Could someone please explain to me how it is the last week in August already?  I think we all agree to make the most of our last official days of summer…which, naturally, means reading as many fun, witty, delicious, and engrossing books that we possibly can.  Preferably in a place filled with sunshine.  Wherever this weekend finds you, beloved patrons, I hope it is a good one, and that you come back with plenty of good stories to share!

Here are five books that appeared on our shelves this week for your reading pleasure:

Luck Be  Lady: Meredith Duran is one of best historical romance writers out there today, and while her books tend to fly just under the radar, they are always a sure-fire hit, featuring unconventional characters in refreshingly original situations.  At heart of each of them though, is a romance that will knock your socks off.  In this fourth installment of her Rules for the Reckless series, Catherine Everleigh is determined to win back the auction house that was to be her birthright, and nothing will stand in her way.  But when Nicholas O’Shea, and infamous crime lord, offers her a marriage of convenience to help them both obtain their goals, she finds that her once-broken heart may be the one factor she never considered in her plans.

The Book Of Speculation: This book has been garnering attention and positive reviews even in pre-publication, which is usually a good sign, but when you hear that the main character of Erika Swyler’s debut is a librarian, I know you are all going to run to check out this book.  When Simon Watson receives a mysterious book from an antiquarian book dealer, inscribed with the name of his grandmother, he uncovers a family curse that may have already cost him more than he knows.  While I can appreciate that not everyone get excited about books about people researching historic things, to me, this book sounds like a slice of happiness.  My favorite review thus far as come from the Star Telegram, which said “A good book is magical. A piece of our heart stays tucked inside its lines when we return the book to its place on our shelf. Good novels about good books can be even more special, doubling the fun with two tomes to love. And when the book within the book is actually magical, as it is – or may be – in Erika Swyler’s The Book of Speculation, well, let the wild read start.”

Last Bus To Wisdom: This is another novel that has been making waves lately, blending the best parts of a coming-of-age tale with a classic American road trip in a way that the San Francisco Chronicle called “a rambunctious adventure packed with color, vitality and characters worth rooting for”.  Set in 1951, the story follows young Donal Cameron, who has been raised by his aunt in the Montana Rockies.  But when she needs an operation, Donal finds himself shipped to his aunt’s sister, a mean-spirited woman who has no time or room for Donal.  So he and his great-uncle, Herman the German embark on a cross-country adventure in a bus, meeting a whole host of unexpected and unforgettable characters along their way.  Their Sadly, author Ivan Doig, chronicler of Montana, passed away in April, but this book seems a fitting legacy of a man whose writing was a love letter to the place he called home.

Voracious : A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way Through Great Books: Every once in a while a book comes up that makes you stop, shake your fist towards the indifferent sky and cry out “why didn’t I think of that?!”.  This is one of those books.  Cara Nicoletti grew up reading in her grandfather’s butcher shop, watching how food and stories both fed people’s souls and kept them going.  Thus, her book is a tribute to both food and books, with recipes and essays that celebrate food in books (like Jane Austen’s perfect poached eggs) and the readers who make food delicious.  Publisher’s Weekly gave this a starred review, saying it is “As inviting as a bowl of homemade chocolate pudding. . . . Nicoletti turns both reading and cooking into eagerly anticipated visceral experiences.”

True Yankees : The South Seas And The Discovery Of American Identity: Dane A. Morrison’s newest book is a complex and fascinating study that traces the lives and exploits of five American seamen in the years just after the American Revolution, mostly in the South Seas and Pacific.  Morrison (who teaches at Salem State University) looks at these men (and women!) not just as intrepid explorers, but considers how they conducted business in foreign cultures, how they understand the world, their place in it, and came home from these far-flung islands with a new concept of what it meant to be American.  This is an overlooked portion of American history, and a place that few consider when looking at the early years of the American experience, but plenty of reviewers have been praising Professor Morrison’s narrative voice and research acumen, making this book sound like a winner for fans of history and travel alike.

Happy Friday, and happy reading!

As an historian, I love good, detailed footnotes; the kind that not only tell you where an author came across a piece of information, but offers anecdotes, qualifies the point in some way, or generally just feels like you have been privy to some kind of secret insider information–like the author has taken you aside for a little chat in the middle of the book.   Such footnotes often provide space in the text for the author to bring in pieces of fun information that just didn’t fit into the main body of the piece, but are just too good to pass up.  There have been books where the best bits were found in the footnotes, rather than the primary text.

But what about footnotes in fiction?

There are any number of authors who look to enhance the world of their (fiction) story with footnotes, such as Douglas Adam’s incomparable  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which offers brilliant little asides and incidental information as a way to familiarize the reader with the vast incomprehensibility of the world he is describing, and also to get the reader as familiar as possible with the main characters.  Additionally Susanna Clarke uses footnotes in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell as a place to familiarize readers with fairy folklore, the history of English magic, and the various texts that her characters study.  This feels like genius when you’re reading the text, for if Clarke had tried to jam these facts and tales into her already beautifully detailed story, it would jam-up the narrative flow irrevocably.  Instead, readers have the chance to pause, seek out another tale in the footnotes, and return to the text at their own pace, their knowledge and familiarity with the scholarship of Strange and Norrell immeasurably enhanced (I am told that the e-version of the book makes this process even simpler still by allowing readers to toggle between the text and the footnotes at their leisure).

But there are other books that take the notion of the footnote further still, not only using them to enhance the fictional world of the text, but to create a new kind of reality altogether.  They use our acceptance of the footnote against us, disguising fiction in the guise of provable fact.  Personally, I adore these kind of texts, and revel in the the games that they play; I know they aren’t for everyone–among other things, having to switch from text to footnote can be physically taxing on the eyes, not to mention distracting from a good story.  But, if done properly, these kinds of footnotes can make the world of a good book that much more unforgettable, and make the reading experience that much more exciting.  So if, like me, you think footnotes in fiction are a great idea, then be sure to check out…

The Supernatural Enhancements: We’ve discussed this book previously, but it deserves to be talked about a good deal more.  By turns thoroughly creepy, marvelously engrossing, disarmingly sweet, and genuinely surprising, this is a book that builds on a number of tropes (haunted houses, secret cabals, hidden histories), but feels nothing except utterly original.  When A. inherits a house from a relative he didn’t know existed, he and his odd companion find a mystery waiting for them hidden in cyphers, codes, and ancient rituals.  Edgar Cantero uses the footnotes as a way to explore the different cyphers at work in his text, offering actual, useful information while at the same time enhancing the eerie atmosphere of the story by layering it with other mysteries and secrets.

House of Leaves: I think Mark Danielowski may have re-invented the book when he composed this mind-bending novel.  Ostensibly, it is the record of a family who bought a house that turned out to be bigger on the inside than on the outside…and kept on growing.  But there is nothing at all straightforward about this story.  It is a text-within-a-text-within-a-text, and the various stories compete for space across the page and, particularly, in the footnotes, where the reader often hears from film critics (Regarding a documentary about the house that may or may not have ever been screened), the blind hermit who collected the stories about the house, and the increasingly mad rantings of the young man who collected the hermit’s ramblings.  The whole thing is deeply unsettling, especially as the text begins to change color and wend its way across the page–upside down, sideways, tripping and falling into the margins….but also spectacularly engrossing.  I can’t remember a book that made me so aware of the act of reading the same way that this one did.

The Ghost Network: This is a bizarre little text, but one that is so startlingly unique that it’s worth a read.  Author Catie Disabato poses as the editor of a “found manuscript” documenting the search for doomed pop-superstar Molly Metropolis.  According to the premise of this book, all that Disabato knows is that her mentor has vanished while searching for Molly, leaving only these notes.  Thus, the footnotes in the text not only cite books, both real and imaginary, that the characters used to learn about the obscure cult that Molly Metropolis joined (a real-life group, though Disabato uses their history as a springboard for her own story), but they also discuss her own ‘history’ with the characters and the interactions she had with them during her own quest.    This is a book that plays around with fact and fiction in a way that is partly genius and partly bizarre, but it is certainly a breath of fresh air for those looking for a change of pace.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: Because along with informative footnotes, there are also citations to the works of ancient magicians, as well as texts by the characters themselves.  And even though people tell me this is a work of fiction, seeing John Segundus’ or Jonathan Strange’s name as the author of a text allows me to believe a little longer that they are, in fact, real in a world outside my head.

I might be a long way from home for a bit longer, but, as that odd, old song goes, “there’s always something there to remind me…” of home (and good luck getting that out of your head for the rest of the day, beloved readers).  It’s more than just the occasional glimpses of Red Sox hats, or that one guy on the Tube today wearing a Free Brady shirt, which gave me a hearty chuckle.  It’s being in a place that not only knows how to pronounce your hometown, but why the name of your hometown is so impressive.

If you’ve told someone from outside the metro-Boston area where you live, their first reaction is usually bafflement; apparently, the vast majority of the country would call our city Peeeee-BODY, as opposed to running all the consonants together like you’re chocking on overheated alphabet soup, as we tend to do.  But here in London, George Peabody’s adoptive home, his name is pronounced correctly with ease…and it is spoken with pride.

As many of you might know, George Peabody was born in what is now Peabody, but visited London beginning in 1827  in order to raise capital for American engineering and infrastructure projects, finally organizing “George Peabody & Co.” and settling in London permanently a decade later.  But it’s what he did after this that is truly important.  Having seen the devastation, anger and resentment churned up by the Civil War, and particularly the plight of the lower classes in the South firsthand, Peabody decided to go out and change the world.

In April 1862, Peabody founded the Peabody Donation Fund, which established quality, affordable housing for the “artisans and labouring poor” of London, and the first of these buildings opened in Spitalfields in 1864.  These houses were–and, frankly, still are–remarkable, because they were built on the premise that the lower classes deserved to live in a safe, clean, and modern environment, and that, in so doing, they would be more able to contribute to society in whatever way they chose to do.  These houses were among the first to have electricity, elevators, and indoor plumbing in the city.  They were run like a community, with classes being offered to residents about money-management, personal finances, and home care for first-time home owners.  They were warm, centrally located, and within the financial reach of a number of people who would otherwise be forced to live in the slums made notorious by Dickens, or in tales of Jack the Ripper.

And do you know what?  Those houses still exist today.  You can read about them here, on the Peabody Housing Authority website.  From that one building in Spitalfiends, Peabody’s vision has now become 31 housing estates, offering shelter, employment opportunities, and a sense of belonging to some 70,000 people.  And before you start thinking if this whole sense of niceness is overblown, I am here to tell you that it isn’t.  As I was walking back from the London Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell (an area of London very close to the financial heart of the City), I came upon the Peabody Estates of Clerkenwell, which were built in place of a slum in 1884.

As you can see, these buildings are still lovely, and still really quite affordable, all things considered.  And, unlike a number of estates, they have windows, and walls thick enough to hold in heat and keep out street- and neighbor-noises.  Also, for those who think this all looks a little familiar, these buildings were used in the film The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, because, according to director Terry Gilliam, they offered the most quintessentially “perfect London atmosphere”.  You can read a bit more about these buildings here.

Many of you may have seen photos of George Peabody’s statue in London (see below, too!).  It stand near the Royal Exchange, and was unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1869.  George himself was too ill to attend, and when he died, some four months later, Queen Victoria permitted him temporary burial at Westminster Cathedral until arrangements could be made to send him to his final rest at home (for those who appreciate trivia, news of his funerals in London and Massachusetts were among the first news shared along the Transatlantic Telegraph Cables).

The statue is not only meant to commemorate Peabody’s impressive business acumen, which was considerable, but because he was, truly, the first modern philanthropist in history.  The Carnegies and the Gettys and the Gates of this world may receive more public credit, but, in this lifetime, George Peabody gave over $8 million (by his contemporary financial standards) in order to benefit people he would never meet.  People like him, who wanted more out of life–who wanted to learn and to create, and the chance to grow up and share what they learned with the world.  The fact that his memory is still so revered, on both sides of the Atlantic speaks to how successful he was in that endeavor.  And has made me pretty proud to tell people where I’m from, I can tell you that.

PS: For those of us who study the First World War, there’s a whole section on the Peabody Housing Authority’s website about Peabody and World War One.  I know I’m not the only one who finds this fascinating.

It seems nearly everyone has an opinion about the state of books and whether or not the book is dead. It also seemsthat very few people agree on what that state is. As some insist that the book is going the way of the dodo, others consider the book is as vibrant, lively and worthy of attention as it ever was. This debate is often carried over into libraries as libraries are, by some, thought of as book storehouses and if the book is dying than libraries must be as well. But as modern libraries are demonstrating that their true focus is community and that we’ll go wherever the community takes us, be it into books, movies, computers, project creation and more, the book is also demonstrating its adaptation to the world at large.

Readers are still out there. Seth Meyers, taking up the torch from Jon Stewart, is showing book love with his Late Show Literary Salons that highlight, not always the latest book on the press junket, but some of his personal favorites or books that he’s really passionate about. Book Riot, one of my favorite bookish-blogs written by readers and writers alike, is constantly discussing books of all types and in different forms: as reading material, as status symbols, as art, as social commentary and more. Quirk Books is another of my favorites that trends towards nostalgia, but also features some great articles on fascinating reads. Much like this blog strives to do, these and other fantastic blogs are written by readers who love to talk about the ways books have impacted their lives, reading habits or just gush about something they feel very strongly about.

Once can’t talk about the supposed death of the book without talking about the death of the physical book. The e-book (or digital book or Kindle book, etc.) is often decried as he modern death knell for the traditional form of printed book. Many seemed to panic when PriceWaterhouse Coopers declared that e-books will overtake print books by 2018. Scientific American considered the idea that reading in a digital age might be altering the way we read a text and possibly be a less enriching experience because text is presented differently on-screen than on-page. Could the paper book really be on its way out, our reading habits forever altered and disrupted? Probably not. The BBC published an article last week that had some interesting statistics. Granted these statistics are taken from the British point of view, but I found it to be an interesting read, nonetheless. It seems that digital book sales have stabilized and print books are even making a bit of a comeback.

I’m not going to go into a long diatribe about one version or the other. I like both print and digital books; each have their own sway over me for different reasons and I’m often happy to read in whatever format is more comfortable or convenient to the setting. If the text is all there, I’m pretty much a happy camper.  Honestly, I don’t see print versus digital as an either/or issue. Reading a book on a computer or tablet doesn’t make the person consuming the text any less of a reader. Reading a hard copy doesn’t necessarily present the best option for some readers (I can think of many suitcases that have been significantly lightened with the option of digital reading) or, despite what Scientific American says, make someone a better reader.

Here at the library, we like to present our patrons with options and information, rather than pushing opinions or a one-sided idea on them. That’s why we have a fairly extensive and ever-growing collection of e-books, while we still purchase hard copies of books for our collections. As we have with superheroes, book preferences and women authors, we encourage you to take part in the conversation and decide where your own opinions lie. We’ll still be here whatever you decide.

To entice you further, here are some books that we have in both print and digital copies. Why choose? Feel free to read in both formats!

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

I’ve recommended in the past beginning the Neil Gaiman canon with Neverwhere, but this book is also a worthy introduction to his magical works. Gaiman’s prose is gorgeous and this book has a hint of an Alice in Wonderland flair to it. If you enjoy being taken into a world that’s like our own, but in which things are not quite what they seem, time with this book will be time well spent.

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

While the movie may have taken on much of the publicity, this book is well worth reading, whether or not you know someone who has been affected by Alzheimer’s disease. The heart-wrenching chronicle of the failing mind of a woman who was an exceptional intellectual is almost as sure to inspire curiosity and compassion as it is tears.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

This is a recent pick by one of the South Branch’s reading groups. It had a decidedly mixed reaction but the premise is entrancing. A girl and a chimpanzee are raised together as siblings as a sort of social experiment. This book describes how such an unusual upbringing affected everyone in the family.

Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel

If you’re dying to read what everyone is talking about, or if you’d just like to figure out what precisely was going on in the PBS miniseries with minimal dialog, now is your chance to pick up the Man Booker Prize-winning novel.

One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson

Not the riotous romp of his travel memoirs, but still entertaining and engaging. A great deal happened in the U.S. in the summer of 1927, and Bryson chronicles much of it with insights into how it affected the country later on. Expect more of his dry wit intermingled with the insights.

Till next week, dear readers, remember that reading, and books, are in the eye of the beholder. Books, be they print, digital, hybrid or some new format we haven’t yet conceived of, can’t die as long as there are people to enjoy them. And to that I say: Long live the reader!