Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, by Chris Crutcher

The final post from the Circulation Division this week comes from Vicki Rolley, who wraps things up with a piece of young adult fiction. If you’re a teenager, Chris Crutcher is a must-read author for you.  If you’re an adult, rediscover young adult literature with this Crutcher fiction. Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes is a [...]

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The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, by Lauren Willig

Today, the Circulation Division’s Sarah Smethurst brings us a tale of intrigue, adventure, and romance. As a child, I remember sleeping over at my grandparents’ house and watching the old black and white version of The Scarlet Pimpernel, a daring tale of intrigue, spies, and elaborate costuming. Baroness Orczy’s story of a British spy who, [...]

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Tell No One, by Harlan Coben

Today, we hear from Circulation Services staffer Mandy Malone, who offers us thrills and chills for the summer. I was familiar with the suspense thrillers of author Harlan Coben through my work at the library, but it wasn’t until I saw French director Guillaume Canet’s adaptation of Coben’s 2001 novel Tell No One that I [...]

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Zeus: A Journey Through Greece in the Footsteps of a God, by Tom Stone

Today’s post from the Circulation Services division is courtesy of John Livecchi, who takes us to Greece. Two of my favorite things are travel and Greek mythology. Over the years, I have been lucky enough to combine them with a few excursions to Greece, but it’s rare to find a book that does the job [...]

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The Hillston trilogy, by Michael Malone

This week we are delighted to have folks from the library’s Circulation Services division join us. This first post of the week comes from Alan Bernstein. Between 1983 and 2002 Michael Malone wrote three novels (Uncivil Seasons, Time’s Witness, and First Lady) about the fictional North Carolina  town of Hillston. Hillston is an exemplar of [...]

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Farewell, E. Lynn Harris

In many ways, E. Lynn Harris was the breakout writer who moved African-American fiction from the “literature” shelves to the popular collection.  He took on topics like homosexuality, class, and family secrets, finding the universality in those themes even as he expressed the conflict they bring to African-Americans. He also placed his characters in a [...]

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Moon Called, by Patricia Briggs

Mercy Thompson is a VW mechanic in the Tri-Cities area of Washington State. As hard as she tries to live a normal, quiet life, that’s just not in the cards for her. Mercy’s life is just a tad bit complicated, being a coyote shapeshifter with a werewolf for a neighbor, a former boss that’s a [...]

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Sweet Hush, by Deborah Smith

Hush McGillen Thackery is a mother, a woman, a lover, a widow, a farmer, a liar, a fighter, and a pillar of her community. While individually all these words give a sense of the character she is, it is the combination of these roles that ultimately make her a force to be reckoned with. In [...]

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Magic Bites, by Ilona Andrews

Kate Daniels is a mercenary of the magical kind. She cleans up the messes other people make when they play with magic. A lot can and does go wrong when technology fails and the magic surges. Kate finds this out very soon when her guardian, a powerful mage, is brutally killed and she begins to [...]

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The Spymaster’s Lady, by Joanna Bourne

We are first introduced to the infamous Annique Villiers during her interrogation in a dank prison in France. Where some women would have broken down and given up their secrets under the questioning, Annique holds her own, for she is the “Fox Cub,” a notorious spy who is wanted throughout Europe. Little does Annique know [...]

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Alien Taste, by Wen Spencer

Ukiah Oregon is a tracker. He hunts the missing, and there’s no one he can’t find. Ukiah is so good that the police, despite the fact they think he’s a little bit spooky, have called him in to find a missing woman whose roommates have just been viciously murdered while she has mysteriously disappeared.  It’s [...]

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My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up, by Russell Brand

“Time moves very slowly when you’re standing naked on Hackney Road at three o’clock in the morning. I can hear music from the bar below, and I realize there must be a party with a late license, but I can’t go down there completely naked. Luckily, there’s an umbrella standing up against the door, so [...]

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Death with Interruptions, by José Saramago

On New Year’s Day, in an unidentified country, everyone suddenly stops dying. Disease still strikes, accidents still happen, the elderly get even more so, but everyone just keeps on ticking. Havoc ensues, but it is very funny havoc, if you go in for dark social satire. The funeral workers are in a tizzy. The government [...]

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The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, by David Sanger

If you like to sleep soundly at night, satisfied in the knowledge that people are basically decent and that your children will grow up with the freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, permit me to gently nudge you toward Cute Overload, a website that has nothing to do with reading but which [...]

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Identity Crisis, by Brad Meltzer

If, hypothetically, someone completely neglected to read comics in her childhood like she was supposed to, how would this person, now a grownup, become familiar with the superheroes? Discuss. I posed this entirely hypothetical question to a geek friend of mine, explaining that the reader, hypothetically, was intimidated by superhero books because she wasn’t familiar [...]

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Creature, by Andrew Zuckerman

The baby blue eyes of the panther* on the cover called me across the room. Before I knew what was happening I found myself with an impulse grab from the New Book shelf. *Leopard, actually. The kitty is a black leopard, but I didn’t discover this till the very end, because there are no words [...]

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Valkyrie (2008)

This movie is about the most extensive plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler, the one that came the closest to actually killing him. Since most people will actually know what resulted from such a famous historical event, a movie like this needs to show us what it was like for the conspirators to make it worth our while [...]

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The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (2005)

It was bound to happen sooner or later. A blog sponsored by a public library would eventually have to have a review of the movie The Librarian: Quest For the Spear. I may be putting my professional credibility on the line, but I have seen this movie several times and never fail to laugh at [...]

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