Monthly Archives: April 2017

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Six Book Sunday!

First off, dear readers, some sincere apologies for missing you this week.  A Kafka-esque combination of end-of-semester stress, a random power-outage, and plain old poor time-management skills meant that we didn’t get a chance to celebrate our new releases this past Friday.  So, as a means of making amends, we present you here with The List That Should Have Been, along with an extra book to make the alliteration complete.  We sincerely hope it gets your week started off on best of footings!

And now, without further ado, here are some of the excellent books that have traipsed up onto our shelves this week:

The Book of Joan: Lidia Yuknavitch’s newest release was listed on some of the literary world’s “Best of the Year” awards even before its release, and it seems that the reading world has similarly embraced this powerful and provocative novel.  In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped in a vessel hovering over their former home, lead by a ruthless and charismatic cult leader who turns life onboard into a kind of paranoid police state.  A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule—galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth.  But when Joan becomes a martyr, no one—not the rebels, their enemy, or Joan herself—can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.  Yuknavitch’s willingness to explore themes of power and resistance, gender, sex, and love in her detailed futuristic world is a pitch-perfect blend of genres and philosophies that NPR called “[A] searing fusion of literary fiction and reimagined history and science-fiction thriller and eco-fantasy. . . Yuknavitch is a bold and ecstatic writer, wallowing in sex and filth and decay and violence and nature and love with equal relish.”

The Stars are Fire: Anita Shreve’s newest book turns to a real-life event–the 1947 fire that became the largest in the history of the state of Maine (and which, incidentally, is also prominently featured and fictionalized in Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot).  In October 1947, after a summer long drought, fires break out all along the Maine coast from Bar Harbor to Kittery and are soon racing out of control from town to village. Five months pregnant, Grace Holland is left alone to protect her two toddlers when her husband, Gene, joins the volunteer firefighters. Along with her best friend, Rosie, and Rosie’s two young children, Grace watches helplessly as their houses burn to the ground, the flames finally forcing them all into the ocean as a last resort. The women spend the night frantically protecting their children, and in the morning find their lives forever changed: homeless, penniless, awaiting news of their husbands’ fate, and left to face an uncertain future in a town that no longer exists.  But in the midst of such devastation, Grace finds a freedom she never dreamed existed–and one she may not have the strength to keep.  In it’s own way, this, too, is a story about growing in the face of adversity, as well as being a study on love, loyalty, and self-hood that Library Journal (who also named this book an Editor’s Pick) stated categorically: “This is sure to be a best seller. Shreve’s prose mirrors the action of the fire, with popping embers of action, licks of blazing rage, and the slow burn of lyrical character development. Absolutely stunning.”

The Last Neanderthal: Claire Cameron’s newest release is set in a world perhaps even more alien to us that any futuristic one–she begins 40,000 years ago with some of the last Neanderthals (a sibling species to homo sapiens).  After a crushingly hard winter, their numbers are low, but Girl, the oldest daughter, is just coming of age and her family is determined to travel to the annual meeting place and find her a mate. But the unforgiving landscape takes its toll, and Girl is left alone to care for Runt, a foundling of unknown origin. As Girl and Runt face the coming winter storms, Girl realizes she has one final chance to save her people, even if it means sacrificing part of herself. In the modern day, archaeologist Rosamund Gale works well into her pregnancy, racing to excavate newly found Neanderthal artifacts before her baby comes. Linked across the ages by the shared experience of early motherhood, both stories examine the often taboo corners of women’s lives.  By uniting the past and the present in such a concrete and tangible manner, Cameron offers the premise that, even though their features and habit may have changed, the human heart, its ability to feel and to break and to change the world around itself, is a thing that never alters.  Publisher’s Weekly gave this book a starred review, noting that “[The] book’s greatest strength [is] its ability to collapse time and space to draw together seemingly dissimilar species: ancestors and successors, writer and reader.”

Ice Ghosts : The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition: I’l not ashamed to admit that the news of the discovery of the HMS Terror–the ship that carried the doomed Franklin Expedition in their quest to locate the Northwest Passage–in 2016 was perhaps my favorite news story of the year.  A journalist by training, Watson was on the icebreaker that led the expedition that discovered the HMS Erebus in 2014, and he broke the news of the discovery of the HMS Terror in 2016, and in this book he weaves together an account of the legendary Franklin Expedition of 1845 (whose two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, and their crew of 129 were lost to the Arctic ice) with the modern tale of the scientists, researchers, divers, and local Inuit behind the recent discoveries of the two ships, and the way that oral tradition provided the information scientists needed to find one of the most famous wrecks in modern history.  Booklist calls this work “Riveting. . . . An engrossing chronicle of a legendary doomed naval voyage and the nearly 200-year effort to bring the Franklin Expedition to a close.” I can’t wait to read it–how about you?

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage murders and the birth of the FBI:  In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances. As the death toll climbed to more than twenty-four, the FBI took up the case. It was one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations and the bureau badly bungled the case. In desperation, the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only American Indian agents in the bureau. The agents infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.  Journalist David Grann is an excellent researcher, and a master at spinning gripping, suspenseful yarns that brings a chilling, under-researched piece of American history to light in a work that USA Today calls “A shocking whodunit…What more could fans of true-crime thrillers ask?”

Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling: It’s a good week for true crime in American History books, dear readers, and Michael Cannell’s newest book about New York in the 1950’s, and the bomber whose actions changed the world of detection is being hailed as a fascinating piece of research work and storytelling.   For almost two decades, no public place in New York City seemed safe from the man who signed his anonymous letters “FP” and left his lethal devices in phone booths, storage lockers, even tucked into the plush seats of movie theaters.  Desperate to end the threat before any more innocent people were maimed, Police Captain Howard Finney sought the help of a little known psychiatrist, Dr. James Brussel, whose expertise was the criminal mind. Examining crime scene evidence and the strange wording in the bomber’s letters, he compiled a portrait of the suspect down to the cut of his jacket. But how to put a name to the description? Seymour Berkson―a handsome New York socialite, protégé of William Randolph Hearst, and publisher of the tabloid The Journal-American―joined in pursuit of the Mad Bomber. The three men hatched a brilliant scheme to catch him at his own game. Together, they would capture a monster and change the face of American law enforcement. Cannell paints a fascinating portrait of place and time in this book, making the race to trace down the villainous ‘F.P.’ into a richly detailed exploration of New York City.  Publisher’s Weekly agrees, noting “Cannell is at his best in making the impact of F.P.’s crimes palpable: he conveys in detail the dangers faced by the members of the NYPD Bomb Squad . . . and aptly captures the state of terror created by explosions in random places such as movie theaters and train station restrooms.”

 

Until next week, beloved patrons–happy reading!

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Saturdays @ the South: Return of the BISAC

Hello, dear readers. Today’s blog post will be brief, because I have have been spending my time in the stacks, instead of at the computer. While my eyes are thanking me for the reduction in screen time, I realize that there may be some disappointment on your part that this isn’t a more book-centric post.  You have my apologies for that, but you also have my assurances that my time in the stacks has been put to good use. As promised a year ago, almost to the date (where does the time go?) the South Branch is adopting the BISAC system for our Adult Non-Fiction collection in hopes that it will make finding what you need easier and, hopefully browsing the non-fiction stacks more pleasurable.

Umm… no Internet. I really did mean BISAC, not Bison

For me there is often a great sense of enjoyment from finding something I want to read right next to something I was looking for. While the Library of Congress system has many merits, it doesn’t generally allow for that type of serendipitous browsing.  The BISAC system groups like items together: sports, biographies, cookbooks, etc. organized by the authors last name (and sometimes a sub-category, if necessary). So if you’re looking for a cookbook by Rachael Ray, you’ll find them right next to each other on the shelf. Biographies and memoirs are organized by the last name of the book’s subject (with a few exceptions, like royalty. Anyone know what Elizabeth II or Queen Victoria’s last names are? I sure don’t!) so instead of wondering who wrote that latest biography of the Wright brothers (David McCullough), you can just look in the Biography section under W. And while it’s a little odd to see Audrey Hepburn next to Hitler in our small collection, it still makes finding a lot easier.

If you’d like more information about the BISAC system in general, I recommend you take a look at last year’s Saturdays @ the South post: Much Ado about BISAC. If you’d like to see BISAC in action, you can take a look at the kids’ non-fiction section here at the South, or take a look at the West’s adult non-fiction section where they’ve been enjoying BISAC for more than a year now.

I look forward to talking more specifically about books with you next week, dear readers. Until then, I’m heading back into the stacks to make your library experience as easy and, hopefully, as pleasurable as it can be.

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The Man Booker International Prize Shortlist!

On Friday, the Prize Committee for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize announced their shortlist, having whittled down their long list to six shining examples of greatness in international (that is, non English-speaking) fiction, and the best in translation work.

And it’s this aspect of the award that I personally find fascinating.  There are brilliant, creative, and insightful human beings around the planet, and they create art in any number of mediums, forms, and in as many languages as have been created thus far.  But to translate their work is another art form in and of itself.

As Rick Kleffel noted in his fabulous think-piece on this topic, titled The Art of Translation, word choice is only the beginning when it comes to translation work.  It’s fairly easy, generally speaking, to  transpose a word in a foreign language to English.  But a translator also has to think about the sound of words, especially when translating lyric works like poetry.  Local and cultural connotations are significant, as well–there are any  number of regional dialects that a translator has to parse in order to provide an effective and meaningful translation; think about how we in Massachusetts understand “wicked” to mean “very”.  Now think about the actual meaning of the word “wicked” (evil or morally wrong).  These are issues that a translator must not only understand, but be able to handle.

Time periods matter, too.  Kleffel notes a particularly colorful instance related to him by Burton Raffle, a professional translator who was hired to translate a 16th century novel from Middle French into modern English:

Written in the 16th century, the novel was set in a time of filth and squalor. Raffel found he had to overcome the limits of the English language.

“Rabelais, the author of this very strange book, ends the chapter with a sputtering iteration. I believe it’s something like 43 different words in French for s- – -,” says Raffel. “My problem was finding 43 different words because English is not so plentiful in these things.

So, on that note, let’s tip our hats today, not only to these phenomenal authors, but to their incredibly talented translators, as well!

And just a reminder, the international prize comes with a cash award of £50,000, or about $64,000, which authors split with their translators.

And the nominees are…

Compass by French author Mathias Énard.  As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape, including the love whose loss has defined his life (translated by Charlotte Mandell).

A Horse Walks Into a Bar by Israeli author David Grossman: In a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of stand-up.  Gradually, as it teeters between hilarity and hysteria, Dov’s patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood, from his traumatized and violent parents to his week at a military camp for youth, while his audience is forced to wrestle with their part in his increasingly harrowing tale  (translated by Jessica Cohen).

The Unseen about a family living on a small Scandinavian fishing island.  Sadly, there has been no US release announced (yet) for this book (translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw).

Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Danish author Dorthe Nors.   Sonja’s over forty, and she’s trying to move in the right direction. She’s learning to drive. She’s joined a meditation group. And she’s attempting to reconnect with her sister.  But Sonja would rather eat cake than meditate.  Her driving instructor won’t let her change gear.  And her sister won’t return her calls.  Sonja’s mind keeps wandering back to the dramatic landscapes of her childhood, but can she learn to find her way in the present? (translated by Misha Hoekstra).

Judas, by Israeli author Amos Oz.  Jerusalem, 1959. Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar, is adrift in his young life when he finds work as a caregiver for a brilliant but cantankerous old man named Gershom Wald. There is, however, a third, mysterious presence in his new home. Atalia Abarbanel, the daughter of a deceased Zionist leader, a beautiful woman in her forties, entrances young Shmuel even as she keeps him at a distance. Piece by piece, the old Jerusalem stone house, haunted by tragic history and now home to the three misfits and their intricate relationship, reveals its secrets. (translated by Nicholas de Lange).

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Making Magic: It’s Festival Time!

*This post is part of Free for All’s “Making Magic” series, which will focus on Kelley’s exploration of the opportunities in the library’s Creativity Lab as well as musings about art, creativity and imagination.

Spring is here, and with it comes festivals! If you’re familiar with annual North Shore happenings, you know that warm weather means music festivals, art fairs, farmers’ markets and more. For today, I’d like to focus on one very special event in particular and that is the Mass Poetry Festival. Every May, the Mass Poetry Festival comes to Salem and brings three days of poetry readings, workshops, lectures and performances. Venues for the event are all in downtown Salem and include spaces as varied as Old Town Hall and Howling Wolf Taqueria.

Each year, in preparation for the event, the library offers a series called Get to Know the Festival Poets, which gives people a chance to learn about the event’s headlining poets with the guidance of local poet and professor Jennifer Jean. This year’s series just wrapped up, but you still have time to get a ticket to the Festival, so that you can see live readings with some of the poets we discussed. This year’s headliners include Louise Gluck, Eileen Myles, Ross Gay, and Cornelius Eady. If seeing some award winning poets read their work isn’t enough for you, the Festival also offers a small press fair, panel talks, open air performances, and poetry slams.

So mark your calendar for May 5th – May 7th! And in the meantime, why not read some of these great books written by participating Festival poets?

Poems, 1962-2012 by Louise Gluck
A Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning poet, Louise Gluck will speak at the Festival as part of the Poetry Society of America’s current national series, Poetry and the Natural World.

 

Penguin AnthologyThe Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry
This collection includes poems written by Cornelius Eady, a Festival headliner who will read on Saturday, May 6th. Eady is the author of Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and The Gathering of My Name, which was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize.

Eileen MylesI Must be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems by Eileen Myles
Described by Publishers’ Weekly as “ both an underground star and a major force in contemporary poetry,” Eileen Myles is the recipient of four Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Creative Capital’s Literature Award as well as their Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. Myles will read at the Festival on Saturday May 6th.

The Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is the winner of  the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to writing award winning verse, Gay is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project.

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Saturdays @ the South: Can the Library help you stay healthy?

Why yes, yes we can. Aside from the many health benefits reading can offer you, Libraries have been known to increase the general population health of the cities they serve.  So how can we here in Peabody help our patrons be healthy in their lives?

April is Massachusetts Health Care Decisions month (celebrating 10 years, who knew?)  and the library has some resources to help you make good decisions regarding your health. Please know, however, that health is an exceedingly personal topic and the library is never a substitute for a medical health professional’s learned opinion. We can’t diagnose a condition or offer medical advice. What we can do is help you be more informed when you go to a health practitioner’s office so your conversations with him/her are more productive.

Have you ever looked up a headache on Web MD and incited a minor panic attack in yourself with all the possible diseases a headache can be a symptom of? I’ve been there; it’s not fun. While WebMD is a very popular site to look up health information, there are other options that are not ad-driven with reliable information. As Arabella noted, there is that great “more” section on the library’s website. Part of the “more” we offer, is access to the Health and Wellness Resource Center. This site offers searchable options for health conditions, directories of practitioners, alternative medicine options and information about drugs and herbs and their interactions with the body and each other. This and many other health-based databases are available here to help you make the best health decisions for you.

The library also has health and wellness titles ranging extensively in variety. The West Branch (and very soon the South Branch!) have those listed in the BISAC system, so all you have to do is look for the “Health” section in our Adult Nonfiction stacks to find what you’re looking for.  Or you can always ask a friendly staff member to locate a book either within our stacks, or in the catalog. Because the NOBLE system includes several academic libraries, you have access to a lot more researched and reviewed information than many other public libraries who don’t have a consortium behind them.

And then there are our programs. The South Branch recently hosted a professional organizer who talked about the affects of clutter on health and well-being. The Main recently hosted a Health Information Workshop and we’re always looking to offer more programs that can help our patrons live better lives.

So this Earth Day, while I highly encourage you to think about the health of the Earth, remember also that your health is important, to the Library as well. Till next week, dear readers, stay healthy and let us know how we can help you do that!

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Five Book Friday!

And a very happy birthday to Turkish novelist, poet, and playwright Murathan Mungan!  Mungan, who was born this day in 1955, to an Arab father and a Bosnian  mother, is one of Turkey’s most respected and well-known writers, as well as being a champion of LGBT rights in Turkey.  His works deal with topics such as the Kurdish conflict, political Islam and gender issues.  You can read some of his beautiful poetry (in translation) via the Words Without Borders website.

Murathan Mungan, courtesy of FotoKritik

In 2014, Mungan sat down for an interview with Qantara.de, an Internet portal that represents the concerted effort of organizations within the German Foreign Office to promote dialogue with the Islamic world.  In the interview, which you can read in its entirety here, Mungan talks about language, about optimism, and about the potential for creating a better future through dialog.  In honor of his special day, we thought we’d share a few of his insights here with you.  And just a note, remember that this interview took place in 2014, right around the time that then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became President.  Perhaps these words have even more meaning for all of us now:

You say you don’t like the word optimistic, but in general you always seem optimistic when it comes to developments in Turkey. At the same time, you once said that you can do anything in Turkey, but you’re not allowed to disgrace yourself. Do you still feel as positive following the accusations of corruption against representatives of the AKP, which so far have not been followed up?

Mungan: First of all, I have to say that, as far as my own life goes, I’m no butterfly happily fluttering around. But I try not to think in terms of categories like optimistic, pessimistic, happy, unhappy, hopeful, hopeless; I try to find an objective yardstick, to see the entire picture, the whole process.

There’s a quote from a French thinker, whose name I can’t remember, who said: my experiences make me pessimistic; my will makes me optimistic. That’s the best way to describe my attitude. We have to find new paths of resistance. And I think the greatest resistance is to do what you do best. The system can take everything from me, but my ability and my belief in what I do best will always remain.

And speaking of doing what we do best, here’s some of the books have marched across our shelves this week for your reading pleasure!

Ararat: I know I’ve been waiting to meet this book for a while now, so it was lovely to see all the terrific reviews that have been pouring in for Christopher Golden’s newest novel!  When an earthquake reveals a secret cave hidden inside Mount Ararat in Turkey, a daring, newly-engaged couple are determined to be the first ones inside…and what they discover will change everything.  The cave is actually an ancient, buried ship that many quickly come to believe is really Noah’s Ark. When a team of scholars, archaeologists, and filmmakers make it inside the ark, they discover an elaborate coffin in its recesses. Inside the coffin they find an ugly, misshapen cadaver―not the holy man they expected, but a hideous creature with horns. Shock and fear turn to horror when a massive blizzard blows in, trapping them thousands of meters up the side of a remote mountain.  I’m in love with Josh Malerman’s cover blurb, so I’m going to share it with you here: “Let the other blurbers tell you how thrilling, how frightening, how robust this book is. They’re right to do it. But the thing that struck me deepest about Ararat is how timely this tale is for the world right now. The men and women in the book are treated as equals; in strength, in smarts, in power. Muslims are set to marry Jews. Scientists and Christians are working on the same edgy project. And yet, they all fear the same way. And they hope the same way, too. If ever we could use a story that reminds us that we’re together, a singular race, in religion and gender, that time is now. Bravo, Christopher Golden, for sewing such enormous themes into a nail-biting, exhilarating book.”

Finding Gideon:  Eric Jerome Dickey is one of those writers whose books are taut, exciting, daring, and envelope-pushing (if that’s a phrase), but they also focus on a number of issues that don’t normally get discussed–at least so overtly–in mysteries.  In this fifth outing for Dickey’s much-beloved hitman Gideon, the job is taking its toll. Neither Gideon nor the city of Buenos Aires has recovered from the mayhem caused during Gideon’s last job. But before the dust has settled and the bodies have been buried, Gideon calls in backup—including the lovely Hawks, with whom Gideon has heated memories—to launch his biggest act of revenge yet…one he believes will destroy his adversary, Midnight, once and for all.  Yet Midnight and his second-in-command, the beautiful and ruthless Señorita Raven, are launching their own revenge, assembling a team of mercenaries the likes of which the world has never seen… and Gideon isn’t their only target. Gideon will need all of his skills if he is to save not only his team, but his family as well.  This is a story, and a series, that blends soap-opera levels of drama with plenty of action, suspense, and vivid characters that is sure to keep readers enthralled.  Booklist certainly was, as they noted in their review “Dickey steadily generates a taut, deadly atmosphere throughout the book, and readers will not be able to predict who will be the last man standing”.

American War: Journalist Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, which is part dystopian sci-fi, part social commentary, and part action-thriller, has been winning acclaim from readers and reviewers alike, for good reason.  Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place. But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be. Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike.   El Akkad’s own courage in defying genre expectations from start to finish, and his willingness to examine the darkest parts of our current interactions has earned him a great deal of attention, with The Washington Post cautioning ““Follow the tributaries of today’s political combat a few decades into the future and you might arrive at something as terrifying as Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War. Across these scarred pages rages the clash that many of us are anxiously speculating about in the Trump era: a nation riven by irreconcilable ideologies, alienated by entrenched suspicions. . . . both poignant and horrifying.”

Notes on a Banana: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Manic Depression: Any time I hear that someone loves Julia Child as much as I do, I want to hear their story, and James Beard-Award winner David Letie’s story is a truly remarkable one that speaks to readers on a number of levels.  Born into a family of Azorean immigrants, David Leite grew up in the 1960s in a devoutly Catholic, blue-collar, food-crazed Portuguese home in Fall River, Massachusetts. A clever and determined dreamer with a vivid imagination and a flair for the dramatic, “Banana”, as his mother endearingly called him, fell in love with everything French, thanks to his Portuguese and French-Canadian godmother. But David also struggled with the emotional devastation of manic depression. Until he was diagnosed in his mid-thirties, David found relief from his wild mood swings in learning about food, watching Julia Child, and cooking for others.  This is a story about self-acceptance, perseverance, and determination, and about using your talents not only for others, but to save yourself, and is winning reviews from psychologists, cooks, and readers alike, with Booklist calling it “Warm, witty…sometimes heartbreaking . . . Fans of the author’s James Beard Award-winning website, Leite’s Culinaria . . . won’t be surprised by his wonderful sense of humor and his keen powers of observation . . . candid and charming.”

H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil: If you’ve read Eric Larson’s seminal work Devil in the White City, you’ll have heard plenty about H.H. Holmes, the super-villain of Larson’s work.  But in this new book, Adam Selzer, host of the Mysterious Chicago blog, delves into Holmes’ biography to create a true-crime book that aficionados will savor.  Though Holmes has become just as famous now as he was in 1895, a deep analysis of contemporary materials makes very clear how much of the story as we know came from reporters who were nowhere near the action, a dangerously unqualified new police chief, and, not least, lies invented by Holmes himself.  The cover blurb notes that “Selzer has unearthed tons of stunning new data about Holmes”, and while I’m not sure if that’s a metric measurement or a gross exaggeration, he certainly is earning plenty of acclaim from other true-crime authors, and Publisher’s Weekly had this to say: “When the unprecedented success of Erik Larson’s Devil in The White City stirred up renewed interest in serial killer H.H. Holmes, Selzer made it his mission to painstakingly research Holmes’ life, family, and crimes with intense determination and doggedness. The result is this comprehensive, compelling, and surprising biography of Holmes, written in a conversational style, as if we are passengers on one of Selzer’s tours…Using thousands of primary sources to draw the most accurate picture of this American villain yet, Selzer keeps the delicate balance of salacious (and mundane) details maintained with solid facts. What emerges is a picture of a terrible but intriguing man, one who continues to capture our imagination over a century later, and one whose story leaps off the page in Selzer’s uniquely suited hands.”

Until next week, beloved patrons, happy reading!

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On Book Stagnation and Readers’ Advisory

Did you ever have one of those days (or weeks….or months…) where you just couldn’t find anything to read?  Where every book you started failed to hold your interest through the first fifty (or twenty…or three…) pages?  Where even the covers annoyed you because you knew they weren’t the book  for you?   Where you genuinely begin believing you will never find another book to read ever again and there is no joy left in the world and all is darkness?

I’ve been there.

We’ve all been there–to a greater or lesser extent.  Your addiction to reading might not be quite as strong as mine, but I think you know what I mean.  It’s a more common issue for readers than we like to discuss.  Sometimes it’s a condition that Lady Pole has described here as a book hangover, when the last book you read was so good, so immersive, so engaging, that you don’t want to leave it’s spell once the final page has turned.   But sometimes, it has nothing to do with the last book you read.  Sometimes, it’s book stagnation.

We haven’t really discussed that one too much, but book stagnation refers to that feeling when you just can’t find a good book; when the publishing market and your personal tastes seem to be on very different pages (proverbially speaking).  Like when every romance novel I picked up wanted to be Fifty Shades of Grey.  If that was your thing, I’m very happy for you.  It just honestly did nothing for me.  Or every mystery I picked up featured a highly-detailed and gruesome murder, as told by the murderer, in the first pages (in italics, because all murderers talk in italics).  Again, if you enjoy these books, then I rejoice for you.  It’s just not my cup of tea at all.  Or when history books don’t have proper citations/footnotes/bibliographies.  That’s one that I refuse to tolerate, sorry.

But, thankfully, there is a remedy to both book hangovers and book stagnation.  And both can be found at the Library.  More specifically, from the people working at the Library.

Speaking for myself, one of my most favorite parts of the job is when a patron comes up and says that they like a certain author, or genre, or topic, and that they don’t like another genre, or a theme, or a type of plot, and asks me to help them find a new book based on that criteria.  Not only is it a fun challenge to find the bookish needle in the bookish hay of our stacks, but it’s also a true, heart-swelling moment of joy to talk about books and stories with another person, and connecting with another reader.  We may not see eye to eye about what makes a ‘great read’…in fact, we usually don’t.  And that makes it so much more fun, because it helps me appreciate the elements of a story that much more.

For example, I’ve had a long talk with patrons about scary stories.  And it was fascinating to learn what scares people in fiction.  For me, as we’ve discussed here, it’s a lot about the unknown, and the unexplored.  For others, it’s haunted houses.  For others, it’s true crime novels.  And for another, nothing was scary unless it had a soundtrack (so we headed to the DVD section of the Library).  Similar things happen with ‘funny’ books.  I delight in absurdities, while some patrons prefer black-as-night humor, and still others prefer humorous non-fiction like Erma Bombeck’s work, because the laughs come from empathy, rather than absurdity.

So imagine my joy when a fellow librarian friend of mine sent out a note to the Social Media last night saying that she was suffering from book stagnation and needed help!

I provide the recommendations she received in this hopes that it might encourage you to come in and find some new books for yourself, as well.

Here were the guidelines:

Books Recently Enjoyed:
The Rosie Project
A Man Called Ove

Dislikes:
Military History, Contemporary Romance, Gruesome Details in general (though mysteries are ok in theory), scenes of animals or children suffering

Recommendations:
(These are just a few of the huge pile that were suggested–feel free to check them out, or bring in your own list of ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ to get some more personalized recommendations!)

Non-Fiction:

Joe Gould’s Teeth: Joe Gould believed he was the most brilliant historian of the twentieth century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life’s work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. “I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of every day people,” he explained, because “as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry.” By 1942, when The New Yorker published a profile of Gould written by the reporter Joseph Mitchell, Gould’s manuscript had grown to more than nine million words. But when Gould died in 1957, in a mental hospital, the manuscript was nowhere to be found. Then, in 1964, in “Joe Gould’s Secret,” a second profile, Mitchell claimed that the book had been, all along, merely a figment of Gould’s imagination. Lepore, unpersuaded, decided to find out.

The Soul of an Octopus: Sy Montgomery’s popular 2011 Orion magazine piece, “Deep Intellect”; about her friendship with a sensitive, sweet-natured octopus named Athena and the grief she felt at her death, went viral, indicating the widespread fascination with these mysterious, almost alien-like creatures. Since then Sy has practiced true immersion journalism, from New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, pursuing these wild, solitary shape-shifters. Octopuses have varied personalities and intelligence they show in myriad ways: endless trickery to escape enclosures and get food; jetting water playfully to bounce objects like balls; and evading caretakers by using a scoop net as a trampoline and running around the floor on eight arms. But with a beak like a parrot, venom like a snake, and a tongue covered with teeth, how can such a being know anything? And what sort of thoughts could it think?

Hidden Figures : the American dream and the untold story of the Black women mathematicians who helped win the space race: Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the space race, [this book] follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances, and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future.

Fiction:

Miss Jane:  Brad Watson has mad his career by expanding the literary traditions of the South, in work as melancholy, witty, strange, and lovely as any in America. Inspired by the true story of his own great-aunt, he explores the life of Miss Jane Chisolm, born in rural, early-twentieth-century Mississippi with a genital birth defect that would stand in the way of the central “uses” for a woman in that time and place–namely, sex and marriage. From the country doctor who adopts Jane to the hard tactile labor of farm life, from the highly erotic world of nature around her to the boy who loved but was forced to leave her, the world of Miss Jane Chisolm is anything but barren. Free to satisfy only herself, she mesmerizes those around her, exerting an unearthly fascination that lives beyond her still.

The Spellman Files: In San Francisco, 28-year-old private investigator Isabelle “Izzy” Spellman works for her parents’ detective agency as does her 14-year-old sister Rae (their brother, the perfect and non-nosey one in the family, is a lawyer). The fact that the Spellmans are outlandishly dysfunctional, have trouble with boundaries, and are prejudiced against dentists (including the one Izzy starts dating) just adds to the fun–but then things take a bit of a serious turn when a family member goes missing.

Good luck, and good reading!