Homer & Langley

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E. L. Doctorow's novel Homer & Langley retells as a work of imagination the unforgettably sad story of the Collyer brothers, two of the most famous hoarders in history.  They were notorious for living in squalor in their fine, ancestral Fifth Avenue brownstone with decades of accumulated materials (from mountains of newspapers to a Model T) until Langley was killed in a fall of debris and his blind brother, Homer, died soon after.

Doctorow tells the story from Homer's point of view.  Homer relates how he lost his sight as a young man but found solace in his music and his other senses—life was still pleasant and comfortable.  But the death of his parents to the Spanish influenza and the return of his brother crippled in a mustard gas attack on the front in World War I changed everything.

Starvation Lake

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There’s just something about an American regional mystery, one that drops you into a you-are-there setting as familiar and believable as your own back yard.  Bryan Gruley’s Starvation Lake is a terrific debut set in small-town Michigan, where the ice is thin over old secrets.

Gus Carpenter is the newspaper editor, back in his old hometown after a disastrous shot at big-time reporting.  (Detroit lawyers are circling avidly over the illegal expose he did about truck fires.)

Gus had left home because he couldn’t stand the town’s disappointment in him.  He was the goalie who lost the town its first and only shot at a high school hockey state championship.  After Coach Blackburn had built the best team the town had ever seen, Gus blew the big game.  Blackburn never spoke to him without loathing again, and the coach drowned, the town hero, while Gus was off screwing up a career, too. 

Now, years later, Blackburn is back to haunt Gus again.  His snowmobile has been found in the lake—in the wrong lake, and with a bullet hole in it.  Blackburn didn’t drown—he was murdered.

Riches, Riches, Riches

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Sometimes there’s such a run of wonderful books that it’s like a row of cherries on a slot machine. You can hardly believe they’ve all come up at once, and the payoff is amazing.

A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, Pete Dexter’s Spooner, and John Irving’s Last Night in Twisted River all reached the top of my to-be-read pile in the last couple of weeks. Have you read them already?

They’re all big, generous, supple, and artful novels, unmistakably the work of masters of their craft. And they’re all about writers.

Denise's Top 5 True Crime

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“Nonfiction lovers know that the truth isn’t just stranger than fiction—it can be a whole lot scarier as well,” writes Michelle Kerns in her examiner.com article, “50 Best True Crime Books.”  As an avid reader of nonfiction and a fan of true crime stories, I couldn’t agree more. 

Below are my Top 5 favorite true crime books of all time.  Feel free to comment on my blog by posting your own favorites, and don’t forget to check out or subscribe to our frequently updated list of new true crime books!

1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965) 

2. Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer (2003) 

3. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (2003)

4. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (1994)

5. Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss (1983)

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? 

Written on the Body

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The New Age of Adventure

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This was my latest car book, The New Age of Adventure: Ten Years of Great Writing, a collection of pieces from National Geographic’s Adventure magazine.

Essays by Sebastian Junger, Tim Cahill, Peter Matthiessen, and other greats of travel, adventure, and nature writing are collected here. Plus a creepy look at the man-eating lions of Tsavo by Philip Caputo; the account of a stay with the last of the traditional reindeer herders in the far reaches of Russia by Gretel Ehrlich; and a horrifying account of an ebola epidemic by Tom Clynes.

This volume is a little different from earlier collections, as it includes some political writing and war correspondence. But it’s still a look at life on the outer edges by very talented people, and it’s a great read straight through or dipped into at coffee stops.

Janell Cannon's Stellaluna and Baby Names

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Grey’s Anatomy actress Ellen Pompeo recently gave birth to a daughter on September 15th, naming her Stella Luna Pompeo Ivery.  Stellaluna just so happens to be an adorable children’s book by Jannell Cannon, about a fruit bat separated from her mother and adopted by a family of birds.

If the name Stella Luna doesn’t inspire the expectant parents, then the library has plenty of baby name books to consider, such as:

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. 

Mind Wide Open

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It’s too bad Steven Johnson’s name is so generic.  I just read his 2004 Mind Wide Open:  Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life from cover to cover before realizing that he is the same author who wrote two other recent favorites of mine. 

You can look back at my entry on The Ghost Map:  The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, which was a marvelous work of science history and big-picture thought.  (Do you remember that old TV series, Connections, and how it tied together wide-ranging theories to explain the sweep of history?  You’ll love The Ghost Map.)

The other book I didn’t post about, but I recommend it, too—in Everything Bad Is Good for You:  How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Johnson argues persuasively that videogames and other much-maligned forms of popular culture are far more cognitively challenging than we credit.

In Mind Wide Open, he reviews the science of how our brains work.

No Strain, No Gain

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John Hart's Last Child

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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.  

Beowulf on the Beach

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My high school world literature teacher Ms. P. probably wouldn’t have been too pleased with this book.  After all, Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature’s Greatest Hits by Jack Murnighan lists sections to skip over in several of her required readings:

The Aeneid, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment...

And while I loved her class (except those pop essay quizzes) and I love the classics, I have to admit that William Faulkner’s confusing The Sound and the Fury (a two-page long sentence?) and James Joyce’s super-confusing Ulysses (Whaaaat?) aren’t at the top of my “to read” list.  There are sections to skip for those, too. 

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The Ghost Map

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Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map is a few years old now, but considering the recent swine flu outbreak, it’s timely.

In the mid-nineteenth century, London was a city of more than 2 million people with an infrastructure cobbled together in less urban centuries. The number of Victorian terms for occupations related to garbage picking gives a clue to how inadequate waste management was in the city, as should the incident known as the "Great Stink," brought on by a heat wave over the polluted Thames.

In the summer of 1854, in this densely populated, filthy city, a cholera epidemic began to sweep through the crowded neighborhood of Golden Square, Soho. Medical theory held that it was spread by smell, so measures were taken to deal with that. Of course, that had little effect on the propagation of the deadly disease.

Johnson sees that summer as a make-or-break moment in the history of cities, a time when the entire urban experiment in the history of humanity could have fallen through. But the persistence of a medical doctor, John Snow, and a neighborhood curate, Henry Whitehead, traced the epidemic to a single contaminated water pump, and they finally persuaded authorities to shut it down.

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.

Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad Books

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My one-year-old daughter’s favorite toy is a frog that attached to her infant car seat when she was a baby.  She lost it, so her grandmother bought another one.  We found the first one again, so now she has two.  Sometimes she will hold one in each hand in her crib at night, so I decided to read her a chapter from each of the Frog and Toad books by author/illustrator Arnold Lobel before she goes to bed. 

Last night we began with the story “The Letter” in Frog and Toad Are Friends (1970), the first title in the Frog and Toad series and a Caldecott Medal Honor Book.  Toad is sad because he never receives any mail, so Frog sends him a letter to cheer him up.  Lobel’s simple text and charming illustrations in soft greens and browns capture all the emotions of true friendship. 

I’m looking forward to reading more of their adventures this evening, but these stories are perfect chapter books for beginning readers, too!  And don’t forget to also check out: 

• Frog and Toad Together (1972)
• Frog and Toad All Year (1976)
• Days With Frog and Toad (1979)

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.

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.

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.

The Numbers Game:

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Numbers rule.  Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot are the court jesters. 

Their little book, The Numbers Game:  The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life, is very amusing, an enjoyable evening’s read.  But it has a serious purpose:  to demystify the numbers that fill the daily news, dictate public policy, and determine our lifestyles. 

How can the ordinary non-mathematicians among us make sense of the statistics, studies, and stupefying data thrown around by media and government? Blastland and Dilnot would say that even a child can tell whether the emperor is wearing clothes.  They offer half a dozen simple ways to put public numbers to the test.

Eating that latest health food halves your chance of developing brain cancer.  (Halves it from 1 in 4 or from 1 in 4 million?)  The average person will save $1000 with the latest tax law change.  (But what will most people save?  After all, almost all of us have more than the “average” number of feet.)   The crime rate is going down after a big push by local law enforcement.  (Would it have gone down anyway?)

Considering the staggering numbers we’re all being asked to understand these days, this entertaining and informative book couldn’t be more timely.

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 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 Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

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What should I read next?  That’s often the dilemma we face after we finish a book.  Well, fear no more, because on January 1st, the library kicked off our new year-long Featured Book of the Month program, designed to introduce readers to books they might otherwise have overlooked.

Our January selection is The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, humorist and travel writer Bill Bryson’s hilarious and delightful memoir about growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950s. 

The Thunderbolt Kid was born when six-year-old Bryson found a scratchy green jersey with a golden thunderbolt across the chest in the basement of his parents’ house.  The sweater bestowed extraordinary super powers: the ability to zap teachers and babysitters and deflect unwanted kisses from old people.

Bryson fondly recalls his boyhood, his zany family, and his beloved hometown, while at the same time shedding light on all aspects of life in America during the 1950s.  And, whether you grew up in that decade or not, we think you’ll be happy with our choice.

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.

The Suicide Index

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Every once in awhile, a book comes along when you need it most.  For me, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death In Order was that book.

A 2008 National Book Award finalist, author Joan Wickersham poetically tries to make sense of the death of her beloved father by a self-inflicted gunshot wound on a cold February day in 1991.  Using the index format found in the back of nonfiction books as chapter titles (Suicide: act of, Suicide: anger about, Suicide: attitude toward), Wickersham attempts to impose order on an intensely chaotic, personal experience. 

Julia Glass, author of The Whole World Over, says it best:

“The Suicide Index is just astonishing.  Having endured the suicide of a close family member, I opened this book with dread and longing; fearful of revisiting so much pain yet keenly wanting, as I always will, to understand why.  No one can ever fully answer the devastating question that suicide remains for those left behind, yet here, in Joan Wickersham’s exquisitely straightforward story, I found surprising consolation.”

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.

Two Perspectives on Paul Brown

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Marking the centenary year of the birth of the legendary Ohio football coach, Paul Brown, two new biographies of the gridiron icon have hit libraries and bookstores: Paul Brown: The Rise and Fall and Rise again of Football's Most Innovative Coach by Andrew O'Toole (Clerisy Press); and Paul Brown: The Man Who Invented Modern Football by George Cantor (Triumph Books).

Both examine Brown's life in football beginning with his days as a high school quarterback at Massillon Washington. Following a solid career at Miami University, Brown returned to Massillon as head coach and directed the Tigers to consecutive state championships. He was subsequently hired as head coach at Ohio State, the school he was deemed to small to play for, and led the team to a college national championship.

Dog Books, Sad and Happy

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It seems like a good time of year for feel-good books about dogs.  Hollywood thinks so, anyway, since the movie version of Marley and Me, John Grogan’s bestselling memoir of life with his very unusual Labrador, premieres on Christmas.  Here are a couple more to try.

I just finished listening to the audio version of The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein’s popular novel.  Enzo, its narrator, is another irresistible canine.  He’s a rather more philosophical creature than Marley.  From a TV documentary about Mongolia, he has learned of a belief that dogs are reincarnated as humans, and he feels that he is ready for this step—certainly the ability to speak is something he looks forward to.  The inability to communicate to and for his beloved master, racecar driver Denny Swift, is a frustration to him.  Denny’s life is going through some terrible turns, with the illness of his wife and the potential loss of his daughter.

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.

Once Again to Zelda

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F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of my favorite authors, and The Great Gatsby is one of my all-time favorite books.  The book itself is dedicated to his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, in honor of their often tumultuous love.  I was intrigued to read the story behind this dedication in the book Once Again to Zelda: The Stories Behind Literature’s Most Intriguing Dedications by Marlene Wagman-Geller.

Arranged chronologically, she reveals the fascinating, tragic, and often romantic stories behind the dedications in fifty classic books, including a few that I’ve read and enjoyed:

The Reading Life

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In an ideal world, I would have a stack of Booker prize winners on one side of me, a stack of Pulitzer prize winners on the other side of me, and an infinite amount of time to read these wonderful books. (The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County has a page with links to award-winning books in a variety of categories).

But like most people, my reading habits are shaped by the various pushes and pulls of the real world. Instead of reaching for long, engrossing epic novels (such as previous favorites Middlesex and The Poisonwood Bible), I find myself doing more and more of my reading online in shorter segments, whether it's an article from The New York Times or a book review on one of the many literary websites across the internet.

In addition to Turning the Page, there are many other book-themed sites worth visiting. The Elegant Variation is a site dedicated to providing book reviews and information about author visits around the country, as well as connecting writers with one another. The book blog of the New York Times, Paper Cuts, has frequent author interviews and discussions about the world of books and publishing. In a fascinating entry from October 17, 2008, a writer discusses the dangers of writing truthfully in some regions of the world.

The Why You Do the Things You Do

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There have recently been so many fascinating books set at the intersection of psychology, neurology, sociology, and evolutionary biology to explain why people act the way they do. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink was probably one of the first to hit the bestseller lists. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, Mirroring People:  The New Science of How We Connect with Others, and This Is Your Brain on Music:  The Science of a Human Obsession are a few that I’ve blogged.

Add to those Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says about Us) and Daniel Gardner’s The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t—And Put Ourselves in Greater Danger.

Technology writer Vanderbilt explains in the prologue to Traffic that one of his inspirations for writing his book was the firestorm of reaction he got when he posted to a question-and-answer website: is it better to be an early merger, getting over cooperatively as soon as the road signs tell you your lane is going to end ahead, or a late merger, making as long as possible a use of the emptier lane and tucking into traffic at the last second?

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.

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. 

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

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Englishmen in July 1860 opened their newspapers to accounts of a shocking crime:  in a respectable Wiltshire country house, a child had been abducted from his bed, murdered, and flung into the privy just outside the stable yard.

Who could have committed the murder?  To the horror of the nation, it soon became apparent that it must have been one of the household.  The Victorian home was supposed to be a private sanctum, the “castle” of proverb. 

The local police and public opinion quickly fastened suspicion on one of the live-in servants, the nursemaid who slept unusually near her employer’s bedroom.  But the case went nowhere.

Enter Jack Whicher, one of the first professional detectives of Scotland Yard, summoned from London.  His investigation focuses on an even more shocking villainess:  the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house, the child’s half sister. 

Uproar.  The rushed case is dismissed, the detective is disgraced, and wild speculation ruins the lives and reputations of almost everyone involved. 

So who really did it?

Diving In To Panther Soup

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Hello Cupcake!

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This one’s irresistible.  Look at the cover of Karen Tack and Alan Richardson’s Hello Cupcake! and you’ll see how adorable their ideas are for decorating cupcakes for all kinds of festive occasions. 

Cupcake corn on the cob decorated with yellow jelly beans, fruit-chew “melted butter pats,” sugar crystal “salt and pepper” and real corncob holders.  Chocolate donut and donut-hole penguins.  Twinkie sharks with bright red fruit-leather grins.  These are easy and utterly captivating ideas, all made from cupcakes, candy, and colored frosting.

So celebrate the dog days of summer with the charming terriers on the cover or the dozen other doggie breeds Tack and Richardson create with these easy ingredients.  Equal time for cupcake kitties, too.

Sweet.

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.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

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My coworker kindly gave me a copy of the children’s book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? as a baby shower gift, and I've been reading it to my daughter since she was born four months ago.  She loves the rhyming text by Bill Martin, Jr. ("Red bird, red bird, what do you see?  I see a yellow duck looking at me”) and the bold, colorful illustrations by Eric Carle. 

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? was the first book Eric Carle illustrated.  Since then, Martin (1916-2004) and Carle collaborated on three other beloved classics that I hope to add to my daughter’s collection: Polar Bear. Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?, Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See?, and Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?.  I’ve included links to the available board book editions for tiny fingers to hold and enjoy.

Your little one may also be interested in our popular Library Babies programs, so check our online program calendar or your local branch library for further details! 

The New Kings of Nonfiction

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I have a new car book.

Don’t worry, I don’t read while I drive.  That would be taking this whole reading thing just a little bit too far.

My car book is for doctors’ offices, for impromptu coffee stops, or for waiting for late friends.  Why read year-old magazines or pawed-through newspapers or check your watch two dozen times when you can carry around something great to fill the time?

I just picked up The New Kings of Nonfiction, a terrific collection of journalism pieces selected by Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life host Ira Glass.

So far it’s fulfilling all the requirements of a car book:  able to be read in short, random chunks of time but absorbing enough to fill those waiting minutes completely.  The only problem is that the pieces I have read so far are so interesting that I’m tempted to take it home and finish it.

Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others

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I picked up Mirroring People:  The New Science of How We Connect with Others thinking it was going to be about the phenomenon that TV documentaries sometimes cover, that people who interest each other subconsciously mimic each other’s gestures and even synchronize their breathing and heartbeats.

Well, neuroscientist Marco Ioacoboni’s fascinating book touches on that topic, but it turns out to be about much more. 

He describes the discovery, led by a team of Italian scientists, of “mirror neurons,” motor nerves that appear to play a basic role in the ability of people (and other animals) to recognize each other’s intentions, anticipate each other’s actions, feel empathy for the emotions of someone other than themselves, develop language, and participate in the whole complex process of social cognition.

Pretty cool, huh?

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.

Journey to the Bottommost of the Earth

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I recently snagged Jim Malusa's travel and adventure book, Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents, published by Sierra Club Books.  I found it to be an entertaining and quite amusing ride. 

Malusa, a biologist and native of Tucson, Arizona, conceived of the idea of biking to the lowest places below sea level on each continent—he refers to these as "antisummits”—after he and his wife, Sonya, rode their bicycles through Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, crossing over a 12, 400 foot high mountain pass to get to the Turpan Depression in the Takla Makan desert.  It's the lowest point in western China, some 500 feet bellow sea level.

They are obviously a couple who enjoy cycling and have a taste for adventure.

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. 

The best dance moves in the world--ever!

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If you like to dance, or like to laugh at people who dance, then you'll want to check out The Best Dance Moves in the World--Ever!  100 new and classic moves and how to bust them by Matt Pagett.  Granted, a book may not be the most effective way to learn to dance, but the illustrations in this one are too great to pass up.  From standards like the Twist and the Swim, to a breakdown of Michael Jackson's Thriller choregoraphy, to Cincinnati's own Ickey Shuffle, this book has it all.

And if you're looking for a DVD to give you some tips, try Breakdance: Completely Street, Series 1 or try out the library's new digital video collection and download D's Hip Hop Aerobics, Fitness on Demand.

This Library Owns Some Amazing Music

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Back in the day, it was called Alternative Music.  Since then, the name has changed many times--College Rock, Indie Rock or Pop, New Music, etc.--and this library has done a commendable job of keeping up with many of the polymorphous group of artists who make up this genre, or collection of genres.  If you want to learn more of the nomenclature and history, Wikipedia has an interesting article on Alternative Rock.  It is a chunky topic, as a subject search in the library's catalog for "alternative rock" yields 375 titles.  Like all of my blogs and lists, this one will be highly selective, subjective, and lacking a bunch of great music I have overlooked.  If you feel personally offended or frothing-at-the-mouth enraged by something I have left out, please feel free to comment.  I have listed the most recent library-owned release to date by each band/artist (or the most comprehensive/representative in some cases).  

So here's yet another list from me to you:

Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table

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I'm passing this along to all of you who enjoy a nice, quirky memoir.  Another librarian recommended Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone:  Growing up at the Table to me.   It's not a new book, but that just means there are two sequels, Comfort Me with Apples and Garlic and Sapphires to put on your list, too, if like me you didn't read them when they came out.

Reichl is a food writer, the editor of Gourmet magazine, a one-time chef, and most famously a former restaurant critic for the New York Times.  Tender at the Bone is the story of her childhood and youth. 

How she ever became a foodie is something of a mystery, given the stories she tells about her manic-depressive mother's odd ways of dealing with food, particularly her blithe habit of scraping the blue layer off of leftovers and declaring, "It's only mold." 

But a long line of mentors and fellow enthusiasts helped Reichl to some memorable meals, and she lovingly remembers every friend and every bite.  How a boarding school friend's French father introduced her to fois gras, how two courtly locals fed her couscous in Tunis on a college trip, the time she asked a lower Manhattan matron to teach her to make gefilte fish, to the days when she whipped up the daily specials at a Berkeley collective restaurant--Reichl fills her pages with warm and delicious stories. 

And she includes recipes.

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. 

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. 

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.

Vermeer's Hat

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Here’s one for all of you art history buffs, lovers of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and even readers of what are now popularly being called microhistories, those fascinating social histories that look at how a single insignificant object or place or event changed or reflected the course of world events.

In Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, Timothy Brook uses the objects glimpsed in Vermeer’s paintings to explore how economy and culture became globalized in the seventeenth century.

The broad-brimmed hat of the dashing officer in Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl becomes an emblem to explore the American fur trade and the search for the fabled Northwest Passage. A porcelain dish of fruit in the foreground of Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window leads to a discussion of the Chinese porcelain trade, and so on.

The Ends of the Earth

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I’m partly through this new book and I just noticed that it has two front covers, two editors, two tables of contents, two introductions, and two sub-subtitles.  On one side, it’s called The Ends of the Earth:  An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic:  The Arctic, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert.  On the other side it’s called The Ends of the Earth:  An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic:  The Antarctic, edited by Francis Spufford.

Okay, so the publishers will be disappointed that I missed the clever upside-down, half-and-half presentation, but they should be pleased how much I’m enjoying the first inside half. 

I started with the Antarctic, since as you may remember I’m a big fan of Beryl Bainbridge’s The Birthday Boys. 

The Chip Kidd Album

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In college, my major was graphic design, but by my senior year I discovered (or should have realized all along) that librarianship was my true calling.  Even so, when I went to bookstores, I would naturally pick up books with interesting covers and check the back flaps to see who designed them.  One name kept appearing again and again: Chip Kidd.   

You’re already familiar with Chip Kidd if you’ve read some of my earlier blogs, because he designed the covers for An Anthropologist on Mars, Schulz and Peanuts, and my all-time favorite cover, The Secret History.  But Kidd has designed many more (mostly for publisher Alfred A. Knopf), and you can see a 400-page retrospective of his work in The Chip Kidd Album: Book One: Work, 1986-2006.   

Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, David Sedaris’ Naked, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) are well-known Chip Kidd covers included here. 

Judging a Book by Its Cover

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 I have to confess that I have become completely addicted to our new New Arrivals service.  If you don't know, it's a part of our website that lists every new title we receive.  You can look at it whenever you're in the mood for something new, or you can subscribe to all or parts of it as an RSS feed so that you can make sure you never miss a thing in the categories you're interested in.  Still better, you can put holds on anything that tempts your fancy.  Some of the entries include reviews, and some of them include cover images. 

That's of course why I put a hold on this book, Ellen Highsmith Silver's Floorquilts!  Fabric Decoupaged Floorcloths--No-Sew Fun.  The cover is gorgeous, showing a floor covering that looks like a quilt.  Silver describes the process with which she treats artist's canvas and decoupages fabric onto it, using traditional quilt fabrics and design principles, for colorful and durable floorcloths.  It seems like a very do-able project, though time-consuming. 

Now, will I ever actually make one of these?  Maybe not.  (Well, to be more accurate, very, very probably not.)  But I love the fact that I know this book is in our collection and that if I ever get inspired to get out the fabric scraps, I know exactly where to find my inspiration. 

Around the World for Love of Food

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Anthony Bourdain has published a fantastic memoir of his travels in No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach (2007). It is mostly a book of photographs taken by his small crew who travels with him on the production of his Travel Channel series, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. Anthony comments on all the pictures and muses about how each location affected him.

On TV it looks like such a wonderful vacation, traveling around and eating as a way of life. These photos and the accompanying insights, however, reveal the bitter truth: They really are having a ball. Although the locations are not always plush, and they have to deal with some pretty hard things, these folks are true ambassadors for peace. They respectfully share food and lifestyle with real people in real places all over the world. I feel lucky to vicariously go along.

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.  

This Year You Write Your Novel

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The other day I saw a commercial where a family was in search of the father’s New Year’s resolution list.  The fifth goal on the list was write a novel.  I snickered.  Who doesn’t think they have at least one good book in them?

Writer Walter Mosley thinks you do, too, and in his book, This Year You Write Your Novel, he gives you the tools and the motivation to get started.

The Gathering

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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. 

Under the Banner of Heaven

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I recently noticed on the library's book discussion group calendar that the Miami Township Branch Library book club will be discussing Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer on Tuesday, January 8th at 10:00 a.m. 

I read the book this past summer and was blown away.  I found myself wanting to talk about it with anyone who would listen--much to the annoyance of my husband and coworkers, I’m sure.  But Krakauer’s book is that good.  He grabs your attention and doesn’t let go.

Under the Banner of Heaven tells the true story of Mormon fundamentalists Dan and Ron Lafferty, who murdered the wife and infant daughter of their younger brother Allen in 1984 but claimed they were acting on direct orders from God. 

Alphabet Book for Adults

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Hiding between the covers of a children's book is a very funny collection of grown-up cartoons. Steve Martin and Roz Chast have teamed up to create a gem, The Alphabet from A to Y, With Bonus Letter Z! (2007). It really almost comes across as a parody of children's alphabet books.

For example, Q: "Quincy the kumquat queried the queen, Cleverly, quietly, without being seen." Or how about, "Amiable Amy, Alice, and Andie, Ate all the anchovy sandwiches handy." The pictures, in classic Roz Chast style, mix the mundane with the weirdly worrisome, putting alligators under coffee tables and eels enjoying eggs at the dinette.

Adults will enjoy this book much more than kids will. It is an alphabet book, yes, but some of the sophisticated humor will go right over their heads. And it might prompt some awkward explanations, while you are trying to catch your breath from laughing as you put it into simple words why it's funny that Tough Tommy wants to try on Tina's tutu. Or that the man on the "D" page is, well, um, "dizzy".

White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s

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Joe Boyd has written an amazing book, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.  Joe Boyd is a music producer, who, in the years 1966-1974 produced records by the following luminaries: The Incredible String Band, Shirley Collins, Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, John & Beverly Martyn, Nico, and Maria Muldaur, among others.  For a bit more information on some of these folks, check out a couple of my other blogs, one about 1960s British folk rock, and another on Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd's original songwriter.  More than a roster of Boyd's accomplishments, White Bicycles is part memoir, part social history, and partly an intimate portrait of some very colorful, talented, and often tragic, individuals.  Due to feeling a strong connection to Sandy Denny and Nick Drake, I was particularly moved by the chapters written about them.  Poignant social commentary permeates the book as well, and he pulls no punches in describing his take on the myriad of differences between the world back then and what it has become. He even gets on the soap box for a superb chapter on the virtues of old school analog recording techniques versus today's omnipresent computer-based music making.  I cannot say enough wonderful things about this book or recommend it more strongly...I was sad to see it come to an end.  If you think you might be interested, put yourself on the holds list.  If you like folk, folk rock, or 1960s/early 1970s music in general, wrap your head, ears first, around the companion cd, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.  You won't regret either move.             

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.

An Anthropologist on Mars

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Neurologist Oliver Sacks is back after a five-year writing absence with a new book currently on the New York Times Best Sellers List called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.  I’ve just picked up my library copy and am excited to read it.  In the meantime, I thought I’d write about one of his earlier books. 

In An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, Sacks discusses seven medical cases that challenge our understanding of the brain and how it works.  Here are a few:

• An artist loses all color vision after a car accident and now sees and paints only in black and white
• A young man has a brain tumor that leaves him with no memory of events past 1970
• A surgeon experiences the compulsive tics of Tourette syndrome except while operating
• An autistic boy named Stephen Wiltshire uses his extraordinary drawing skills to communicate with the world

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

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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?

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?

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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. 

Pop-Up Update

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Last year I wrote about some stunning pop-up books that adults might enjoy. There have been some new releases that you really shouldn't miss, especially if you are a fan of paper-engineered books.

Matthew Reinhart has come out with Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy (2007), an unbelievable treasure depicting the original 3 movies.

David A. Carter has followed up his terrific One Red Dot (2005) with Blue 2 (2006) and 600 Black Spots (2007), both as much fun as the first.

Alive: The Living, Breathing Human Body Book (2007) from Dorling Kindersley, engineered by Iain Smyth, is a fascinating look at the human body.

This year Robert Sabuda gave us Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Mega-Beasts (2007), a wonderful study in ancient animals. And you shouldn't miss How Many? (2007) by Ron Van Der Meer, an intriguing study in shapes and paper sculpture. The mechanics and complexity of the book make us see things in new ways.

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.

Look Me In The Eye

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I am privileged in my work to serve the population of special needs children in our county. While I enjoy all of them, there is a special spot in my affections for the Autistic and Asperger's kids.

John Elder Robison's look me in the eye: my life with asperger's (2007) is the memoir of a life with Asperger's syndrome. Undiagnosed as a child, his unusual family did not really help this brilliant man on the road to normalcy (whatever that may be), and his younger brother Augusten Burroughs wrote his own memoir about that, Running with Scissors (2002).

Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day (2007) also relates what it is like to grow up with Asperger's. This incredibly creative man, who recited Pi to over 22,000 digits, also has savant syndrome capabilities and synesthesia; but he has grown up to fit in to his everyday world and excel in it, developing a language-tutoring website for learners of new languages.

In their own words, these books describe how these incredible men grew up. I admire them.

Music On The Road To Chicago

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Charlie and I went on another road trip to Chicago, and of course, music was involved.

Dinosaur Junior and the related Sebadoh, with Dinosaur Junior's bass player, were great. They bring to mind the rock bands of 15-20 years ago, and the fabulous guitar playing of J Mascis took me back to the glory days of my youth, admiring the great guitar players. Oh wait...he was one of them!

The Hold Steady are kind of gritty, kind of bouncy, with folk music overtones but solid rock presentation.

Bright Eyes calmed us right down with mellow acoustic pieces, and the easygoing county music-like songs set a very nice no-stress atmosphere. 

My pick for the day was Gary Allan's Greatest Hits, country music with a rough-cut rocky edge.

I must mention

• Elliott Smith (lovely)
• Dragonforce (my new favorite...speed metal in the fantasy realm)
• The Cure  (fabulous)
• Radiohead  (New CD coming soon!!!!)
• Wilco (nice listening)

It's a long drive to Chicago and back in one day, but it's a great time for music.

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. 

World War II Reading Recommendations

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Ken Burns’ new series, The War, which debuted on PBS last week, has generated an enormous amount of buzz in the media the past few weeks.  And why not?  Not only is Ken Burns responsible for a number of absolutely terrific award-winning documentaries but World War II remains the most important event of the last century.

British Chick Lit

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For those of you who think that British chick lit begins and ends with Bridget Jones's Diary, do I have news for you!  The chick lit genre is teeming with great British authors.  For a hilarious (and mostly true) introduction to British chick lit, check out A Yankee Girl's Guide to Brit Chick Lit.  According to the author, some of the differences between British chick lit heroines and their American counterparts:  the British "drink like fishes",  "slather themselves with scent",  and "always seem to be wearing disreputable, grayish underwear when Mr. Right finally comes along and sweeps them off their feet."  Did I pique your interest?  Then read on for a list of some of my favorite British chick lit authors and their most recent books:

• Bidding for Love by Katie Fforde
• Second Chance by Jane Green
• Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes
• Shopaholic & Baby by Sophie Kinsella
• Welcome to the Real World by Carole Matthews
• A Tale of Two Sisters by Anna Maxted
• Rescuing Rose by Isabel Wolff

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.

Dog Is My Co-Pilot

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This past weekend, I was looking at my mom’s September/October issue of The Bark magazine and saw     a dog on the front cover that looked quite similar to our late family dog, Daisy.  This dog had the same cute black-and-white face and was also a mix of Beagle and Border Collie, a fact I soon discovered as I turned the page and read the Editor’s Note.

The dog’s name was Nellie, and the owners are the founders of The Bark.  Nellie sadly died of cancer this summer, but pictures of her can be seen in this issue and on the front cover of Dog is My Co-Pilot: Great Writers on the World’s Oldest Friendship, a touching anthology of dog writing compiled by the editors of The Bark magazine.

When our dog Daisy died of cancer, a good friend made a Pet Memorial Fund donation to the library, which was used to purchase a dog book to remember her.  And if your child is grieving the loss of a four-legged friend, I highly recommend the tender children’s book Dog Heaven by Cynthia Rylant.

Baltimore Blues

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If you're looking for a new mystery series to delve into, I highly recommend Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan series.  The Baltimore-based series began in 1997 with Baltimore Blues.  Tess, an ex-reporter-turned-PI, enjoys rowing, food, and arguing with her large extended family.  In this, her first case, a fellow rower asks Tess to investigate his fiancee, whom he believes is having an affair with her boss.  When the boss, a prominent lawyer, ends up dead, Tess must fight to find the real killer and clear her friend's name.  Tess is nothing if not a dogged investigator and has a habit of putting herself into dangerous situations.  A statuesque redhead with a quick temper and fierce loyalty to both her boyfriend and slightly wacky (not to mention slightly corrupt) family, Tess is one PI you won't want to miss.  If you enjoy Baltimore Blues, you'll want to read all of Tess's adventures, including the latest, No Good Deeds.

Lippman has won many awards for her work, including the Edgar, Shamus, Agatha, and Anthony awards.  She is also the author of three stand-alone thrillers:  What the Dead Know, about the disappearance of two sisters; To the Power of Three, about a school shooting; and Every Secret Thing, about the murder of a young child by two adolescents.

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.

A Bit of Back to School Nostalgia

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The Nanotech Plague

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Sometimes it’s worth taking a flier on a debut paperback original.  I found this was the case with Plague Year, Jeff Carlson’s post-apocalyptic science fiction thriller.  

A small band of men and women cling to survival on a tiny peak in the Sierra Nevada.  The group made it through a terrible winter, following the outbreak of plague worldwide.  They've done so by eating their dead.  

Most of the human and animal life on Earth perished two months after an experimental nanotech virus was stolen from a Sacramento laboratory.   The nanotech was developed with the promise of ridding the human body of disease and pollutants – such as cancer – as well as offering greatly extended lifetimes.  But the untested, self-replicating machine virus was released into the atmosphere hours after it was stolen.  Simply breathing it was a death sentence.

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.

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.

Memories of the Lost War

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In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War is the sequel to This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff’s classic coming-of-age memoir about growing up with an abusive stepfather in the 1950s. 

A National Book Award finalist, In Pharaoh’s Army chronicles Wolff’s decision to join the Army and ultimately, the Vietnam War.  Wolff’s voice is painfully honest, rendering the horrors of war and its casualties (including his good friend Hugh Pierce) with both sensitivity and shattered illusions.  He is equally hard on himself, examining his own close calls and survival amidst the loss of so many others.

Money Changes Everything

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A few days ago I heard a NPR story about a woman who decided to forego buying things from China for a year.  It reminded me of the book I'm currently reading by an author who decided to opt out of the consumer market by not buying anything for one year.  As I listened to the news piece and connected the books I thought how nice it must be to make the decision to not buy anything as opposed to not having the money to purchase, which is the way it is for some Americans. 

As John Edwards continues his poverty tour during his bid for the '08 democratic nomination, we are again reminded of the lines drawn between the haves and the have-nots in this country.  The poor's approach to consumerism is completely different than those of financial means because they don't have the wherewithal to spend.  There's no statement they can make on mass consumption by withholding their dollars because more than likely they don’t spend frivolously enough to be missed

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors

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After turning the last page of a particularly breathtaking book, have you ever said to yourself, “Hmmm, I wonder where the inspiration for that came from?”  You aren’t alone.  Driven by the need to “tear down the invisible wall between us readers and them writers and see what’s really going on behind the page,” Dan Crowe and Philip Oltermann took an unusual approach to exploring the creative writing process.  Instead of relying on the standard Q&A exchange, they asked the writers to “…think for a minute about which object, picture, or document in your study reveals most about the relationship between living and writing, and then send it to us.”  The resulting essays and photographs, collected together in How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors are surprisingly fascinating!

Some excerpts:

Jay McInery: “This is an Acheulian hand axe, approximately half a million years old, crafted by Homo Erectus, which was given to me by my friend Hamilton Russell…I like to heft it and hold it between paragraphs. It fits the palm beautifully. It reminds me of a friend and a beautiful landscape; sometimes I try to imagine its maker and his world.

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. 

The Mysteries of Susan Wittig Albert

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One of my favorite mystery authors is Texas native Susan Wittig Albert.  Of her series, her most well-known is probably the one starring former lawyer-turned-herbal shop owner China Bayles.  China co-owns a tea shop and catering business with her best friend Ruby Wilcox in Pecan Springs, Texas, where the two women have a knack for stumbling across dead bodies and sticking their noses into dangerous situations.  Every mystery includes some great recipes and tips for using herbs in either cooking or medicinally.  The latest is Spanish Dagger.

China Bayles' Book of Days is a non-fiction companion to the series, complete with recipes, crafts, and gardening tips.

Albert also pens an Edwardian mystery series with her husband, Bill, under the pseudonym Robin Paige.  Death on the Lizard is the latest entry.  You might also want to check out her Beatrix Potter series, including The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interracial Intimacies

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Mildred Loving doesn’t give a lot of interviews anymore.  She doesn’t see herself as that spectacular. She sees herself as just a girl who fell in love with boy and they got married.   But at the time their marriage was against the law in many states, especially her home state of Virginia.  

On June 12, 1967 the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws and made it legal for interracial couples to marry.  To celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the Loving case a few cities across the country are having Loving Day parties. 

Randall Kennedy’s book Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption examines the long history of race relations in the United States.  The book’s introduction opens with the story of Jacqueline Henley, a young New Orleans orphan whose aunt relinquishes custody because neighbors suspected Jacqueline was black.   

The Ghost Hunters Are Back!

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Hurray! TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society), my favorite crew of ghost-hunting plumbers, is back on the air, and starting June 6 there will be new episodes of Ghost Hunters on SciFi with new investigations! These Ghost Hunters take their investigations very seriously, coming at it from the point of view of disproving it. Sometimes they can't...

Along those lines, I have a little stack of books on my desk about proving and debunking paranormal events.

• The Case for Ghosts (2006): Interesting, my favorite of the bunch, with the appropriate subtitle "An Objective Look at the Paranormal".
• The Skeptic's Guide to the Paranormal (2005): Well-known phenomena debunked; worthy warning to not make the evidence match our beliefs, either for or against.
• Debunked! (2004): Yes, these are ways to fake it, but that doesn't disprove actual paranormal events.
• Paranormal Beliefs: A Sociological Introduction (2000): Wordy academic's view of the paranormal in societies worldwide. 

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.

Sound Track for the Road Trip

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Whenever my son Charlie takes a road trip, he organizes a sound track. I had the pleasure of experiencing one of these sound tracks with him recently on a trip back from Nashville. I have a new appreciation for indie rock and some new favorite music.

Bright Eyes with Conor Oberst is a wonderful band from Omaha. 2007's Cassadaga has great music and wins for Best Album Cover (a nifty little tool reveals words and pictures all over it). 

Arcade Fire's Neon Bible was overall the best one. Charlie saw this Canadian band in concert in Chicago a couple of weeks ago and said it was sublime.

Dragonforce...and now for something completely different! This is speed metal from England, hearkening back to the 80's but with 2000's sophistication. I loved it. Described as a "power metal band", I think their concerts should be at Stonehenge, or in front of dramatically lit castles with laser light shows.

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.

Dim Sum Sundays

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One of our disagreements recently was over food.  I happened upon a book called Dim Sum: A Pocket Guide and was instantly intrigued.  I love Chinese food but I have never had dim sum and I thought this would be the perfect antidote to weekend brunching at a place that is packed with people.  I brought it to his attention and he quickly dismissed it.  According to him I wouldn’t find a place here that would serve it but in Cleveland…

But I did!  And we went, with kids in tow.  Unfortunately I forgot the book.  The book has only 80 pages but it’s a necessity to explain what is on the menu, what the ingredients are and how it looks.  At least to me it is.  I’m not an adventurous eater therefore I had to rely on my memory to think of the things I wanted to eat.  Some places have carts that roll around and you get to choose your dish that way but the place we went to eat had a non-descriptive menu. 

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.

In-Between Worlds

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“The In-Between World of Vikram Lall” is a fictional story of an East Indian living in Kenya during the days of the Mau Mau revolution.  The narrative begins with Vic living exiled in Canada because of a bounty on his head.  He recounts his once idyllic childhood in Africa where he, his sister Deepa and his friends Njoroge (an African), Annie, and Bill (English expatriates) play without discrimination until a tragedy rends them apart.

As Vic comes into adulthood a new Kenya emerges, but the heartbreak of the past reflects upon the decisions of the adult Vic and turns him into one of the most corrupt men of the country.

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.

Celebrate APAH Month

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Asian Pacific Heritage Month usually receives lesser fanfare than the months that are dedicated to other minorities. To kick things off in Cincinnati there was an Asian Culture Festival at the Cincinnati Museum Center this past weekend.  Throughout the month of May special programs will air on PBS and PRI, which highlights the Asian communities' varied histories in this country.  And, as a conclusion to the month’s festivities, the cable network AZN TV will air the Asian Excellence Awards on May 24.

Asians are one of the fastest growing racial groups in the United States and many can trace their ancestry on this soil to the 19th Century, yet many Asian Americans feel they are seen as foreigners in their own country.  “Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White” by Frank Wu explores the experience of Asian Americans through their history in this country.  It is a seminal work in Asian American history and has been compared to W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Souls of Black Folks”.

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. 

Simply Magic

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Today marks the beginning of the Romantic Times Annual Booklovers Convention, held this year in Houston, Texas.  The event is sold out, so if you don't already have your ticket, you'll have to make do with these recent releases by some of today's best romance writers.  Warning:  some are hotter than others.

Historical Romance:

• Simply Magic--Mary Balogh
• A Wicked Gentleman--Jane Feather
• The Taste of Innocence--Stephanie Laurens
• Beloved Warrior--Patricia Potter

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.  

Books for a Desert Island

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When I was a small girl, my brother made me angry for one reason or another and I decided to run away.  I grabbed a jacket and my favorite stuffed animals, and then got together the books that I absolutely couldn't live without.  When I was finally ready to leave, there was one small problem;  I couldn't lift the pile of books.

It's difficult as a book lover to narrow down your collection of essentials.  It took me many years and several occasions of moving house before I minimized my own collection.  I love books, but having now lived in a variety of places, most with lots of stairs, my back finally overruled my brain. 

The Welcoming Garden

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As referenced in a previous post, April is National Gardening Month.  The library has something to pique the interest of every gardener, whether you're dealing with a gardening challenge (too much shade, too little space) or trying to develop a focus (a color-themed garden or container gardening).  Dig in!

• If you feel like your front yard could use a little sprucing up, check out The Welcoming Garden for ideas on how to turn it into a gardener's paradise.
• Shade puts a positive spin on this gardening challenge by addressing the different types of shade and the plants that thrive there.
• Garden lovers who love to garden but who have very little space to do it in should pick up Plants for Small Spaces.

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.

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.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

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A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon absorbed by the life story of a musician I knew nothing about.  And now I find out that musician is coming to Cincinnati in May. Director Jeff Feuerzeig won a 2005 Sundance award for The Devil and Daniel Johnston, his documentary about the innovative and talented artist Daniel Johnston.  Intertwined with Johnston's remarkable songwriting and visual art is his personal struggle with manic depression.  Interviews with friends, colleagues, and his devoted parents as well as Daniel's recordings dating back to childhood, make for a gut-wrenching, complex portrayal of love, survival, and art. 

Daniel Johnston performs live at The Southgate House in Newport on Friday, May 11.   

The Cincinnati International Wine Festival

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The 16^th annual Cincinnati International Wine Festival will be held this coming weekend, with the Grand Tastings scheduled for March 22 and 23.  These recently published books in the Library’s collection will advance your knowledge and enhance your appreciation of the vino aging in your cellar.   

The Oxford Companion to Wine

Updated in 2006, this authoritative compendium contains almost 4000 entries on every conceivable aspect of wine and wine making.

Wine: the 8,000-Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade by Thomas Pellechi

Pellechi presents a fascinating overview of the commercial impact of the wine industry  throughout history.

The Way to Make Wine: How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home by Sheridan F. Warrick

Red and white varietals; pressing equipment; techniques of the craft: this is a complete guide for novices and experienced winemakers

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.

Erin Go Bragh!

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Break out that ugly green turtleneck you've been dying to wear and get ready to celebrate--St. Patrick's Day is almost here!  Cincinnati's Annual St. Patrick's Day Parade is this Saturday.  Corned beef, cabbage, and Guinness can be had at Newport's or Mason's Claddagh Irish Pub.  If you're looking for a quieter way to commemorate the holiday, check out some of these novels set in Ireland.

In recent years, mystery writers have found Ireland a fertile ground for murder and mayhem.  Lake of Sorrows, Erin Hart's sequel to Haunted Ground, is a prime example.  In it, pathologist Nora Gavin is sent to the bogs of Central Ireland to investigate two recently discovered corpses, one ancient, the other recent.  Other good mysteries set in Ireland include Ken Bruen's Priest, Carol Anne O'Marie's Murder at the Monk's Table, and Dicey Deere's The Irish Village Murder (all three are the latest titles in series).

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.

Dig Up a Good Mystery

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I don't profess to be the world's best gardener, but I do love flowers, so I was very excited the other day when I noticed my spring bulbs peeking through the dirt.  Soon my yard will be awash in brightly-colored crocus, hyacinths, daffodils and tulips.  If spring can't come fast enough for you, you might want to indulge yourself with a few of these garden-themed mysteries.

• Bleeding Hearts by Susan Wittig Albert--In Pecan Springs, Texas, herbalist and tea shop owner China Bayles investigates the murder of Tim Duffy, the high school football coach.
• Death in the Orchid Garden by Ann Ripley--On location in Hawaii to film an episode of her popular gardening show, Louise Eldridge probes the beating death of a well-known botanist.
• Bindweed by Janis Harrison--When her mentally handicapped assistant, Toby, is killed by a deliberately-planted nest of killer bees, River City, Missouri florist Bretta Solomon vows to find Toby's murderer.

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.

Try A Natural Born Charmer

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I first discovered Susan Elizabeth Phillips when I read her book It Had To Be You back in 1996.  I loved her wit and humor and her easy storytelling style.  Still do.  She's one of a few authors that I'll automatically read without having to know what the book's about.

When her newest book, Natural Born Charmer, was published this month I happily snapped it up and read it in one weekend.  It's the story of Chicago Stars quarterback Dean Robillard and vagabond Blue Bailey.  When Dean picks Blue up after he spots her walking down the highway in a beaver suit (trust me there's a good reason for that!) their adventure is only begining.  Throw in Dean and Blue's mommy issues, Dean's younger sister and one cranky old woman who owns the town and what you have is ultimately a story of what it means to be a family and accepting the one that you have.

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.

Tom Perrotta and The Wishbones

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This Just In: Women Can Cook!

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 I was perusing the BBC's website today (I love having a foreign perspective on world news), when I stumbled upon the story of French chef Anne-Sophie Pic.  Just who is Anne-Sophie Pic?  She's the first woman to receive a three star rating from France's prestigious Michelin restaurant guide in more than fifty years, and is the fourth woman chef to receive the award since it's inception in 1926.  And if that weren't enough, she comes from a family of three star Michelin chefs (her grandfather Andre won in 1934, and her father Jacques won in 1973). 

While I personally can never be compared with a three star winning chef, I do like to cook (is it wrong that I have a dream kitchen, but couldn't tell you what the rest of my dream home looks like?).  I love to make (and eat) Rachael Ray's Italian Meatball soup.  I love making comfort food like macaroni and cheese, grilled cheese and BLT sandwiches, soups, and casseroles.  One of my favorite gifts from my grandmother is the recipe book she made for all of her children and their spouses filled with all of our family recipes (hands off the buckeye recipe and the German doughnut recipe).

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.

Man's Best Friend

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Shahtani Tropical Breeze.  Thistleglen Margot.  Freestyle Ocean Breeze.  Sound like nice places to visit, right?  If you were in New York City last year at this time, you would have been able to visit all of them at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.  The 2007 show starts today and concludes tomorrow (live coverage both days from 8-11 pm on the USA Network).  In all, 165 breeds in seven groups (working, terrier, toy, non-sporting, sporting, hound, and herding) compete against each other to be crowned Best in Show.  Last year's winner was Rufus, the colored bull terrier (otherwise known as Rocky Top's Sundance Kid--I swear I'm not making these names up).  Tune in to see the popular (beagles) compete against the unknown (Spinone Italianos) and the just plain weird-looking (pulis).  While you're in the mood, you might want to peruse these dog-themed mysteries as well:

• A Deeper Sleep by Dana Stabenow--Alaskan PI Kate Shugak and her faithful half-wolf, half-Siberian husky, Mutt, try to gather evidence against a man who has killed three of his wives.

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. 

Secret Lives Revealed Tomorrow Night

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Frank Warren, who conceived the Postsecret Project where people anonymously write their secrets on postcards and mail them to him to be published, will be at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati on Wednesday, February 7th at 7:00 pm.  Warren is promoting his new book, The Secret Lives of Men and Women.  This is his third collection of whimsical, heart-wrenching, chilling postcards, arranged in collage with original illustrations.  For those interested in art, human psychology, and the secrets we all keep.

Other PostSecret books:

PostSecret:  Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives

My Secret: a PostSecret book

I am not who I appear to be

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I recently picked up a new book: My Secret Life on the McJob, written by Jerry Newman, a business management professor who took a year off to work at seven fast food burger joints.  The book purports to be another "management advice book" and each chapter begins with a management lesson that one might presumably glean from the following chapter.  I liked the book even more as an outsider's undercover glimpse of what working fast food was like.

There's something very appealing in books about this kind of cross-cultural spying.  The classic of the genre is Black like me, written by a white man with darkened skin making his way through the segregated south of the 1950's.  A close second in terms of name recognition is probably Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, in which the middle-class Ehrenreich explores what it really means to take the sort of low-wage work on which the working poor rely. 

The Edgar Awards

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The Mystery Writers of America recently announced their 2007 Edgar Award nominees.  There are twelve categories, including Best Novel and Best Fact Crime.  This year, Stephen King will receive the Grand Master Award (past recipients include Mary Higgins Clark and P.D. James).  I was happy to see many of my favorite mysteries from the past year receiving nominations, including Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects, a novel that I recently blogged about, which received a nomination for Best First Novel By An American Author.  Some of my other favorite nominees:

• A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read--Syracuse journalist Maddie Dare delves into a 20-year-old unsolved double murder in which her cousin is the prime suspect.
• The King of Lies by John Hart--In rural North Carolina, criminal defense attorney Work Pickens struggles first with his father's disappearance and then, a year later, with the discovery of his murdered body.

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.

The O.C. May Be Cancelled, but the Music Lives On

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Fans of The O.C. saw the writing on the wall when Mischa Barton left the cast at the end of last season.  With only a few episodes left in the series, you might be wondering how to cherish the memories.  What better way to relive the drama than by listening to the Music of the O.C. – the indie pop sounds that became a staple of the show.

Music of the O.C. - Mix 2

Music of the O.C. - Mix 4

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.

Sharp Objects

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Stephen King called it a "relentlessly creepy family saga" and an "admirably nasty piece of work."  He was referring to Sharp Objects, the debut novel for Entertainment Weekly's chief TV critic, Gillian Flynn.  In a candid essay about her work, Flynn admits to being fascinated by aggression in women and wanting to write a "dark, dark book...about the violence of women."

She has succeeded.  Her protagonist, Camille Preaker, is a hard-drinking journalist who works at a second-rate Chicago paper.  She is also a reformed cutter; at age 13, she began carving words into her skin:  "queasy", "vanish", "weary".  Camille has a very distant relationship with her mother and little liking for her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri.  When two preteen girls are murdered in Wind Gap, her editor sends her back home to write a piece on the killings.  In the course of Camille's investigation, she learns something that didn't make it into the papers:  both girls had their teeth removed.

Watch Out, Your Life Is No Longer Your Own!

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Who are are all these great big people in my house, and where did my cute little toddlers go? 

I have a few questions for parents everywhere: Which is more stressful, potty training or teaching your child to drive? Or, would you rather feed strained peas to a baby or a crisp fresh salad to a 13-year-old? Or how about watching your 1-year-old take his first steps toward you, then realizing, as you watch your 18-year-old walk away, that those first steps just weren't that long ago?

Jim Borgman and Jerry Scott have uncanny insight into parenting a teenager and an incredible talent for putting it onto paper. They co-author Zits, a daily comic strip about family life with a teenaged son. There are several collections available in book form.

We are expecting a new Zits sketchbook soon, Are We Out of the Driveway Yet? In the meantime, there are other Zits books in our collection with fabulous titles such as Pimp My Lunch and Growth Spurt.

Where did my toddlers go? The bigger mystery right now is, with all these teenagers around, where did all the food go?

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. 

Electric Folk Before the Birth of the Freak Folks

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There has been a popular folk music movement brewing for several years known as “Freak Folk”, consisting of people such as Devendra Banhart, Vetiver, Faun Fables, Joanna Newsom, Espers, Josephine Foster, Six Organs of Admittance, Animal Collective, Akron/Family, and others.  Freak Folk will more than likely be the subject of a future blog.  Why then bring it up now?

Because FF simply could not exist without the creative fusion of styles that occurred in the UK in the 1960’s and 1970’s, described in mouth-watering detail by ethnomusicologist Britta Sweers in her Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music.   I would strongly recommend this wonderful book to anyone interested in folk, folk rock, or the music of the British Isles, and for those curious about the lesser-known, more traditional musical/cultural revolution of the 60’s that was (among other things) a reaction against the pop music of the day.  Sweers wrestles with the problematic definitions and history, paints a vivid sociocultural portrait of the scene, discusses the main players therein, elaborates on the many ongoing musical revivals, and speculates about future fusions of traditional and “new”. 

Helping Sheep Buck the Trend

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I like new things--especially technological toys.  I was one of those people who ran out and got a digital camera when 2 megapixels was top-of-the-line and cost what 10 megapixels cost today.  I snagged a combination cellphone/MP3 player/internet device all of about 2 months before they were suddenly advertising them on TV everywhere.  I love my Web 2.0.  On the occasions when I can afford it, I'm what they call an early adopter. 

What that translates to, according to Flavor of the month: why smart people fall for fads, is that I'm an enthusiastic embracer of technological fads and innovations.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in certain cases it costs me money and time.  People who hold off buying that digital camera get a better deal; people who pause a bit before buying that Segway mostly never end up purchasing it at all.  The secret is to know what innovation to adopt and when.  One interesting point along these lines that the book mentions is that, in the 1930s, some people thought wristwatches were just a fad.  Then again, who really wants a Pet Rock?

A Crafty Good Time

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When I had my first child almost two years ago, a good friend threw me a shower and made a beautiful quilt for our nursery.  Another friend wove a baby blanket.  This past Halloween, my mother sewed a dog costume for my daughter to wear (complete with brown spots and floppy ears and tail, very cute!)  Even if you're severely deficient in this area (like me!), you still might enjoy reading some arts-and-crafts-themed mysteries.  Here are some of my favorites:

• In Knit One, Kill Two by Maggie Sefton, full-time CPA and part-time knitter Kelly Flynn investigates the burglary death of her favorite aunt in Colorado.
• Earlene Fowler's Fool's Puzzle is set in San Celina, California, where young widow Benni Harper has recently moved to take a job as curator of their folk-art museum.  While trying to put together a quilt show, she discovers the body of a local potter in the museum's studio.

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.

Fun With eBay

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My goal was to make $50 a week selling useless junk on eBay, and for about a month I did just that.  Then, unfortunately, I began running out of useless junk that anyone else would want, and I'm at $52 for the entire last 30 days.

Kenneth Walton, author of Fake: Forgery, Lies, & eBay, did much better.  In about 1998 he was able to quit his job as a lawyer and sell the art he bought at garage sales and thrift shops for thousands of dollars a week.  He spent $200 on Davenport's Art Reference & Price Guide and began to recognize the work of minor but collectible American artists.  At one point he and his Army-buddy partner found a painting by Oscar Berninghaus at Goodwill, which they sold for $18,700.

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.

Sammy Davis, Jr. was in the Church of Satan?!

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Need a reading suggestion for that special oddball in your life?  I may have a perfectly esoteric recommendation.  If the person has an interest in the 1960's, the occult, eccentric people, and strange tales, Gary Lachman's intriguing Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius might be just the ticket (to ride). This fast-paced and highly entertaining reader of otherworldly and sometimes sordid activities alleges connections between many colorful figures such as: L. Ron Hubbard and Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson and the Beach Boys, Jayne Mansfield and Anton LaVey (founder of The Church of Satan), and other strange bedfellows too numerous to mention here.  

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

Ballets Russes: Brilliant Dancers, Brilliant Film

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The wonderful documentary Ballets Russes is now at the Library, after a too-brief stint on the big screen here last summer. The film recounts the glories and “ballet battles” of the two troupes of dancers, originally all Russian émigrés, who toured the world for decades during the mid-twentieth century. These companies brought ballet to regions where it had never been seen before, particularly in the Americas and Australia.

A 2000 reunion of former Ballet Russe members in New Orleans gave Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine an opportunity to capture their accounts of this pioneering period in ballet history. The film combines these candid, affectionate, moving, and often humorous interviews with precious glimpses of legendary works and performers.

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.  

Graphic Novel Nominated for National Book Award

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Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese has made history as the first graphic novel nominated for a National Book Award. Although it didn’t win, the book joins Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus as a graphic novel honored by a major awards organization outside the comics industry.

Yang’s art is charming and beautifully full-colored by Lark Pien. The book’s multi-thread narrative relates three clever, absorbing tales: the adventures of the legendary Monkey King, the struggles of a Chinese-American boy to fit in at school, and the trials of a European-American boy shamed by his visiting Chinese cousin, who is a study in racist clichés.

Gift Books by Local Writers

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Looking for something unique to give this holiday season?  Check out the Images of America series that features books about the history of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.  Histories of specific communities, such as Delhi: Cincinnati's West Side,  College Hill, or Fort Thomas, in addition to subject specific studies such as Cincinnati Cemeteries: Queen City Underground or Stepping Out in Cincinnati: Queen City Entertainment 1900 - 1960 mean there's something for everyone.  Take a look at the extensive list of titles that covers a wide range of local interest topics.

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. 

Yummm

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Those of you who read the blog regularly know that Mary is our queen of cookbook posts.  But I’m going to borrow her crown briefly to post about Dorie Greenspan’s new cookbook, Baking:  From My Home to Yours.  It deserves a royal fanfare.

Greenspan was the co-author of the award-winning Baking with Julia, has written several other cookbooks, and is a “special correspondent” for Bon Appetit magazine (how’s that for a job?), though she says she got her start as a cook by burning down her parents’ kitchen at the age of thirteen.

Holiday Mysteries

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Buying presents.  Trimming the tree.  Baking cookies.  Visiting relatives.  The holiday season can be exhausting and stressful--so make yourself some hot cocoa and park yourself in front of the fire with some of these holiday-themed mysteries (just try not to laugh at the titles).

• Sugar Cookie Murder--Joanne Fluke--Minnesota bakery owner Hannah Swensen investigates the murder of a former Las Vegas dancer.
• Santa Cruise--Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark--Setting sail from Miami on an after-Christmas cruise, private detective Regan Reilly teams up with amateur sleuths Alvirah and Willy Meehan to track down a pair of escaped convicts.
• Jingle Bell Bark--Laurien Berenson--The suspicious death of her son's bus driver brings out the inner snoop in Greenwich, Connecticut dog trainer Melanie Travis.

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.

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. 

Family Connections

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It's the day before Thanksgiving, which is the quintessential American family holiday, and I have the peculiar nature of the family on the brain.  Families are funny.  No, let's face it, most of our families are quirky, odd, downright weird.
 
Because of all the shared history involved, it can be hard to tell a family story correctly and succinctly.  Some things translate, and some don't work at all.  For instance, although I can explain to strangers why nearly every gift my aunt Dar gets has a goose on it somewhere (she had a fundamentally bad experience with a goose when all my aunts were children), I'm not nearly as capable of elucidating why another of my aunts has an entire photo album full of pig posteriers. 

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.

Sabudapalooza!

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Robert Sabuda, the premier paper engineer pop-up artist around, is coming to Cincinnati!

We have exciting plans for this Saturday, Nov. 18: A Pop-Up Party with Robert Sabuda from 1-3 in the Main Library Atrium. It will be fabulous fun: a talk with slides from Mr. Sabuda, pop-up crafts for everyone, exhibits of his work throughout the library, and opportunities to get Robert Sabuda's real live signature in your copies of his books (available at the Friends Shop)!

Every book by Robert Sabuda is a glorious work of art. My favorite, Winter's Tale, is a gorgeous white and sparkly depiction of winter, from the first pop-up of a soaring pure white owl to the last twinkly forest clearing.

I have written before about the appeal of pop-up books. Remember: definitely NOT just for kids!

The Museum of the Missing

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Seven paintings, including a Cézanne masterwork, were stolen from art collector Michael Bakwin’s home in 1978. Bakwin recovered the Cézanne, Bouilloire et Fruits, more than 20 years later, when a corporation offered it for sale and a suspicious Lloyd’s of London underwriter called the Art Loss Register. But soon after, Bakwin was forced to sell Bouilloire et Fruits – for more than $30 million – simply because he could never maintain enough security to prevent another theft. He eventually regained four more of his paintings, but two remain missing.

This story from Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft illustrates both the good and the bad news about the current situation. The good news is the Art Loss Register, a London-based organization that maintains a database of stolen works. Since its creation in 1991, the Art Loss Register has done much to compensate for light trade regulation, inadequate governmental resources, and low motivation to identify or report suspect provenance.

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.

Holiday Films

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Looking forward to the holiday movie season?  Can't decide which movies to see?  Then check out Yahoo's Holiday Movie Guide.  If you still can't make up your mind, pick up copies of some of the following books.  The movies based on them are all set to hit theaters soon.  Scheduled release dates are in parentheses.

• A Good Year by Peter Mayle--Russell Crowe inherits a French vineyard and falls in love with a beautiful local woman (11/10)
• Fast Food Nation:  The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser--A fast food company executive played by Greg Kinnear investigates when tainted meat turns up in his company's restaurants (11/17)
• Casino Royale by Ian Fleming--Daniel Craig plays the first blonde James Bond (11/17)

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.

Ohioana Hamilton County Writers Celebration

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The Ohioana Library's Hamilton County Writers Celebration will be in the Tower Room on the third floor of the main library on Sunday, November 12, at 1:30.  The event is open to the public, and you might want to arrive early to get a good seat.  We've invited more than 130 writers who were either born in Hamilton County, or who have lived here for many years, or who write about Cincinnati--either real Cincinnati or a fictionalized version (with vampires, and excuse me if I'm wrong about vampires being fictional)--and who published books, music compositions, or new magazines or newspapers within the last year.

Not all 130 writers will come, of course, but already a selection of around 40 interesting and diverse writers have agreed to come.  Mercantile Library Board Member Buck Niehoff will give a keynote talk; the writers will receive certificates, and we have created a slide show honoring their books and describing their work and lives.  And yes--refreshments at the end and plenty of time to meet the writers and look at their books.

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. 

Bloodsucking Fiends

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If you haven't yet read Elizabeth Kostova's blockbuster debut The Historian, you might want to pick up a copy.  Kostova, who graduated from Yale, took 10 years to research and write her vampire tale.  Apparently her persistence paid off--Little, Brown and Co. purchased the book for $2 million, and Sony shelled out another $1.5 million for the movie rights.  It also won the 2006 Book Sense Book of the Year Award and the 2005 Quill Award for Debut Author of the Year.  It has been published in 37 different languages, had an initial print run of 300,000, and hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

The book opens in 1972 Amsterdam, where a 16-year-old American girl discovers an ancient book in her father's library.  The book is blank except for a creepy drawing inscribed with the word "Drakulya", but it is the letters hidden inside it that intrigue her.  Letters which begin with the ominous salutation "My dear and unfortunate successor..."

We Just Get Keep Getting Smarter and Smarter, and Pretty Soon We're as Good as We Are Now

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One of my high-school teachers got off topic and repeated her personal anecdotes a lot.  I've forgotten Latin, but I remember the anecdotes.  One was about a big, strong husky boy who nevertheless didn't try out for the football team because he was "yellow."  Some other boys beat him up, and the Latin teacher was glad.  Then again, she thought, he probably had dementia praecox (or else he would have been on the team), so his "yellowness" wasn't exactly his own fault. 

Dementia praecox, I knew, had not been a diagnosis since the 1950s, when we became enlightened and started using good drugs (Thorazine) instead of bad surgeries (lobotomy), and the word "schizophrenia" replaced "dementia praecox."  Then things got even better in the '90s, when atypical antipsychotic medicines with fewer side effects were created. 

According to Robert Whitaker's 2002 Mad In America, though, I've been completely wrong. 

Blender's 40 Greatest Rock 'N Roll Books

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As library people we love lists...Especially booklists.  So if you happen to love rock music and lists, like some of us libraryfolk, below you will find Blender music magazine's "40 Greatest Rock 'N Roll Books", from their October issue.  I am also pleased to report that we own most of the books on the list (and ordering those we do not, if in print).  

Having stated that lists are lovable, it must also be said that they can be problematic, causing negative reactions in some by what they include and exclude.  Blender's list rose the ire of music blog/zine Stereogum.  Having read through the flames and rants, I discovered three books that Stereogum readers were most dismayed by Blender's omission: Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, Cash: The Autobiography, and "Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes".

On the other hand, Kirkus Reviews agrees with Blender's choices, and reviews 13 of the 40 picks in this article from The Book Standard.

Kind reader, what about you?  What's missing from the list?  What's on it that shouldn't be?  Comments...?

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.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

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I'm a little cuckoo for this show.  If Larry David met me, he'd be put off by my enthusiasm.  But no show has made me laugh this hard since Seinfeld, so what am I supposed to do?  Since I don't have HBO, I've had to catch the episodes on DVD, and after watching all five seasons, I've got nowhere to turn except network TV, and that's just not a place I want to be.  You can imagine my delight when I discovered Curb Your Enthusiasm, the Book was coming out. 

Johnny U

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Tom Callahan, a sports columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer in the early 1970s, has written a superb biography of Johnny Unitas, Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas. I highly recommend it.

A native of Pittsburgh, John Unitas played quarterback at the University of Louisville in the early 1950s.  The Pittsburgh Steelers selected him in the 9th round of the 1955 NFL draft, the 105th player taken.  The Steelers then cut him. After competing in a Pittsburgh city-league, Unitas was invited to a tryout in the spring of 1956 by the Baltimore Colts. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

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?

I See Dead People

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After reading George D. Shuman's 18 Seconds, I was reminded of this famous quote from M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense.  18 Seconds is the story of Sherry Moore, a blind psychic blessed (and cursed) with the ability to see the last 18 seconds of a person's life.  When Sherry touches a dead person's body, she relives their last seconds before dying.  This makes her an invaluable asset to the detectives of Wildwood, New Jersey, who are hunting a serial killer preying on young women.  The killings are eerily similar to a series of unsolved homicides from the 1970's.  When the killer learns about Sherry's "unusual ability", a cunning game of cat-and-mouse begins.

Intrigued?  Read on for a list of more thrillers featuring people with "unusual abilities."

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. 

Long Sigh of Satisfaction

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When I finished reading Variable Star for the first time the other day, I gave a long sigh of satisfaction.  It’s one of Robert A. Heinlein’s stories but Spider Robinson actually wrote it.  The Robert A. Heinlein estate asked him to write this story outlined by Heinlein in 1955.   

I have to give Spider Robinson a lot of credit for his work.  It could not have been easy.  He started with an eight page handwritten synopsis, fourteen 3X5 index cards with extensive notes, his knowledge of Heinlein’s work and his long friendship with Heinlein. The result is vintage Heinlein, or vintage Robinson or both.

A Shiver Down Your Back

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The leaves are turning.  There's a nip in the air.  Pumpkins, scarecrows, and witches are popping up on front porches everywhere.  Children are scaring themselves silly at haunted houses.  Personally, I prefer to get my chills and thrills the old-fashioned way:  through the pages of a good book.  Have you ever picked up a book because the cover gave you that creepy-crawly, shiver-down-your-back sensation?  If making the hair stand on the back of your neck is a must for you, check out some of the following covers.  Read the books.  Just make sure to keep your flashlight handy.

One of my all-time favorites for a scary book cover (and title) is Stephen Dobyns's The Church of Dead Girls.  The discovery of the bodies of three young girls paralyzes a small upstate New York town.  Their deaths are eventually linked to an unsolved murder from years before.  The connection?  All of their left hands had been severed.

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.” 

The Music Biz & Listen 2 This!

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Some of the most requested books in the Art & Music Department are those on the music business and associated topics, i.e., management and booking, career advancement, marketing and promotion, record labels, recording, and legal issues.  For the first time in three years, a bibliography of these books has been revised and updated.  It is now available as a printed brochure and online: The Music Business: Basic Sources of Information.  There will also be a selection of these books displayed in the Atrium Friday, October 6 through Saturday, October 14.  The timing is not accidental...

Quoth the Raven "Nevermore"

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This quote probably brings back not-so-fond memories of high school English class for many of us.  Edgar Allan Poe, the author of the poem "The Raven", died 157 years ago this week.  Poe, who also wrote such famous short stories as "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher", was born on January 19, 1809 in Boston and died on October 7, 1849 in Baltimore.  The circumstances surrounding his death are murky.  Although it was believed for years that Poe's death was due to extreme alcohol abuse, the doctor who attended him found no evidence to support this claim.  Cholera, rabies, and syphilis have all been put forth as possible causes of death, but it is likely that the cause will never be known.

Every year on Poe's birthday, a man dressed in a cape appears at his gravesite and leaves three roses and a partially empty bottle of cognac.  Inspired by this real-life event, mystery novelist Laura Lippman wrote In a Strange City, in which PI Tess Monaghan investigates a shooting death that occurs at Poe's tomb.

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. 

One of LonelyGirl15's Favorite Books / Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

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Okay, LonelyGirl15 turned out to be a scam.  Apparently this has proven a near tragedy to young male "geeks" who were attracted to a beautiful actress who also seemed to share their interest in science.

If you just get a plot summary of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! you'll want to slap him around.  As a child Feynmann fixed adults' radios.  He distinguished himself at MIT, was one of the first arivees at Los Alamos.  He caught the notice of the higher-level scientists and solved important nuclear-related problems.  He learned to pick locks.  He distinguished himself at Princeton and got teaching jobs at Cornell and CalTech.

Glamour's Dos and Don'ts

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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 Contract with God Trilogy

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In a recent post, I headed a list of milestones in modern comics history with Will Eisner’s 1978 A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories. The pioneering writer, artist, publisher, and teacher for whom the Eisner Awards are named marketed this collection of adult tales as a “graphic novel.”

A few months before his death in January 2005, Eisner decided to republish his landmark work together with two other collections set on the mythical New York tenement street that reflects his childhood home. The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue includes the stories of A Life Force, written in 1983, and Dropsie Avenue from 1995, both new to the Library with this omnibus volume.

While A Contract with God and A Life Force portray the world of the 1930s, Dropsie Avenue traces the changes in the neighborhood, especially the succession of ethnic groups, since 1870, when “still there were farms in the Bronx.”

It Seemed Like Good Advice at the Time

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“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.”   Erica Jong

I'm not very interested in current-day self-help books, but I love old ones.  There is nothing like immersing yourself in the aphorisms and advice of the first half of the twentieth century to give yourself a feeling of the utter strangeness of a familiar culture. 

We recently got a book that sent me down that road again.  How to be Popular is a collection of short excerpts from self-help books and articles for teens on the subject of popularity.  These are drawn from books and magazines, mostly from the 1960's and 70's, with art from the same time period.  A classic quote from this title is "Take a good look at those who are popular.  Where do they go?  What do they do?  Try to be like them."

Right as Rain: Noir Novels for Walter Mosley Fans

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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, The Night Gardener, or if one book is not enough (and it won't be!), start with one of his recent series, beginning with Right as Rain. 

Red Hat

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It recently dawned on me that I am closer to 50 than 40.  With this realization came the urge to wear purple and red. Then a new book, The Red Hat Society Cookbook, arrived in my department. Well, I was immediately drawn into the wonder that is the Red Hat Society.  Now I read in the paper that the Ohio Red Hatters Convention will be at the Sharonville Convention Center this weekend.  It seems that someone or something is telling me to envelop myself in the wonders of the red hat movement. Luckily, after reading about the Society on their website, I found out that I can wear pink for a few more years.  

You may like to check out other materials that the Library has on the Red Hat Society.

And let's not forget Jenny Joseph's poem that inspired it all, Warning. 

Walking in Circles Before Lying Down

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My dog has been known to exhibit some strange behaviors.  When my husband and I first brought him home from the rescue, he developed a strange habit of jumping into our bathtub.  He has an affinity for bathrooms in general, as evidenced by his insistence on accompanying me whenever I go into one.  He also likes to run maniacally in circles around our backyard until he exhausts himself (or blows out his knee, which he did a few years ago, but that's another story).  One thing I'm pretty sure he's never done:  talked to me.

In Merrill Markoe's Walking in Circles Before Lying Down, Dawn Tarnauer is convinced her dog, a pit bull mix she calls Chuck, is talking to her.  Even stranger, he seems to be making a lot of sense.

Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs

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I found Unleashed:  Poems by Writers’ Dogs more than ten years ago, when it first came out.  Yesterday I found a scrap of paper with a quote from it stuck to my refrigerator door (which I clearly don’t clean often enough), and it reminded me how much I adored this little volume. 

Editors Amy Hempel and Jim Shepard claim that the collection came about after a drunken campfire verse-making session, when their fishing buddy, Bob Shacochis, composed this one-line poem, “Wind,” in the voice of his Irish setter, Frank:

Leaves—I thought they were birds.

It inspired them to solicit poems from famous writers, all the poems written as though from the dogs’ point of view.

The result is irresistible, a charming, surprisingly varied collection of poems in all genres, on all kinds of doggish subjects.

A Cool Breeze on the Underground

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For a crisp, fast-moving mystery with appealing characters and snappy dialogue, you can’t beat Don Winslow’s 1991 debut, A Cool Breeze on the Underground.  It got an Edgar nomination for best first crime novel.

Neal Carey, an investigator for a very discreet New England firm called Friends of the Family, was brought into the business at age eleven, when he tried to pick the pocket of New York-Irish p.i. Joe Graham.  Graham took Neal under his wing, trained him in investigative techniques, and arranged for the firm to get him an expensive education.  Now Neal just wants to finish his degree in English lit (specializing in Smollett), but the firm has a job for him.  The daughter of Vice-Presidential hopeful John Chase is missing.  Not that Chase really cares, but he needs her for the photo ops.

In the Shadow of No Towers

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Most of the leading comics professionals created moving tributes to the events of September 11, 2001. Their work is collected in three anthologies – 9-11: The World’s Finest Comic Book Artists and Writers Tell Stories to Remember, 9-11: Artists Respond, and 9-11 Emergency Relief. In addition, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón will be at the Library very soon.

But the most cogent and intimate graphic treatment, In the Shadow of No Towers, comes from Art Spiegelman -- appropriately, since Spiegelman is the author of another powerful study of the human spirit grappling with ultimate darkness. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale uses the cat-and-mouse cartoon tradition to tell the story of his parents’ sufferings and heroism during the Holocaust.

An equally significant credential is the fact that In the Shadow of No Towers is also a survivor’s tale: Spiegelman and his family witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center from their Lower Manhattan neighborhood, and were among the crowds fleeing its collapse.

Coming Soon to a Library Near You

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The days are getting shorter, the nights cooler, and the perennials in my garden are starting to look a little shabby—sure signs that fall is just around the corner! This year, I’m particularly eager for fall to arrive because a bumper crop of titles from some of my favorite authors will be released in the coming months. Here are some of the novels I’m looking forward to curling up with on crisp, cool fall evenings:

• Imperium by Robert Harris. Harris returns to Ancient Rome, the setting of his bestselling thriller, Pompeii.  This is the first in a trilogy chronicling Cicero’s rise to power. (September) 

• The Mission Song by John le Carre.  A literary tale of political espionage from the always masterful le Carre.  (September) 

• The Road by Cormac McCarthy. A father and son scavenge to survive in post-apocalyptic America. Kirkus Reviews is hailing The Road “as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.” (September) 

The Sweet Science

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Pound for Pound, a posthumously published boxing novel by F. X. Toole has received a lot of critical attention.  It's the story of an emotionally scarred Los Angeles trainer, Dan Cooley, and his association with Chicky Garza, a rising young Hispanic fighter from San Antonio.  The novel provides an unsentimental treatment of the redemptive power of boxing drawn from the elemental relationship between trainer and fighter.  

In 2000, at the age of 70, F. X. Toole entered the literary world with a debut collection, Rope Burns: stories from the corner.  He'd worked previously in boxing as a corner “cut man,” giving him an insider’s knowledge and perspective of the fight game.  Toole died of heart disease in 2002, and never saw his story “Million $$$ Baby” translated into an Oscar-winning feature film in 2004. 

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

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Some scientists have the gift of writing so clearly that it’s like being taken backstage by a magician and shown all the tricks—oh, that’s how it’s done.  I heard Daniel J. Levitin on the Diane Rehm Show a few weeks ago and was impressed by how well he described his new book, This Is Your Brain on Music:  The Science of a Human Obsession, and when I picked up a copy, I was delighted to find that he writes just as lucidly and humorously as he talks.

Levitin is a cognitive neuroscientist (“the field that is the intersection of psychology and neurology”) and musician who studies how and why the human brain makes and appreciates music. 

The Tokaido Road: Romance among the Samurai

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Lucia St. Clair Robson has written several historical novels set in frontier America.  They’re immensely readable, with down-to-earth characters, engaging adventure plots, and plenty of appeal for fans of both historical fiction and romance.

Her 1991 novel The Tokaido Road is a frontier romance of a different kind, set on the high roads of eighteenth-century Japan.  Unlike some romance novelists, who use exotic settings as so much scenery, Robson manages to make her love story suit its unfamiliar time and place.

All in the Family

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Not too long ago, I was writing a brief review of Carol Higgins Clark's latest Regan Reilly mystery, Hitched.  Carol, of course, is the daughter of Mary Higgins Clark, a perennial New York Times bestselling author.  Although the two for the most part write separately, they have also collaborated on several novels (the most recent being The Christmas Thief).  Does talent run in families?  I'll let you be the judge of that.  In the meantime, check out my brief list of related authors and their most recent works:

Husband and wife:  Bill Pronzini's Mourners and Marcia Muller's Vanishing Point

Husband and wife:  Pat Conroy's Beach Music and Cassandra King's The Same Sweet Girls

Husband and wife:  Jonathan Kellerman's Gone and Faye Kellerman's Straight into Darkness

Ursula, Under

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I just remembered a wonderful book that I read about 2 years ago. Ursula Under by Ingrid Hill (2004) is the story of a little girl, Ursula Wong, who accidentally falls down the air shaft of an abandoned copper mine.

The book goes back in time to follow the family history that led to Ursula, whose ancestry is an amazing yet typically American mixed assortment of cultures and people. We also get to know Ursula's modern world and how wonderfully everything around her helps make her who she is.

Ursula's story is engrossing, it is empowering, and it has an ending that will stay with you for a long time. I loved this book!

God's Fires: Science Fiction for Readers Who Don't Like Science Fiction

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I was emailing the other day with a genre fan about sf as sociological satire.  We both loved Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount, for example, and think it works brilliantly as a Swiftian parable of social intolerance, even for readers who don’t care that it’s a “first contact” novel. 

First contact and its subgenre alien invasion are actually great choices for non-genre readers interested in social commentary.  (Hard to engineer a meeting between humans and aliens without giving thought to what humanity means.) 

Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite first contact stories, and it fits our “Rediscoveries” category twice over, since most genre fans missed it, too—God’s Fires, by Patricia Anthony.

The Great World: A Portrait of Survival

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The Great World is a war novel without battle scenes and a POW novel with only a few chapters set in a prison, but quietly and obliquely it conveys the devastation of war through the story of two men drawn into reluctant lifelong friendship by their shared experiences in Malayan and Thai POW camps during World War II.

Digger Keen, a quiet, steady man with an eidetic memory, lives in the house he grew up in in a backwater Australian town.  Apart from the war, he has hardly ever left, and for twenty-six years he has kept in his memory the roll call of his fellow soldiers and their fates that he memorized during his years in the prison camp.

Visiting him now and then (more frequently as the years pass) is Vic Curran, who had a hard-luck childhood but has become wealthy in the years since the war.  He fastened onto Digger’s close group of buddies in the service and ended up in the prison camp with him.

My Heart is in the Highlands

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I've been so busy at work lately.  Flying from one thing to the next, hurry, scurry out to the reference desk and then back to the office to work on everything else I have to do.  Busy is good.  It's fun to be involved in all the great things the library is doing, but sometimes when I get home I need a little help winding down.

Enter Hamish MacBeth.  No, I haven't found a pleasant Scotsman to greet me at the door with dinner when I arrive home; Hamish is a character in a series of books by M.C. Beaton.  A cozy mystery with a pleasant main character is a great way to unwind, and though Hamish can't beat an actual man bearing dinner, he is pleasant to curl up with nonetheless.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

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Rarely have I been so moved by a novel as I was by Ayelet Waldman's Love and Other Impossible Pursuits.  Waldman, the author of the Mommy-Track mystery series (the latest of which, Bye-Bye, Black Sheep, was released earlier this month), created a firestorm last year with her essay "Truly, Madly, Guiltily" which appeared in the New York Times.  The essay was a frank discussion of marriage and parenting, in which Waldman wrote that, while she loved her children desperately, she loved her husband even more.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, in which a first-time mother mourns the death of her infant daughter, shines with Waldman's insights on marriage and motherhood.

Graffiti Art's Worldwide Urban Canvas

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"Intriguingly beautiful works of art."  Not words most would associate with graffiti, that blatantly vandalistic and incomprehensible scourge on our fair cities.  Maybe the naysayers should see the book DF: Idiots On Parade.  Published by Shake It, Ink. (as in the Northside record store), this book displays legal and illegal creations by the notorious DF graffiti crew.  The DF group has been around for over twenty years, with origins in New York, though now claims members across the country (including Cincinnati).  These folks are also successful--some have attended the best art schools, scored design jobs with high-dollar accounts such as Nike, been on television, and had their works shown in galleries around the world.  Local DF artist Rapes, & possibly Scribe (from Missouri) will have several pieces displayed in the Main Library as part of Listen To This!, a Hip Hop-oriented music business program scheduled for Sunday, October 15.  Check it out.  Other library materials on graffiti art include:  Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents by Nicholas Ganz, GV4, Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City by Joe Austin, Chicano Graffiti and Murals: The Neighborhood Art of Peter Quezada by Kim Sojin, and Graffiti, Post-graffiti.
 

Why We Love Joanna Trollope

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There’s something irresistible about Joanna Trollope’s novels. 

Part of it is just the inexpressible pleasure of fiction on a small, domestic scale.  No sweeping epics here, just Jane Austen’s classic “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village” or the urban equivalent.

Part of it is just that most of her characters are so nice, and Trollope herself is so clearly fond of them. 

Her typical plot involves a comfortable family of pleasant, well-intentioned people who are nudged out of their tidy routines by small events (knocking an elderly spinster off a bicycle in The Men and the Boys) or large (the death of a family member in Next of Kin). 

After a period of dismay at discovering that their happiness is shallower than they had suspected, they learn to readjust and settle down into new relationships with each other.  Then all the deserving characters get happy endings. 

But even the cozy certainty of a happy ending isn't the only reason her books are so addictive.  There’s something else.

Alice As James

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As noted on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, a new biography of James Triptree, Jr. written by Julie Phillips (James Tiptree, Jr. The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon) has been published.  Writing under the Tiptree Jr. pseudonym, Alice B. Sheldon started publishing science fiction short stories and novellas in the late 1960s. By that time, she had led a busy and interesting life, serving as a WAC in the Second World War, working for the CIA, and earning a PhD. in experimental psychology. 

As a science fiction writer, Sheldon carefully guarded her identity as a woman, until the editor of a fanzine ferreted out her cover in 1976.  With Kate Wilhem and Joanna Russ, Alice B. Sheldon is counted among the preeminent women science fiction writers of her day.

Abarat: Clive Barker's Other World

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Abarat (2002) is one of the most engaging books I have ever had the pleasure to experience. It is one of Clive Barker's young adult fantasies that takes the heroine, Candy Quackenbush, to a strange and unexpected world that somehow stands up to logic, in spite of being constructed completely out of Barker's imagination.

The books are filled with Barker's paintings, which were apparently his basis for the books. He says he was inspired by the movies The Wizard of Oz and Fantasia, CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, and by Cirque du Soleil. (information from the Abarat web site)

The sequel, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War (2004), is every bit as wonderful as the first book. The best news is: This will be a quartet of books. We have two more to look forward to reading!!

Immerse yourself in the world of Abarat. You will never go anywhere like it again.

Memoirs of a Caddy

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I have to blog this 1991 novel by David Noonan, even though I don’t golf, because it has an irresisitble line in it:

“One of the appeals of golf is that you can do all the things you would normally do in a bar while engaging in an actual sport—you can eat, drink, talk, and smoke cigarettes.”

The hero of Memoirs of a Caddy, seventeen-year-old Jim Mooney, is pretty irresistible, too.  This is his coming of age story.  It’s the summer of 1968, and Jim is spending it caddying at the local country club, playing cards, thinking about girls, and wasting time with his big brother, Matt.  Matt has ditched college and is waiting to be drafted to Vietnam.  That’s not Matt’s only self-destructive act.  But there’s still time for summer’s immortal pleasures, including a perfect vacation hanging out together at the beach, before Matt is shipped out.