The Maze of Bones, by Rick Riordan

I’m a big fan of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series (The Last Olympian is due in May!), so I picked up The Maze of Bones because it was written by Rick Riordan.  I’ve recently found out that the 10-book series (The 39 Clues) will actually be written by different authors.  That’s OK–I think [...]

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to  about this delightful book told me that initially they had difficulty getting into the story; there’s a lot of flipping pages and looking at names to get straight who’s sending letters to whom. But after you get the main characters down, the story flows easily and it becomes quite [...]

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The Royal Physician’s Visit, by Per Olov Enquist

Fiction at its best can immerse the reader in another person’s experience, so that even unsympathetic characters become somewhat understandable.  Historical fiction faces the test of maintaining verisimilitude so the reader stays in the setting.  But when historical fiction keeps that sense of reality while finding the universal in real people from a very different [...]

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Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson

At first glance, Per Petterson’s novel is as bleak as an Arctic landscape – an old man, isolated in a small cabin, recalls for the first time the events from the summer that shaped his life.  But in Petterson’s gentle hands details begin to emerge, indistinct shapes take form and identity, and a real warmth [...]

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In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez

In a society that quadrennially pats itself on the back for a “peaceful transition of power”, it is difficult to imagine growing up in a dictatorship.  We have no experience of one person, publicly or behind the scenes, controlling every aspect of life.  Our cults of personality are iffy at best, and our multicultural society [...]

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The Ghost, by Robert Harris

The publishing world is filled with ghostwriters. Sometimes they keep a franchise author’s work going, whether or not the author is still alive; sometimes they craft the autobiographies of popular and political figures, but rarely do they step into the light to claim credit for their work. The unnamed first-person narrator of Harris’s most recent [...]

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Killing Rommel, by Stephen Pressfield

Stephen Pressfield is known for his detailed and thoughtful accounts of historical and imagined wars – his Gates of Fire took the romantic gloss off the Spartans’ battle at Thermopylae and showed the hardness of the society that could produce such feared and honored warriors.  Until his most recent book, he specialized in ancient military [...]

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The Otherworldlies, by Jennifer Anne Kogler

Fern and Sam are twins, but they don’t look or act similar in any way (not that twins always do). Fern has some pretty distinctive traits that set her apart not only from Sam, but from the rest of her twelve-year-old peers. She is sensitive to sunlight, can predict the weather, hears voices, and can [...]

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100 Cupboards, by N.D. Wilson

As my fellow youth services librarians will attest, I am a pretty organized person. You know the old adage, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” That’s me. That is perhaps what initially drew me to a book called 100 Cupboards. I would love to have a wall covered with 100 cupboards, as [...]

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Wake, by Lisa McMann

People often wish they could know what others are thinking, but what if you could see the dreams of others? How would you cope with seeing the subconscious of your best friend, worst enemy, or crush acted out in front of your eyes? Janie has been able to see dreams since December 23, 1996. She [...]

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Gone, by Michael Grant

The school day begins normally enough in Perdido Beach, California. Fourteen-year-old Sam sits in History class in Perdido Beach School when his teacher disappears. Not in a “We should hire a private detective” type of way, but in a “Poof! He’s gone!” kind of way. Not only has Sam’s teacher vanished, but so have all [...]

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The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

It is said that the best way to write an entertaining book about young people is to get rid of the adults. Perhaps that is why Harry Potter is an orphan, the children don’t take the grownups with them through the wardrobe into Narnia, and Percy Jackson’s mom is a mortal who stays in New [...]

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The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

Telegraph Hill, a neighborhood of San Francisco, became home to a flock of cherry-headed conure parrots. Generally parrots are found in much warmer climes, like the rainforests of South America. So it’s highly unusual to see these beautiful, colorful birds living in the wild of northern California. No one knows how the flock started, but [...]

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Stay Rich Forever and Ever with Ed Slott

This video watches more like an infomercial than I would like, but once you move past that hindrance, you can find good information. However, Ed Slott only touches on his topics, he does not offer a lot of in-depth advice. Mostly, he suggests speaking with a financial advisor, which is probably good advice; everyone’s financial [...]

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Bet You Didn’t Know: Hundreds of Intriguing Facts about Living in the USA, by Cheryl Russell

The cover of this book is bright orange and the front is filled with statistics like, “average measured weight of American women: 163 pounds,” “percentage of young adults who are cell-phone only users: 31,” and the “median size of a new single-family home: 2,235 sq. ft.” You can read about these facts and more in [...]

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Gimme My Money Back: Your Guide to Beating the Financial Crisis, by Ali Velshi

Ali Velshi is a business correspondent on CNN. He has written this timely primer on the current state of our financial crisis. The first chapter explains how we got here with a simplified version of sub-prime mortgages. He then covers the basics of personal finance, looking at good vs. bad debt, savings, and investments. From [...]

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Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets, by Sudhir Venkatesh

If you’ve read Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner you may remember a chapter called “Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?” Levitt and Dubner write about the research conducted by a graduate student, who took to the streets of a Chicago public housing project. That student, Sudhir Venkatesh, elaborates his experiences [...]

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Australia (2008)

I was dragged to this movie last year (as a payback for seeing The Day the Earth Stood Still, which I thought was a great movie even though most people think otherwise).  I was pleasantly surprised at how entertaining Australia was.  The story is a good one,  involving Nicole Kidman as an English aristocrat who [...]

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