delightfully charming period mystery quite unlike those other titles.

Kate Ross’s series debut, Cut to the Quick¸ introduced Julian Kestrel, a London dandy of the 1820s.  Invited to a country house to be the best man at a wedding, he finds that the groom’s aristocratic family is being blackmailed into accepting a former stable hand’s daughter as the bride.

More startling still, Julian finds the body of an unidentified young woman in the bed of his guest room.  When his own manservant (a former cutpurse) is accused of her murder, Julian steps in to find the real culprit, and of course discovers that the murder and the blackmail are linked.

Virgin Lies

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Virgin Lies is the second suspense novel by Roderick Anscombe to feature forensic psychiatrist Dr. Paul Lucas.  You don’t have to have read the first one, The Interview Room, to catch up, though—you’ll be caught up in the suspense from the very first scene, when Lucas fields a frantic phonecall from his wife, Abby, who wants him to use his professional skills to find a missing child—a child who may die while the adults who care for her stand helplessly by, just as their own child did.

Neither A Good Nor Happy Child

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Justin Evans’ psychological thriller debut, A Good and Happy Child doesn’t open, it launches.   Once began, the story grimly informs the reader that the protagonist, George Davies is neither good nor happy. 

George Davies is a married New Yorker with a newborn son.  George and his wife aren't getting along because he cannot hold his infant son.   His wife orders him to seek help, so he begins to see a psychiatrist and record his past in notebooks.  Each chapter is representative of a notebook and they reveal that George was admitted to a mental institution in his adolescent years for violent behavior and possible demonic possession. 

Requiem for a Dealer

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I just read Jo Bannister’s sixth Brodie Farrell mystery, Requiem for a Dealer.  I’ve always liked her work—her Castlemere books are great police procedurals set in northern England—but I think I like these best. 

Brodie is a brisk, resourceful woman who runs a finding service in a little coastal English town.  She tracks down missing pets, locates china patterns in online auctions, whatever needs finding.

In the series debut, Echoes of Lies, she was given a photograph and asked to find the man in it.  She quickly and cleverly identified him as a local teacher, Daniel Hood.  What she didn’t know was that she was finding him for people who then tortured him for information they believed he had, and left him for dead.

He Saw the Other Side

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One might think that after my last blog, I might be done with ideas dragged out of the nursery and dressed in adult clothes.  Not so!  In fact, I continued in the same vein this past week with The Bear Went Over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle. 

In The Bear Went Over the Mountain, a struggling Maine author loses his first manuscript to a fire, and the briefcase containing his second one to a bear.  The author goes into a deep depression.  The bear dresses up in clothes, reminds himself not to carry the briefcase in his mouth, and heads off to sell the manuscript in New York. 

Murder on the Menu

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Do you love to cook?  Are you always on the lookout for a fantastic new recipe?  Then you might want to peruse the library's listing of recipe websites.  If you prefer reading about food to cooking it (and don't mind a little murder mixed in here and there), then check out the following culinary mysteries:

• Dark Tort--Diane Mott Davidson--Colorado caterer Goldy Schulz tries to solve the mysterious death of Dusty Routt, a promising young paralegal.
• The Flaming Luau of Death--Jerrilyn Farmer--While throwing a bachelorette party in Hawaii for a valued employee, event planner Madeline Bean feels compelled to investigate when a body washes up on the beach.
• Key Lime Pie Murder--Joanne Fluke--When a teacher is found murdered during Lake Eden's bakery contest, Minnesota resident and bakery owner Hannah Swensen once again plays amateur sleuth to unmask a murderer.

Leaving Disneyland

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You wouldn’t guess it from the title, but Leaving Disneyland, the debut suspense novel by Alexander Parsons, is one I recommended to a fan of Walter Mosley and George P. Pelecanos.  

The book’s main character, Doc, has served sixteen years of a twenty-year sentence in the grim and crumbling Tyburn Federal Penitentiary.  He is almost due to face the parole board again when is assigned to a new cell.  And it can’t be a coincidence that his new cellmate is a young druglord from a rival gang, whom honor requires Doc and his friends to kill.

Mysteries at the Jersey Shore: Chris Grabenstein

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 Mystery writer Chris Grabenstein takes his readers to a place that evokes memories of surf, sand, and sunburn.  Anyone who has ever been lucky enough to spend a few summer days at the Jersey Shore knows all about the essential components of a seaside resort town: boardwalks, salt water taffy stands, fried clam shacks, family-run motels, souvenir shops, and amusement park rides.  In the fictional town of Sea Haven,  those old familiar rides and carnival games also serve as the titles for Grabensteins's clever mysteries, as in Tilt-a-Whirl, the first entry in the series.

Do you know Jack

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Imagine a novel where Jack comes to the big city to seek his fortune.  The twist is, the city is Toy City and populated only with toys and nursery rhyme characters.  On the night of Jack's arrival, he's mugged and left in an alley. From there, he teams up with a bear named Eddie to solve the serial murders of Humpty Dumpty, Little Boy Blue, and Eddie's former partner Bill (a.k.a. Wee Willie) Winkie.  Along the way he meets a love interest (Jill) and develops a drinking problem (the problem being: the glasses in Toy city are all toy-sized--he solves it by ordering ten drinks at once).  This is Robert Rankin's The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalpyse and it is a hilarious diversion for a summer evening.

Big Red Tequila

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Big Red Tequila is a great title for a Texas mystery, isn’t it?  This novel gets it right right on the title page.

Rick Riordan is probably more famous nowadays as the author of a teen fantasy series based on Greek mythology—his bestselling The Lightning Thief was our teen book choice for On the Same Page.

But back in 1997 he debuted an adult mystery series set in San Antonio.  He got more than the title just right.  All of you readers who enjoy a nice semi-hard-boiled mystery with an appealingly thoughtful but smart-talking hero and a well-realized regional setting should try the Tres Navarre series.

Krauss' "History of Love" is One Worth Repeating

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The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, was one of those rare novels that captured me on page one then held me hostage from other activities—namely eating and sleeping—until I reached the final page.  And once I was released, all I wanted to do was find someone else who'd read it and shared my experience.

History is about many things—aging and loss, love and friendship, memories—but it is also a book about a book with the same title.  The mystery of this book within a book propels the action towards a breathless conclusion.  I often found myself flipping through pages I'd already read in order to confirm my suspicions.  And I restrained myself from flipping ahead in the book or even reading the summary on the back of the book to avoid becoming spoiled.

Garnethill

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How about a little suspense?

I’m looking back at a whole stash of good, nailbiting suspense novels and nice, twisty mysteries that I’ve read in the past few years, and I think my next several posts are going to be about those genres. 

Maybe it’s the hot sunshine we’ve been having lately that has put me in a noir mood—I once read a definition that said a true noir movie had to have a shot somewhere in it of broken light slanting in through venetian blinds. 

I don’t think my first title quite fits that definition, since it takes place in Glasgow.  But it sure fills the bill for gripping suspense.

It’s Denise Mina’s award-winning 1999 debut, Garnethill.

Belly Laughs

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Good things about being pregnant:  Cute clothes (for you and the baby).  Ultrasound pictures.  Feeling the baby kick.  People letting you go first in the bathroom line because they're afraid you might go into labor.  Bad things about being pregnant:  Nausea.  Exhaustion.  People who insist you're having twins because "nobody could be that big and not be having twins" (thanks, that makes me feel tons better).  Not being able to shave your legs because you lost sight of them months ago.  Complete strangers asking if they can rub your belly for good luck (answer:  what do I look like, an oversized rabbit's foot?).

If all this sounds familiar to you (or you're just dying to know how you, too, can skip to the front of the restroom line), then read Jenny McCarthy's very funny and very frank Belly Laughs:  The Naked Truth About Pregnancy and Childbirth.  It's an informative and often sidesplitting look at the wacky, weird, wonderful world of pregnancy.

The Chronicles of Prydain: Classic High Fantasy

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News of the death of children’s writer Lloyd Alexander last week sent me to the bookshelves to reread his Chronicles of Prydain.  It's one of my all-time favorite works of fantasy, whether for children or for adults, a splendid work of high fantasy based on Welsh legend.  Have all of you Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fans discovered it?  The first volume is The Book of Three. 

In quiet Caer Dahlben, the sheltered farm of the great enchanter Dahlben, orphaned Taran tends the oracular pig, Hen Wen, and helps out in the fields and the smithy. 

But what he really longs for is to be a hero.  Glory and grandeur fill his dreams—he’s sure he could do noble deeds, given the chance. 

So when the war bands of the terrible dark lord Arawn threaten Caer Dahlben, causing Hen Wen to run off in a panic, Taran doesn’t think twice.  He dashes off after her, plunging himself into perilous adventure. 

Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay

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The dreaded first year of parenthood.  Your parents, friends, co-workers and people on the street have probably all warned you about it.  Sleepless nights.  Hours-long crying episodes.  Diaper explosions.  Colic.  And on and on and on.  Now that I've scared off everyone in the "planning for a baby" stage, erase those images from your mind and picture...The first time your baby smiles at you.  The first time they fall asleep on your chest.  The first time they grab your hand or pat your cheek.

If you need more convincing (and could use a good laugh), then read Stefanie Wilder-Taylor's Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, and Other Things I Had to Learn as a New Mom, in which the L.A.-based comedienne discusses sharing parenting duties, the trials and tribulations of breastfeeding, and bonding (or not) with other new moms.

Levy's Last Open Road

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Drivers wanted for Burt (B.S) Levy's Series of 1950's open-road car racing novels!

I Don't Know How She Does It

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Right now my toddler has a cold and is pretty miserable.  Which means I'm pretty miserable.  She doesn't care to blow her nose, instead preferring her sleeve.  She also doesn't care to take her medicine, instead preferring to spit it back out (usually on me).  Getting a two-year-old out of the house on a good day takes forever.  When she doesn't feel well, and insists on carting her teddy, two blankets, Elmo, Tigger, and several dolls into the car with her---well, you might as well give it up.

It's on days like this that I'm reminded of Kate Reddy, heroine of Allison Pearson's ode to working moms, I Don't  Know How She Does It:  The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother.

Mothers and Daughters

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Today, I’m kicking off my monthlong tribute to mothers by looking at the often tempestuous, never boring mother-daughter relationship.  One of my favorite novels about this subject is Wendy French’s sMothering (check out the great cover!)  In it, 23-year-old Claire McLeod, who lives in Portland, Oregon, is astonished (and frightened) when her domineering mother arrives on her doorstep.  Refusing to say why she’s left Claire’s dad, her mother immediately sets about reorganizing her apartment, interfering in her love life, and generally making Claire’s life a living hell.  It’s a hilarious and often poignant send-up of the complicated love that exists between mother and daughter.

Looking for other great reads?  Then check out Kris Radish’s The Sunday List of Dreams, Dani Shapiro’s Black & White, Jo-Ann Mapson’s The Owl & Moon Café, and Kelly Braffet’s Last Seen Leaving.

Michael Dibdin

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Michael Dibdin died on March 30.  He was best known for his mystery series featuring Venetian Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen.  The final novel in the series, End Games, will be published in the fall.

As much as the character of Zen defines the novels—morose, psychologically complex, and world-weary—so does the character of Italy, where Dibdin lived for several years. 

Each of the novels is set in a different part of the country, and the style of each novel seems to reflect the cultural differences among Italy’s regions.  But all are richly cynical, darkly funny, intricate in plot, and acute in their understanding of modern Italian politics, religion, and everyday life. 

My personal favorite among Dibdin’s novels is set in England, though.  It’s one of his stand-alone works, the 1991 suspense/satire of Thatcher’s England, Dirty Tricks. 

Mysteries at the Horse Races: Dick Francis

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When it comes to concocting mysteries about fast horses and fast tracks, Dick Francis is the undisputed king.  Although I can't track down the source, it seems that I recently read something about his unfortunate demise.  You can imagine my suprise when, on a beautiful day during Keeneland's spring meet, I saw Mr. Francis himself autographing copies of his most recent book!    That was a mystery I just had to solve.

GalaxyCon: Where Worlds Collide @ Your Library

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You're not imagining things if you've been seeing Imperial Stormtroopers at the library. 

In conjunction with the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, we're launching GalaxyCon, an out-of-this-world celebration of all things science fiction. 

It hasn't even started yet, and already it's a blast.  I've had some great conversations with fans of all ages and families who plan to join us for the stellar events we have planned. 

Science fiction is such a part of our culture, in fiction, film, and TV.  Were you one of the wide-eyed kids who watched Flash Gordon serials on Saturday mornings, or did you stand in line for Spiderman and its sequels?  Did you get your kicks from superhero comics or have your consciousness raised by the sociological sf of Sheri S. Tepper or  Margaret Atwood?  Are you hooked on Heroes or daffy for Dr. Who? 

Even if you're not a techie, a Trekker, or a towel-carrying hitchhiker through the galaxy, how can you resist?  (Resistance is futile, you know!)   

Storming the Keep

Categories Fiction

In Jennifer Egan’s The Keep, Danny is on his way to an unknown location in Europe to help his cousin Howie renovate a castle.  He is an electronics junkie who needs to be connected at all times (by cell phone or email) to the large group of people in his address book. 

Danny is also running away from the mob, which is the main reason he takes the one-way ticket to a place he doesn’t know and can’t remember the name of.  He also has an estranged relationship with his cousin because of a childhood prank that nearly took Howie’s life.

Juxtaposed against the introductory protagonist is Ray, who is similarly cut off from the real world but in a different way.  Danny in fact is just a character in a story Ray is writing for his prison’s creative writing class. 

Falling for Christopher Pike

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Call it ‘literary crack cocaine’ like the blurb on the volume's cover from Kirkus reviews or on a less exotic plane; call it psychological coconut sorbet for the soul.  Christopher Pike’s Falling possesses a title that’s simple, benign, and unassuming but don’t be fooled.  Beware.  It is anything but.  Start down this pike and fall you will. 

Matt Connor is an average American male.  He has a wonderful girlfriend, Amy, who keeps him at arms length constantly over the course of a year.  Thinking all is roses between them, Matt is shocked to discover his beloved with her ex-boyfriend David.  He’s even more perplexed when he finds that she is with child, David’s child, and does not wish to reconcile with him.  Utterly incensed and hopelessly obsessed, Matt devises a plan to make Amy pay and pay she does, in droves. 

Re-Reading Georgette Heyer

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I think most people would be able to answer this question easily:  Are you a re-reader? 

I think we're pretty firmly divded, those of us who are from those of us who aren't.  If you're not a re-reader, you wonder why people bother spending precious time reading things they've already read when there's so much else out there to read.  If you are a re-reader, you wonder how people get along never revisiting beloved authors and characters and settings.  (And we don't even need Maria's desert island as an excuse to re-read.)

I'm a re-reader, and there are certain authors I binge on over and over again.  Currently, I'm re-reading every single Regency novel by Georgette Heyer.  I love their sparkle and wit, their charming characters, and their sweetly humorous variations on the conventions of the old-fashioned historical romance.  

Mysteries on the Ocean: Conrad Allen

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Featuring high-society voyagers, luxury ocean liners, and plenty of time to kill on the high seas, author Conrad Allen has created a recipe for an intriguing series of mystery novels.  Beginning in 1999 with Murder on the Lusitania, he introduces detective George Porter Dillman, a passenger on the maiden voyage of the grand new ship on the Cunard Line.  Money, jewels, and murder are on the ship's log, as is Miss Genevieve Masefield, a lovely private detective in her own right. 

Some People Just Shouldn't Be Around Children

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I'm trying to find a connection between two books I've read lately, Running Away With Frannie, by Renée Manfredi, and Un seul crime, l'amour, by Mary Fualaau (formerly Mary Kay LeTourneau) and Vili Fualaau, with a couple guest chapters by Vili's mother, Soona Fualaau.

I can't talk too much about Manfredi's strange and memorable novel without giving away the plot, which takes an unexpected turn about halfway through, and then another one at the end.  The protagonist is Sam, a 25 year old from a household without a lot of money, one of ten siblings with an alcoholic father and a mother who works in an Elvis-Presley commemorative-plate-making factory.  The mother expresses her opinion of dinner guests through her table settings.  If the visitor gets a young-and-healthy Elvis plate, the mother likes the guest.  Old washed-up Elvis means Sam's mother is not amused.

All the Way to Oz and Back

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L. Frank Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a lovely memory of my childhood. Outside the bedrooms in the upstairs hallway of my grandparents' house the walls were lined with old glass-fronted bookcases, filled with my mom's books from her childhood. All 14 Oz books were there, and I spent many happy hours reading them.

Robert Sabuda adapted the first book to his magical pop-up format, staying true to the original illustrations and story.

The cast of characters from Oz would happily surprise any Harry Potter fan: Tick-Tock the Royal Army of Oz, flying monkeys, witches and sorceresses, Ozma, Jack Pumpkinhead, and of course Dorothy herself who would give Harry a run for his money in resourcefulness and courage. The stories were written early in the 20th century but maintain a fantastic sense of adventure that is still enjoyable.

The Short Stories of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Categories Fiction

As readers all across Cincinnati discuss and celebrate Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, I’d like to introduce another fantastic author.  Like Tan, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni tells stories about the the power of tradition and the experiences of first-generation Americans.  Divakaruni has written a few novels as well as numerous short stories, nine of which appear in the 2001 collection, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives.  I highly recommend this collection to any fan of great writing.

In the first story, Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter, the title character tries to adjust to life in California with her son’s family.  While her son and his wife seem to have easily assimilated to suburban life in America, Mrs. Dutta can’t figure out the mechanics of the washing machine or the jokes on television.  After all, she washed her clothes by hand in India!

Play (Fictional) Ball!

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The Cincinnati Reds, baseball’s oldest professional team, opened their 136th campaign on Monday at Great American Ballpark.  In no particular order, here are a few baseball novels this Red's fan has enjoyed over the years.

The Southpaw by Mark Harris. A 1973 film starring Michael Moriarty and Robert De Niro made famous Bang the Drum Slowly, the second book in the Henry Wiggin quartet .  Published in 1953, The Southpaw was the first .  Henry’s appealing, idiomatic narrative limns his rookie season in the big leagues.  The Southpaw is one of those distinctive American narratives clearly descended from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock. This baseball fantasy pays a homage to another Twain novel. San Francisco newspaperman Samuel Clemens Flower falls asleep on an Amtrak train in the 20th century, but awakens on a steam train in the company of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings.  A well-researched baseball story about the primitive professional game.

Oprah's Choice: Cormac McCarthy

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As a browser of fiction bookshelves, I have often been intrigued by the works of Cormac McCarthy and have felt I really should know more about him.  Or her.  Who is this author, anyway?  As it turns out, he is one of those "I'll let my work speak for me" kinds of authors who actively shuns the spotlight.  Until now, anyway.  On March 28, Oprah announced the selection of The Road, McCarthy's most recent novel, for her book club.  And a brighter spotlight than that would be tough to find.

Tales of the Easter Rising

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No “Irish History Month” would be complete without a tribute to the Easter Rising, the 1916 rebellion against Great Britain that failed, but sparked the astonishing victory of the War of Independence (1919-1921). William Butler Yeats, a contemporary, was the first writer to make great literature of the story. His poem “Easter, 1916” commemorates the 16 rebel leaders whose executions roused the country to revolution: 

MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Among recent literary accounts are two superb novels by award-winning writers: Jamie O'Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001) and Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), which follows the story through the revolution and the subsequent civil war. The approaches of these native Dubliners couldn’t be less similar.

The Family That Spies Together

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What would you do if your parents ran a background check on every person you dated?  What would you do if your 14-year-old sister practiced "recreational surveillance"?  What would you do if your Uncle Ray had lost weekends?  By this point you'd probably be tired of your family and the family business.  Isabel "Izzy" Spellman certainly is.  She decides to quit the family business (a PI firm that she joined when she was 12 years old), but her parents won't let her until she solves a very cold case.  The ways that Izzy gets back at her parents (who else would enlist their sister to film a fake drug deal to get back at their parents?) and how the entire Spellman clan relates to each other are hysterical and ultimately (in their own weird way) demonstrate the powerful bond of family.  Trust me, the Spellmans are not your typical family! 

The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz is the funniest and craziest book that I've read in a long, long time.  The book is author Lisa Lutz's debut, but you would never be able to tell that from the way she expertly weaves the story and keeps the momentum going.  From the first chapter to the last page, you will be laughing.  I highly reccomend this novel to anyone who likes to read.  Stephanie Plum fans will especially enjoy this one. This is the first in a planned series of novels featuring the Spellman family.

Blood Ties

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I'm a huge Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel: The Series fan.  Those two series are really what sparked my interest in vampire fiction.  Some of the best books in vampire fiction is Tanya Huff's Toronto-based "Blood Books" series featuring PI Vicky Nelson and her friend/lover Henry Fitzroy (who just happens to be the 450 year old son of Henry the VIII).  Vicky also gets the assist from her ex-boyfriend Mike Celluci in her chasing down cases.  She's a fabulously flawed heroine who really deserves your time! 

The "Blood Books" were originally published in the early '90s as single titles, but have recently been reissued in three omibus editions.  Each edition contains two of the stories.

• The Blood Books, Vol. 1--contains BLOOD PRICE & BLOOD TRAIL
• The Blood Books, Vol. 2--contains BLOOD LINES & BLOOD PACT
• The Blood Books, Vol. 3--contains BLOOD DEBT & BLOOD BANK [which is a collection of all the short stories Vicky, Henry and Mike have appeared in.]

Ned Kelly's Immigrant Song

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I’ll be after the wearin’ o’ the green in this space during March, which makes a fine Irish History Month. It’s not just the St. Patrick’s Day that’s in it; rain and spring air recall the Emerald Isle, so fertile that the Sassenach (English, or “Saxons”) kept it “the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.” Bad as it could be to have a thriving neighbor, it was even worse for Protestant England to have Catholic harbors next door from which other Papist countries could (and did) try to launch invasions.

“They are going, going, going, and we cannot bid them stay.” My ancestors came to America over the past 300 years of increasing crisis in the homeland. The most fortunate ones were 18^th-century refugees from the anti-Catholic penal laws. The Meade family and Stephen Moylan (first president of The Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick) fought alongside George Washington. Thomas Riley, one of the “wild geese” who found work as mercenaries, arrived in Lafayette’s Irish regiment to whack the Sassenach over here.

At the other extreme were my Toohey great-great-grandparents, who disembarked dead in New Orleans from a "coffin ship" during the Famine of the mid-19th century. In True History of the Kelly Gang, a Man Booker Prize-winning novel about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, Peter Carey makes a beautiful immigrant song out of the lives of the luckless exiles, especially in a passage that intones the names of convict ships like Homer’s catalogue of ships in the Iliad.

The Watchman

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I think Robert B. Parker started it--correct me if I'm wrong.  I'm talking about the mystery genre tradition of the smart-talking p.i. with the silent and supremely lethal sidekick.  Spenser has Hawk.  Harlan Coben's Myron Bolitar has Win.  (Well, Win's not quite so monosyllabic, but he's even scarier.)  And Robert Crais's Elvis Cole has Pike.

It's a useful mystery convention.  Hero and super sidekick together can plausibly handle a lot more trouble than the hero could alone.  Just as important, the author can go to any lengths to take care of the bad guys by the last page, but no matter how violent things get, he never has to let his hero go too far over the edge or permanently drop that oh-so-enjoyably sarcastic tone that helps makes these winning series crackle. 

Messing with a great formula can be risky.  But in Robert Crais's latest, The Watchman, we get the story from Pike's point of view.

Criminal Perspective

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Lately I've been listening to Elizabeth George's What Came Before He Shot Her.  This dark, dense novel explores the ghettos of London and offers another perspective on the events leading up to the ending of the last Lyley mystery, With No One as Witness. 

I really enjoyed her Inspector Lynley mysteries, but that's not really a recommendation for this title, since the plot is only tangentially related to the Lynley series.  In fact, many reader-reviewers have panned it based mainly on this fact.  The book focuses on the rather grim life of three siblings in North Kensington, fifteen year old Ness, eleven year old Joel, and seven year old Toby. 

The Beguiling Universe of the Culture

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The Algebraist

Critics use the phrase "baroque space opera" to describe the books in Banks' series about a civilization called "the Culture." Fair enough, I suppose, but it falls a little short. Because Banks, for purposes ironic or perversely pleasurable, deliberately betrays the conventions of the form.

Meet J. K. Rowling's Heir (We Hope!) at Joseph-Beth, Blue Manatee

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Trenton Lee Stewart will discuss The Mysterious Benedict Society and sign copies at 7 p.m. on Monday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers and at 4 p.m. on Tuesday at the Blue Manatee Children’s Bookstore.

That’s big news for two reasons. The Mysterious Benedict Society has earned rave reviews as a new ‘tween adventure series. The book’s success is no surprise, since Trent is an excellent writer – an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and instructor who has published many short stories and a fine adult novel, Flood Summer.

He’s also a former Library employee, now living in his native Arkansas, and we’re thrilled to welcome him back in triumph. If you have to lose a great colleague, the best way is to a book advance.

Surprisingly Creepy

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Anne Rivers Siddons, noted author of contemporary North Carolina "low country" fiction, produced one and only one horror novel, The House Next Door. I wish she would write more!

The seeping darkness of a gorgeous modern marvel of a house stands out like a stain in the well-to-do, long established neighborhood where it is built and takes on a life of its own. It also takes over the lives of its owners. It's an interesting twist on the haunted house story, based on a sleek brand new contemporary house rather than a decrepit mansion.

The stunning beauty of the house hides the misery and terror that it seemingly causes, making rational people do wildly irrational things and turning spotless lives into great big messes.

The book was written in 1978, and the lack of "modern" technology shows but doesn't detract from the suspense.

Siddons has a crafty way of describing things in terms of everyday life, which makes the horrifying events even scarier, placing them just outside the kitchen door.

Be careful, and wish your neighbors well...

Good Grief

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What do you do when your husband of three years dies from cancer?  For 36-year-old Sophie Stanton, the answer is easy:  gorge yourself on Oreos and fall asleep curled up with your husband's old shirts.  When Sophie starts showing up for work in her robe and slippers, her boss suggests that she take a leave of absence.  Sophie takes things a step further by selling her Silicon Valley house and moving to a small Oregon village, where she finds a waitressing job and begins mentoring an emotionally fragile 13-year-old girl.  By turns poignant and humorous, you won't want to miss Lolly Winston's debut novel, Good Grief.

For other books dealing with the death of a spouse, check out Cheryl Strayed's Torch, Elizabeth Strout's Abide with Me, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and Calvin Trillin's About Alice.

New Jersey Satire for Fans of South Florida Suspense

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I recommended Eric Dezenhall to a fan of Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake a few weeks ago.  If you like the Florida school of over-the-top satiric suspense, move up the coastline a little to meet New Jersey crisis management consultant (a.k.a. spin doctor) Jonah Eastman.

Eastman was introduced in Money Wanders.  A Washington political pollster whose career was in trouble, Jonah found a new client at the funeral of his grandfather, a New Jersey mobster.  Another mob boss was having image problems—Mario Vanni wanted to get a legitimate gambling license and leave a clean business to his grandkids.  But how to  rehabilitate the public image of the state’s biggest gangster?  A little polling revealed the answer—make him look tough on drugs and neighborhood crime. 

Dezenhall gleefully satirized pollsters, p.r. flacks, and public enemies in that humorous crime novel, the first in a series.  Now there’s a new Jonah Eastman adventure, Spinning Dixie.   

On the Same Page in 2007

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Cincinnati's citywide reading program, On the Same Page, is in full swing. Family and friends, neighbors, and co-workers are reading The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.   For teens, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan is this year's action-packed selection. 

You can participate any number of ways.  Pick up a copy of the book at any Library location or contact a branch to get multiple copies for a book club or class.  Host your own discussion or attend a Library book discussion group.  Post your comments about the book on the On the Same Page web site.

Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lecter

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The Horror Writers Association has announced that Thomas Harris will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Bram Stoker Awards Banquet at the end of March during the annual HWA Conference that will be held in conjunction with the 2007 World Horror Convention in Toronto.

Harris hasn't written a lot of books, but his fiction is very finely crafted and creepy. He is, of course, recognized for his perfectly written saga of Hannibal Lecter, the compelling psychopath from Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal.

The latest and final installment, Hannibal Rising, is actually the first installment, starting with Hannibal as a young boy in Eastern Europe during World War II. It offers the reasons for Hannibal becoming the way he is.

Harris wrote the screenplay for the movie  at the same time as the novel. Hannibal Rising is available in audio as well as print, and as a digital audio book for download from the Ohio eBook Project. 

Tom Perrotta and The Wishbones

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Keeping Watch: Another Laurie R. King Novel to Watch For

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I mentioned the trend for suspense standalones in a recent post.  This one doesn’t quite stand alone (it’s loosely related to another of the author’s works), but it’s a real stunner, another example from a few years ago of a popular mystery writer pulling out all the stops for pulse-pounding suspense.

Laurie R. King is known for two very different mystery series, her Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series that, beginning with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, carried on the classic canon; and her contemporary series featuring lesbian San Francisco cop Kate Martinelli, which began with A Grave Talent.

But she did something more different still in Keeping Watch, a tense and complex psychological suspense novel that broke a lot of genre rules.  

Meet Michael Palmer

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The bestselling writer of medical thrillers, Michael Palmer, M.D., is returning to Cincinnati.  Long a favorite of local readers, Dr. Palmer will be appearing at the Oakley Branch Library on March 8, at 7 pm, to sign copies of The Fifth Vial, his latest thriller.  This may be his best novel yet! 

The Clarinet Polka

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It’s February—time for a big, fat novel to settle in with, so you don’t have to go out again till spring.  At 406 pages, Keith Maillard’s The Clarinet Polka may or may not get you that far, but it will certainly sweep you away. 

What makes it even more appropriately for the season is that it’s a big, fat valentine. It’s the Canadian-born author’s love song to the Polish-American community of the West Virginia steel towns where he was raised.   It makes me think of Richard Russo, but a little closer to home.

So if you missed it in 2003, get out your afghan and settle in.

The Thrillers of P. T. Deutermann

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There's an underrated American author of suspense fiction you may not be familiar with.  P. T. Deutermann, a retired Captain in the U.S. Navy, began writing novels of naval suspense in 1992, eight years after Tom Clancy stunned the publishing world and launched the technothriller era with the surprise bestseller, The Hunt for Red October.

Coming of Age in 1970s Bombay

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I did a booklist of some of my favorite coming of age novels in 2003.  Ardashir Vakil’s Beach Boy was on it.  If you didn’t pick it up then, try it now!  The cover is one of the most apt illustrations I’ve ever seen on a book—against a bright saffron-colored background, a boy takes an adventurous leap.  The cover perfectly captures the novel and its depiction of the busy, risky, hopeful spirit of a child’s interior life.

The novel is set in 1970s Bombay.  Cyrus Readymoney is a quiet, anxious boy with an insatiable curiosity to understand the world he’s growing up in.  His parents’ difficult marriage, the mysteries of sex, his friends’ strangely different lives, and the endless fascinations of his beach neighborhood and bustling city—all of these interesting subjects churn constantly through his mind. 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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For the past year or so, millions of children, teens, and adults around the world have been breathlessly waiting for an announcement about the publication date for the seventh (and final) entry in the Harry Potter series.  Finally…the moment has arrived!  Today, J.K. Rowling posted an announcement on her website that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is going to be published at midnight on Saturday, July 21.  Typically, she’s being very tight-lipped about the plot—although there’s been of frenzy of speculation amongst the Harry Potter faithful since Rowling hinted that a couple of characters might die.

Anxious to reserve your copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Take advantage of the Library's Hot Authors service and a copy of the new book will be automatically held for you! 

Fields of Glory: Les champs d'honneur

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For a first novel, this little book made it big—the author of Fields of Glory, Jean Rouaud, went from selling newspapers to being the 1990 winner of the most prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. 

I read the book in its English translation by Ralph Manheim in 1992, and it’s one of the books that have stayed with me over many years.  It’s tiny (only about 150 pages) and gently effortless to read, but it’s indelible.

The unnamed narrator, one of the grandchildren of a family in a little Loire Valley town pays tribute to his eccentric elders—his grandparents and his Great-Aunt Marie—whose lives were long ago altered by the Great War. 

At first, the humorous stories of their oddities charm and amuse.  There’s Aunt Marie’s card catalog of saints and their specialized responsibilities, Grandmother’s martyrdom to Grandfather’s notoriously dangerous driving, and so on.  But gradually the stories become more poignant.

Such Devoted Sisters

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Last month, I blogged about Elisabeth Robinson's The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters, a novel about a woman overwhelmed by her sister's recent cancer diagnosis.  This got me thinking about other novels dealing with the relationship between sisters.  There are some really good ones out there.  Here are a few:

• In Her Shoes--Jennifer Weiner--Philadelphia lawyer Rose Feller and her younger sister Maggie try to repair their fractured relationship with the aid of their long-lost maternal grandmother, Ella.
• Rise and Shine--Anna Quindlen--After an on-air gaffe threatens her career, Manhattan talk show host Meghan Fitzmaurice turns to her younger sister, Bridget, for guidance.
• The Girls--Lori Lansens--Deserted by their mother shortly after birth, Canadian conjoined twins Rose and Ruby Darlen struggle to adapt to their unusual situation.

Oscar Films Were Books First

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Oscar-nominated films now in theaters began as books.   The satirical tone of Tom Perrotta’s Little Children gets a bit lost in the film, but the disturbing performance by Jackie Earle Haley has caught everyone’s attention.  A desperate Judi Dench knows Cate Blanchett’s secrets in Zoe Heller’s What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal. Will Smith and son bring Chris Gardner’s astounding and inspiring memoir The Pursuit of Happyness to a wider audience.

All Aunt Hagar's Children

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Edward P. Jones is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Known World, which weaves the lives of several interconnecting African-American families back and forth through the nineteenth century.

His latest work, All Aunt Hagar's Children,is a collection of fourteen short stories echoing his earlier themes of family and connection. Four of the fourteen have already appeared in The New Yorker. Each shines as an individual piece, yet often the stories loop back to another story's characters.

Sight Unseen

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Sight Unseen is a fine new novel of literary suspense by British author Robert Goddard, a terrific writer whose work is neglected in the U.S. 

In the summer of 1981, graduate student David Umber sat outside a pub in Avebury, England, waiting for a man with a book pertinent to his research: the identity of "Junius," a pseudonymous 18th-century polemicist. Umber witnessed the daylight abduction of a 2-year-old girl, in the care of her nanny, and, subsequently, the death of the child's 10-year-old sister beneath the wheels of the kidnapper's van. The case was never solved.

More than twenty years later, Umber is lying low in Prague, a broken man. Following the Avebury incident, he abandoned his studies. United by the tragedy, he and the girl's nanny fell in love then married. But unable to recover from the trauma, Umber's wife committed suicide in 1999.

Ariana Franklin

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The British writer Ariana Franklin was in Cincinnati on Tuesday as part of a pre-pub swing through the Midwest in support of her new novel, Mistress of the Art of Death. 

I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend a dinner hosted by her agent at Tellers that night.  It was a very pleasant evening—Ariana was charming and graciously answered questions about her books, her interest in the Middle Ages, and her husband (film critic Barry Norman).  And of course, it was lots of fun to chat about book-related stuff with all the Joseph Beth folks and the Enquirer’s Sara Pearce.

Coincidentally, City of Shadows, Ariana’s previous book, made it to Librarian’s Choice, our annual list of staff favorites.  I haven’t read this “stunning novel of historical suspense” (in the words of our Fiction staff), but it’s on my nightstand at home so I’ll probably get to it soon. And yet…

Another Really Good Writer--John Gregory Dunne

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Clearly, I'm not the first to have discovered what a good novelist John Gregory Dunne was.  He's one more writer whose books I hadn't thought of reading, though, because I'd categorized him as a thriller writer, and I don't think of myself as a thriller reader.

Then I picked up Nothing Lost, which was published in 2004, a year after Dunne's sudden death.  The book is certainly a page-turner.  An African-American man has been tortured and murdered in an imaginary U.S. state that seems to hover between South Dakota and Nebraska.  While various politicians, including the president of the United States and a right-wing congresswoman (who prefers to be called "congressman") use the apparently racially motivated murder to advance their careers, two unpleasant drifters are arrested.  The evidence is scanty, and the witness not very credible.

You'll probably spot the clue as a clue when it first appears but not realize how it's a clue.  This will be to your credit, because it's really disgusting.

Dublin Soul

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Roddy Doyle has a new book out, Paula Spencer.  It’s the sequel to The Woman Who Walked into Doors, his 1996 character study of a working-class Dublin woman beset by alcoholism and abuse.  Paula is now sober and managing an ordinary, workaday life, though she's walking on eggshells with her children, who can't quite afford to trust her yet.

It's a lovely book, an intimate character study with a richly original voice.  It's getting the same critical acclaim as its predecessor did. 

But I have to confess a preference for Doyle's more comic works.  My favorite Doyle characters of all are the Rabbitte family, who were introduced in his debut and showed up in two more novels, now collectively known as the Barrytown Trilogy. 

I pulled The Commitments off the shelf to review in 1989, a skinny, paperback U.S. edition of a first novel by an unknown Irish writer.  I was giggling from the first page, where three loutish, untalented Dublin youths decide that their fledgling rock band needs some help and recruit their more musically knowledgeable friend, Jimmy Rabbitte, to manage it. 

She Journals Dead People

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It's now officially time for the post-holiday slump.  Gazing off into space with a little case of the sniffles.  Wrapped in an afghan and looking for another series of cozy mysteries to see me safely through January.  Enter Aunt Dimity.

I'm a bit picky about my cozies.  No matter how much the heart may lust for treacle, my Gen-X sense of irony can be overwhelmed by too much cutesy stuff.  I am working my way toward the sweeter cozy mysteries only with halting, uncertain steps.  (For instance, although I love cute cat pictures, it will be a little while before I'm ready to read the Cat Detective mysteries.)  Aunt Dimity was one of those series that I was uncertain of, but my day off loomed and I needed a book to read.

Staff Picks

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Okay, you survived the holidays and life is starting to return to normal.  (Right?)  So as the evenings close in and the weather gets chilly (right??), this is the perfect time to curl up with a good book. 

Or an interesting new magazine, a movie, or a CD.  Teen titles, too, and some great children's books.  There's so much wonderful stuff out there, it can be hard to know where to start. 

Well, you know us--we'll always have some suggestions.  If you'd like a few unusual ideas, take a look at the Librarians' Choice list for 2006. 

Standing Alone

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It used to be that you could hardly get a novel published in the crime and mystery genre unless you were willing to commit to a series, but lately, long-established mystery authors are going the other way, hitting the blockbuster charts with stand-alone suspense titles (think Harlan Coben, for example). 

Greg Rucka, the author of the Atticus Kodiak mysteries and, more recently, of several superhero graphic novels and a superspy thriller series, did a (yes) super stand-alone suspenser a few years back.  I wish he’d do another. 

That one was A Fistful of Rain.  Its heroine was no Wonder Woman, but she was a knockout of a character.

The Post-Apocalyptic Future

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For readers of post-apocalyptic fiction, or for those of you who just can’t wait for the world as we know it to end, here are two recent novels of note. 

With A Meeting at Corvallis, S. M. Stirling brings to a close a trilogy (cited in a previous posting) set in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, following a catastrophe that renders useless all technology, power generation, and gunpowder.  From chaos and brutality, feudal societies emerge with medieval capabilities and equivalencies. 

The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters

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Elisabeth Robinson, a Hollywood producer and screenwriter whose credits include the movies Last Orders and Braveheart, published this semi-autobiographical work, her debut, in 2004.  Robinson's younger sister died from leukemia in 1998.  At the outset of The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters, her protagonist, Olivia Hunt, a struggling Hollywood producer, is contemplating suicide.  She is interrupted by a call from her parents in Ohio:  her newly married younger sister, Maddie, has been diagnosed with leukemia.

The novel is told through Olivia's letters:  to her ex-boyfriend, Michael, whom she still loves; to the doctors at the hospital where her sister is being treated; to the head honchos at the studio where her current project, a film of Don Quixote, is having a hard time getting off the ground.

The Soldier's Return

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Small people caught up in large events can be great characters for a novel.  I think this is the fourth or fifth World War II novel I’ve posted about--not a theme I expected to see running through my blog entries, but there’s something about that combination of intimate, personal stories and the inexorable sweep of historic events that makes for great reading.  So here’s another novel I can’t resist telling you about.

Paranormal Characters Make For Spirited Reading

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Ghosts and spooky happenings have always been interesting topics for books and stories.

Edgar Award winner Phillip DePoy has created a well-written fiction series about a folklorist named Fever Devlin who returns to his Appalachian roots and whose investigations delve in just short of the paranormal: The Devil's Hearth (2003), The Witch's Grave (2004), and the recent well-received A Minister's Ghost (2006).

Cree Black, Daniel Hecht's fictional paranormal investigator, explores haunted houses and weird happenings in City of Masks (2003), also available as a digital audio book; the series continues with Land of Echoes(2004) and Bones of the Barbary Coast (2006).

Another good ghost story is Jodi Picoult's Second Glance; it is one of those stories with characters and time playing tricks on the reader.

Some other books with a paranormal story line are the International Horror Guild's award winning Fogheart by Thomas Tessier, John Passarella's Kindred Spirit, and Charlie Price's Dead Connection.

Teen Picks 2006

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Looking for the best teen books of 2006?  Maybe you're searching for last minute gift ideas, or you're looking for a good read over holiday break. Whatever your reason and whatever your age, check out the following lists for some excellent recommendations. 

Teenreads.com Best Books of 2006

2006 Teens' Top 10 - American Library Association

2007 Nominations Best Books for Young Adults - American Library Association

Under the Mistletoe

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Twinkling lights.  Horse-drawn carriage rides.  Kissing under the mistletoe.  And eggnog--lots and lots of eggnog.  In the mood for a little romance yet?  No?  Then maybe the following titles will help.

• Santa Baby by Jennifer Crusie, Lori Foster and Carly Phillips--A sexy trio of holiday-themed novellas from some of romance's hottest authors.
• The Eggnog Chronicles by Carly Alexander--Two sisters, Jane and Ricki, and Jane's best friend Emma look for romance during the holidays in New York City.
• Christmas Letters by Debbie Macomber--Seattle resident Katherine O'Connor finds romance and more with child psychologist Dr. Wynn Jeffries.

Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land

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You might (well, you might!) remember my enthusings about Headlong, Michael Frayn’s bravura art history thriller about a long-lost Breugel painting.  I called that and A. S. Byatt’s Possession, a novel about a long-secret romance between two Victorian writers, my top two literary puzzle novels of all time.  

Well, here’s another novel for fans of that genre.  This one’s about a long-lost manuscript that may be the work of Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the daughter of dashing Romantic poet Lord Byron—or may be the work of Byron himself.

Like Headlong and Possession, it’s a sophisticated puzzle that unwraps itself, layer by layer, like an onion.  And like those novels, it’s a work of extraordinary scholarship, dazzling literary technique, and absorbing suspense.

Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

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Although the mercury may not show it (60 degrees in December?), it's almost winter.  If you enjoy hibernating indoors with a good book and you're looking for a fun, stimulating new activity, how about joining or forming a book discussion group?  Rachel W. Jacobsohn's The Reading Group Handbook, Ellen Slezak's The Book Group Book, and Judy Gelman's The Book Club Cookbook will get you going with great tips on organizing meetings, selecting titles, participating in discussions, even recipes that pair up with your favorite books.  If I haven't piqued your interest enough, one of the following titles is sure to!

• Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Lorna Landvik--Neighbors in frequently snowy Freesia Court, Minnesota bond over their love of books.

Beryl Bainbridge's Birthday Boys

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Remember Frank Hurley’s spectacular photographs from the Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic, where the utter clarity of the light on the ice around the captive ship makes every detail seem truer than life? 

I always think of those photos when I reread Beryl Bainbridge’s novel The Birthday Boys, about another Antarctic voyage, Scott’s ill-fated 1910-12 race to the South Pole.  The crisp perfection of Bainbridge’s writing and her sharp, utterly clear-eyed attitude toward her characters and their venture seem to match perfectly the crystalline quality of those photos.  

Ralphie's House

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If you're going up to Cleveland over the holidays, you might want to plan a visit to Ralphie Parker’s house.  San Diego businessman Brian Jones bought the very house used for the exterior shots in A Christmas Story, the satirical holiday classic from 1983, written and narrated by the late, inimitable Jean Shepherd. 

Mr. Jones spent a bundle of money renovating the house, transforming the interiors to recreate the rooms of the Parker house in the film (shot on a sound stage).  A Christmas Story House is located at 3159 W. 11^th Street in Cleveland, and A Christmas Story Museum and gift shop is right across the street. 

Unsuitable Attachments

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Unsuitable Attachments and Love in a Cold Climate tell the stories of sensible Fanny Logan's eccentric cousins and of the wealthy and ancient Montdore family.  Fanny's quiet life could hardly be more different than her beloved cousin Linda Radlett's, and also than that of her friend Polly Montdore. The Radletts' terrifying father Matthew hunts his chldren when foxhounds are not available (and also when they are) and writes down the names of the many people he dislikes on pieces of paper and puts the papers in a drawer, believing this will cause something bad to happen to these enemies.

At Swim-Two-Birds

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Flann O'Brien (one of many pen names--real name Brian Ó Nuallain) wrote a phenomenal novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, in the late 1930's.  It is a whacked out, hilariously psychedelic, and nearly indescribable work of postmodern metafiction.  The fact that it was originally published almost seventy years ago makes it even more mindbending.  I was sitting in a doctor's office waiting room, reading this book, laughing out loud to the extent that others must've thought I was nutty.  Because I enjoyed it so much I read four others by him--The Third Policeman, The Dalkey Archive, The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor, and The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story About the Hard Life.

Me Versus the Classics

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I've been working my way through the classics of literature on CD as I find them, catching up with all those books I should have read long ago. But I feel I have to be honest and share my defeats as well as my victories here. I am now batting only .330 in my attempts to read James Joyce's Ulysses.  Yes, I've only succeeded once out of three attempts, and even then I was in high school and may have skipped one or two pages.  This time, determined to appreciate it as an adult, I got it on CD--that should have made it easy, right?  Well, this morning I returned the unabridged CD version.  Someone else had a hold on it, and I had only made it to disc ten.

Now, there's a good chance that I'm sleep deprived, so it probably wasn't the best idea to try to listen to this title right before bed.  The fact is, it was a great audiobook.  The narrator had a lovely voice, and of course there was the prose, the fantastic melodious prose.  Well, melodious it was, and I tripped down those notes straight into dreamland, night after night. 

You've Just Got to Try This

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One of my favorite parts of my job is talking to people about what they’re reading.  Watching people light up when they tell me about something really, really good, and listening to their voices become urgent when they tell me “you’ve just got to try this”—I  find that absolutely irresistible. 

And of course, if it’s something I’ve read, we get to do that “isn’t he an amazing writer” and “wasn’t it wonderful when” and even “ooh, if you liked that, you have to read.”

I love writing for this blog, because of course I get to do the “you’ve just got to.”  (You can probably tell from some of my much-too-long entries how enthused I can get.)

But it’s not one-way.  It just occurred to me that everything I have out on my card right now and everything I currently have on hold was recommended to me personally by a library user or another librarian. 

Ghostly Story for the Holidays

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Charles Dickens wrote a masterpiece when he came up with A Christmas Carol. I am partial to stories with ghosts in them, and this is one of the best. We have not only the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet-to-Come scaring the socks off Scrooge, but old Marley long deceased showing up as well. And how about the homeless suffering poor that wail their dirge outside Scrooge's window? Creepy, but he deserved it.

I will never forget that Scrooge was in denial as long as possible. He blamed the manifestations on "an underdone potato" or "an undigested bit of beef"!

There have been lots of film adaptations of the story with terrific portrayals of Scrooge, including George C Scott, Patrick Stewart, musical Albert Finney, and even Bill Murray in the modern "Scrooged". My favorite has to be "Scrooge" (1951) with Alastair Sim capturing the old miser perfectly! 

It's just amazing to me how a story created in 1843 can be so timely today. Merry Christmas, 163 years later!

It's Not Just Me: A Science Fiction Novel for You to Try

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I was reading Publisher’s Weekly’s list of their top 100 books of the year yesterday, and I was surprised and delighted to find C. J. Cherryh’s Pretender on the list.  (We won’t go into how surprised I am to find that it’s November already, and best-of-the-year lists are coming out.) 

Surprised because Pretender is the eighth volume in a complicated, densely sociological science fiction series.  It’s hard to imagine what kind of book would be more difficult to persuade someone to try than a book that can only be read after going back and reading seven other books, all in a genre that tends not to be wildly popular anyway.

Delighted because I love this series.  Because I think Cherryh is one of the best writers of science fiction today.  Because Cherryh uses the conventions of speculative fiction to tackle big, thoughtful questions about humanity and civilization.  And because she writes the coolest aliens around. 

The Faceless Spook and John Le Carre's People

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A recent obituary in The New York Times marked the passing of Markus Wolf, the Cold War spymaster who directed the foreign intelligence service of the East Germany Ministry of State Security: the dreaded Stasi.   For two decades he was known to Western intelligence agencies as the “man without a face,” because they had no photograph of the mysterious spook.   Wolf used this epithet for the title of his 1997 memoir, Man Without a Face.

Gardening for Others

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A hilarious epistolary novel showed up in the second-floor display area last week, Bonnie Thomas Abbott's Radical Prunings: A Novel of Officious Advice from the Contessa of Compost.  If you've ever had mean thoughts while listening to a gardening person provide predictable opinions about square tomatoes, this is the novel for you.  The letters seek advice from Mertensia Corydalis, a gardening expert with a syndicated column and strong positive opinions about labor-intensive gardening.  The advice is similar to what you'll see in Eleanor Perenyi's Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden. 

Reading between the lines in the answers that appear in her column, readers come to know quite a bit about Mertensia--that she's recently divorced from a fellow gardener who's now married to a floozie.  Mertensia herself seems kind of interested (if you get my drift) in the young man who helps out with the garden (or why would she insist at least twice that he remove his shirt)?

Majesty and Comfort

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I love lighthouses. This past weekend I stood in awe of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse at night, resplendent in the light of the full moon and sending out its reassuring beam across nearly 20 miles of ocean.

Dawson Carr's 2002 chronicle Cape Hatteras Lighthouse: Sentinel of the Shoals tells the history of the beautiful lighthouse, including the monumental 1999 3-week move of the structure to a safer spot further from the edge of the ocean.  It was moved inland from the encroaching surf by lifting the entire building and hydraulically pushing it forward very slowly along a track to its new location 2900 feet away.

An interesting book about lighthouses that were not as lucky as Hatteras is Lost Lighthouses, full of true stories such as my favorite about Deer Island Lighthouse in the harbor near Boston, where one of the keepers had a cat who would dive from the platform, catch a fish, and climb back up the ladder with it.

For anyone who loves lighthouses and loves cats, it doesn't get any better than that!

Whiny Guys...Spy?

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In my continuing search for audiobooks to play while quilting or knitting, I often end up listening to books I wouldn't be caught dead reading.  This can be interesting.  Two recent titles that I would have set down after twenty pages if I'd encountered them in print, were actually strangely satisfying on CD. 

William Dufris narrates both Lord Vishnu's Love Handles and The Futurist.  I think he had a lot to do with my sticking with these titles to the end.  For the record, I found the characters in both of these novels absolutely unlikable, spoiled and self-indulgent.  However this narrator has a voice that absolutely personifies the whiny upper-middle-class white guy suddenly cast out of his element, and that's what both these books are all about.

A War for the Oaks: Urban Fantasy Romance

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Now that Prince is calling himself Prince again, maybe it’s time to revisit this fantasy set in the 1980s music scene of Minneapolis. 

Eddi McCandry is a rocker chick in a struggling band when she is unwillingly recruited as a pawn in a faerie war.  A handsome phouka (who is sometimes dog, sometimes “human”) explains that she has been magically bound to appear on the battlefield on May Eve, as human blood is necessary to make the ritual combat real.  In the meantime, the phouka will be her bodyguard, because the dark side of the faerie court will be after her. 

Since Eddi hates being told what to do, how will she cope with her unwanted guard dog, either in his alarming animal form or in his alarmingly sexy human one?  And how will she keep body and soul together till May Eve, since her band has broken up? 

By starting a new band, of course, with some very unusual musicians.  And getting ready for the ultimate battle of the bands.

Slaughter: Following the Buffalo

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Elmer Kelton has won prize after prize from Western writers’ associations and regional literature competitions.  Fans of Westerns will recognize his name, but readers of all kinds of historical fiction should give his work a try. 

His marvelous historical novels of the American West are written with deliberate simplicity, but there’s a lot of art in that unadorned, pared-down prose.  The novels give a vivid picture of life on both sides of the frontier between Native American culture and the westward settlement push.

Slaughter follows a ragtag group of whites as they scratch a dwindling living hunting the last of the buffalo south through Texas.  They know their way of life is dying out with the herds.  A disbelieving and finally desperate clan of Commanches watches them arrive—the destruction of the buffalo means the wholesale destruction of the Commanche way of life, too.  Tragedy is inevitable.

Creepy Stories for Halloween

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We tend to think of scary books at Halloween, and I'll take this chance to promote some of my favorite creepy audio books and reading for any dark night.

The Edgar Allan Poe Audio Collection is read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone. Poe's work distills all that is eerie, and these two masters of voice bring the recordings to chilling life.

The Shining by Stephen King is a perennial favorite, good at the movies but terrific as the original book.

Peter Straub's Lost Boy Lost Girl is as creepy as it gets, an excellent read along with its sequel In The Night Room.

And don't forget the Classics: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; Dracula by Bram Stoker and the wonderful silent film Nosferatu; and even War of the Worlds by HG Wells, which was a written work long before it was performed as a radio play or movie.

Politicians' Stories

Categories Fiction

How about fiction written by politicians and their minions?  Let's take a look at some titles from recent years.

A Night in the Lonesome October

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It’s the perfect time of year to read Roger Zelazny’s delightfully clever spoof of supernatural fantasy, A Night in the Lonesome October.   

A group of animal “familiars” led by our narrator, Snuff the Watchdog, are helping their masters (including a knife-wielding Jack, a Count, and the Good Doctor and his Experimental Man) prepare for a rare Victorian-era conjunction of Halloween and the full moon.

It seems that such conjunctions are the only times when a Gate can be opened for the return of the old gods, and magical combatants must gather to prevent its opening. 

Tell Me A Story And Make The Commute Bearable

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Like many working people, I spend about an hour and a half in the car on my way to and from work. Enter my friends, Audio Books. I have passed many a happy commute listening to accomplished readers share books with me.

I greatly enjoyed Thomas Harris's creepy Hannibal Lector trilogy, Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal. I was fascinated by the twists and turns of Maeve Binchy's Tara Road. I laughed helplessly at the antics of Georgia Nicholson in the teen series by Louise Rennison that starts off with Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging. I was drawn completely into Diane Setterfield's dark and mysterious 13th Tale.

J.K Rowling's Harry Potter books are fabulous, read by the incomparable Jim Dale. If you start with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and travel through the whole series, you will be set for a long time. Let's see, if I add it up that's almost 95 hours of happiness on your commute!

Welcome, Chaos

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There are some books I return to over and over.  Kate Wilhelm’s Welcome Chaos is one of them—I reread it this weekend, and it pulled me in again, though it’s hard to define why it’s so appealing to me.

It’s a hard book to blog, too, since the plot involves a secret.  Do I tell you the secret to convince you to pick up the book?  The book jacket does, though the author doesn’t for several chapters.

Let me start by saying that the novel was written when the major threat to world survival was the superpowers’ arms race.  That makes it seem almost innocent, dated by our knowledge of all the other dangers that threaten our peace and our planet.

But in ways that makes it even more powerful, as it’s a thoughtful novel about civilized people deciding how far to go, balancing the lives of millions to save the world.

Another Good Turn

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Sandy posted a couple of weeks ago about some of the books she was looking forward to this fall.  Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn was one of them.  I don’t know where Sandy was on the holds list compared to me, but I just took the novel home last night and read it in one big, delicious gulp.

Atkinson’s last novel, Case Histories, introduced private detective Jackson Brodie, who was investigating three cold cases.  It was a mystery, but not exactly—a lovely and melancholy look at the indelible effects of violence on anyone whose life it has touched, including the detective. 

This one looks even more like a mystery, but somehow it’s “not exactly,” too.  Rather than leave you haunted by sorrow, though, this one will leave you smiling at its perfect unexpectedness—what is this author doing, and how is she managing to make it so wonderfully different?

Desai Wins the Booker Prize

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Pamuk and the Prize

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The 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s leading novelist and its best-known writer internationally.  Pamuk’s approach to fiction is highly literary and postmodern, whether the setting is contemporary Istanbul, as in The Black Book and The New Life, or historical, in intrigues of the Ottoman Empire: My Name Is Red and The White Castle.

Literary suspense and murder mystery forms are employed in Pamuk’s explorations of metaphysical connections among characters, and to engage themes of loss, identity, and the influence of memory on the traditions of art and storytelling. These dense, sophisticated, philosophical novels reflect the enigma inherent in Istanbul's situation, history, and culture: the uneasy tension between East and West.

The Rose Grower: A Quiet Novel of Romance and Revolution

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Girl with a Pearl Earring helped make historical fiction featuring ordinary women a hot publishing trend in the past few years.  And with the recent reconsideration of Marie Antoinette’s reputation, there seem to be a lot of French Revolution novels lately.

How about a novel featuring ordinary women in revolutionary France?  The Rose Grower, by Michelle de Kretser, is a surprisingly moving book that will appeal to fans of both light and serious historical fiction. 

In a rural province, three sisters of good but not aristocratic family sympathetically follow the news of political and philosophical unrest in Paris.  It’s all rather distant, though—their own lives and budding romances are of far more real importance.

Until, slowly, revolution reaches their comfortable corner of the country. 

Charming Village Life from Big Stone Gap to Italy

Categories Fiction

Adriana Trigiani has written a charming trio of books centering on a woman of Italian descent who lives in a small Virginia coal-mining town. The Big Stone Gap novels are effortless, interesting reads.

Happily, according to Adriana Trigiani's web site, we can expect a new Big Stone Gap novel at the end of October: Home to Big Stone Gap. How wonderful!

Big Stone Gap (2000), the first of the novels, introduces our protagonist, pharmacist and part-time EMT Ave Maria Mulligan, and the cast of everyday characters that populates her small town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. Ave Maria learns a long-guarded secret about herself and comes to terms with Who She Really Is.

The second two installments are just as appealing as the first, but they all attend to the grittiness of everyday life and consequently are not cloying.

Some Nerve

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Every time Jane Heller releases a new book, it’s like I’m getting a little piece of chocolate in book form.  In her latest book, Some Nerve, celebrity journalist Ann Roth (who works for the People-like Famous magazine) is told by her editor to obtain the unobtainable:  An interview with notoriously press-shy mega-star Malcolm Goddard.  If she doesn’t get this interview, the nice girl journalist (there’s no point to digging in a celeb’s garbage when you can get info from them politely) is fired.  No ifs, ands, or buts about it. 

It’s interesting reading about Ann’s attempts to woo Malcolm into giving her an interview, her attempts to get around his venomous publicist and just how far she has to lower herself.  She finally gets him to agree to an interview, but he stipulates that she interview him while he’s flying his Cessna plane.  The only problem:  Ann is deathly afraid of flying and Malcolm knows this.  When her fear prevents her from getting “The Big Get” (as her editor calls it), she heads home in disgrace to her small Missouri hometown to be a freelance journalist.

The Hotel Detective

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It’s a typical weekend of mayhem at the Hotel California for assistant manager Am Caulfield:  a bra theft, a Bob Johnson Society convention (every single member checking in is named Bob Johnson), a chef who serves roadkill to an eminent food critic, and, oh yes, an apparent suicide and a double murder. 

Since Am has just been appointed acting security chief, too, all of this falls straight into his lap.  With the help of his new intern, Sharon Baker, Am copes.  But his troubles aren’t over—he’s promoted to general manager just in time for his hotel’s takeover by a Japanese conglomerate.

The Hotel Detective was the 1994 debut for an unfortunately short-lived series by veteran mystery writer Alan Russell.  Russell has a field day revealing the amusing and horrific details of hotel management (the dust jacket says he was a hotel manager himself), and the mystery plot is clever, too.  If you like humorous mysteries, go back and find this one.  Just don’t plan any hotel stays soon afterwards.

A Gallery of Heads for Allhallows Eve

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The approach of Halloween offers me requisite context to commend Severance, an unusual new book of stories by Pulitzer Prize-winner, Robert Olen Butler.  Severance is based on unsettling conceits:  “After decapitation, the human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes;” and, “In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute.” 

Flesh and Gold

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Phyllis Gotlieb dazzles with her sheer imagination in world-building in her 1998 science fiction novel Flesh and Gold.  ”What if?” is the basic question behind science fiction, and a writer who can imagine an “if” that seems truly different from the here and now yet that still seems vividly lifelike is not to be missed.

In a far-future universe richly populated by a dozen or so alien races and several varieties of humans, we follow the adventures of a small band of characters, the chief of whom is Skerow.  Skerow is an interplanetary circuit judge from Khagodi.  She is a ponderously slow but deeply honorable being.  (One human friend thinks of Skerow’s race as “streamlined baby allosaurs.”)  Skerow is shocked and disillusioned to discover that a fellow judge she has traveled with for decades has been taking bribes.

It’s just the first of several shocks this being of great integrity suffers. 

A Fond Farewell

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The Keep by Jennifer Egan is the story of two cousins who are restoring a medieval castle in Europe, and the dark history that connects them. Within this framework, Egan introduces us to another character, Ray, a convict taking a writing class in prison where he creates a story about- you guessed it- two cousins in a medieval castle. Ray has written himself into the tale of the castle, but we're not sure where he fits in, or whether any of his account is autobiographical.  What follows is a compelling story which is part mystery, part suspense and possible allegory- it's a thought-provoking book which is extremely well-crafted. I'm looking forward to checking out more by this author.

My apologies for not posting in a while - it's certainly not for lack of great reading! My desk is piled with books I'm dying to get to, and I'm having a hard time deciding what to read next. It's always difficult to follow up a great book and not be set up for disappointment. Also, I've been in the midst of a career change, and this will unfortunately be my last post. I've enjoyed sharing my passion for books in this blog, and hopefully have inspired a few to pick up some of my suggested reads. Keep reading!

The Lost Get-Back Boogie: My Favorite James Lee Burke Novel

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Sometimes it’s hard to plunge in and start reading a prolific author.  You feel as though you’ll never catch up.  So if the thought of tackling James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux mysteries is a little intimidating, or if you’d like a change of pace from the steamy, haunted Louisiana delta setting of that famous series, try The Lost Get-Back Boogie, a stand-alone suspense novel Burke published in 1986.  You’ll get the gorgeously lyrical writing, the gritty realism, and the inescapable violence, all set against a big Montana landscape.

Iry Paret is out on parole after serving two years for manslaughter (a barroom fight that got out of hand) and is finding it impossible to settle down quietly in his home parish.  With his guitar, his pickup, and an open case of beer, he takes off for Montana, where a former fellow prisoner, Buddy Riordan, has offered him a job on a ranch. 

But trouble follows Iry there, too. 

The Liquidators and Tom LeClair

Categories Fiction ,

Tom LeClair, one of my English professors when I attended the University of Cincinnati, has written his fourth novel, The Liquidators.  In this story, Tom Bond, of Middletown, Ohio, operates a mobile salvage enterprise, Midwest Liquidators.  Bond’s caravan of independent truckers hauls a varied inventory of remaindered and discontinued goods on a circuit of tertiary cities of the Midwest.   

Business is good, but Bond wants to recruit a successor.  His son refuses (“I don’t want to live off failure”); his daughter sees the business as a cult of economic defeat; and his truckers aren’t interested.  He considers the ephemerality of his enterprise and wonders, “What lasts?” That’s when Bond has a dream to build an enduring memorial to human industry and folly in his hometown.  The Liquidators is a discerning character study and a blackly comic fable written partly in homage to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom.

Right as Rain: Noir Novels for Walter Mosley Fans

Categories Fiction ,

George P. Pelecanos is a writer who makes me think of Walter Mosley for the amazing vividness of his writing.  You can feel the grit under the soles of your shoes as you walk down these fictional mean streets, and the dialogue is so pitch perfect you can just hear it sing off the page.  People who like noir crime fiction really shouldn’t miss Pelecanos’ work.

His books are set in Washington, DC, in the Greek-American and African-American communities there.  The same characters show up in many of the novels, so it can be hard to find a place to start reading.  Try his new novel,