The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell

This is a fairly new series for Bernard Cornwell, who is already well-known for his 21-book Richard Sharpe series. Cornwell continues his great story-telling style but in a different time and place. Now we are in the year 866, on the northeast border of England, or Englaland as it was once called. The Last Kingdom, the first [...]

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Medicus, by Ruth Downie

Here is another story about the great Roman Empire interwoven with a murder mystery.  This is a fun, light read – and very enjoyable. The year is 117 A.D., and expansionist Rome is dispatching the Army to the far reaches of its empire.  And so Gaius Petreius Ruso, a doctor with the 20th Legion, finds [...]

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SPQR: The King’s Gambit, by John Maddox Roberts

SPQR I: The King’s Gambit is an entertaining combination of murder mystery and light history lesson which takes us back to 44 B.C., to the bustling and powerful city of Rome.  The protagonist is Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger. As Head of the Commission of Twenty Six, his job is to solve the murders in his [...]

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Generation A, by Douglas Coupland

In 1991, Douglas Coupland published Generation X. The novel defined–and parodied–my generation: people who reached adulthood in the late 80s and early 90s. The book is about three young people who live together in California’s Mojave Desert. As in classics like The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales, they share stories, some fictional and some about [...]

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State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

Road trip! Well, the literary kind, anyway. Editors for the Paris Review and McSweeney’s have assembled the usual suspects and then some for this interesting assortment of essays about the fifty states and District of Columbia. The goal is an homage to the New Deal’s Federal Writers Project, a WPA program that created an even [...]

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Crystal Rain, by Tobias Buckell

John deBrun has two problems with his past. The first is that 27 years before the action of Crystal Rain, he was washed up on the shore of the island nation of Nanagada. He can’t remember anything prior to those events. He spent a few years rising through the ranks of sailors and eventually led [...]

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Little Girl Lost, by Richard Aleas

I have to confess, part of my love for libraries came from unsavory habits in my youth. I spent many hours roaming library shelves in my early teens. Was I looking for the great books? Hardly. For the best and most entertaining genre fiction? Not usually. For great young adult literature? No, that category was [...]

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Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie

Can violence be justified? Can we commit acts of righteous vengeance without being poisoned, perverted by our own violence? These are the questions considered at depth by Joe Abercrombie’s new fantasy standalone novel Best Served Cold. As the novel opens, Monza Murcatto, a mercenary general, and her brother Benna go to a meeting with their [...]

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Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

I was sad to hear that the legendary movie producer/director John Hughes passed away last month. He was most famous for his teen movies of the 1980s, including The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but his best comic movie by far is Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It is the travel misadventure movie of [...]

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Body Movers by Stephanie Bond

For some reason, which I cannot now recall, I was speaking with one of my colleagues about people who clean up crime scenes. Sadly, this has become a business–cleaning up people’s murders and suicides. In the course of the conversation, she mentioned a fiction series called Body Movers, which I decided to try. The first [...]

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Never Suck a Dead Man’s Hand: Curious Adventures of a CSI by Dana Kollmann

One of my colleagues brought this book to me, because she thought I might like it. The title alone piqued my interest, so I gave it a try. The author starts off by debunking a few myths about crime scene investigation. She explains that real CSIs don’t wear mini-skirts and heels to work and they [...]

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Six Feet Under

This television series aired on HBO 2001-2005. It’s probably one of my all-time favorites. I own all five seasons on DVD. The premise of the show is dark and morbid. The Fisher family owns and operates a mortuary out of their home. In the very first episode, the father is killed and leaves the business [...]

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The Office

Apparently, I’ve been hiding under a rock for the past five years, because I completely missed this uproarious series on NBC, which finished airing its fifth season in the spring. Admittedly, I was aware of the show. I heard a few mentions about it, but no one extolling its virtues at length. I knew that [...]

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Pride and Prejudice (1998 BBC)

I am currently listening to the audio version of this book, but I want to recommend the film produced by BBC Television in association with A&E Network. I have probably watched this film a half dozen times; admittedly, I can recite lines along with the cast. Until recently, I had never read the book, but [...]

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In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman

It has been eight years to the day since America was attacked on September 11, 2001. To commemorate, I’d like to discuss the best piece of 9/11 literature I’ve encountered in those eight years, a nonfiction graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers. Even if you don’t normally read graphic novels, [...]

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From Baghdad, With Love, by Lieutenant Colonel Jay Kopelman with Melinda Roth

I was thoroughly surprised by this heartwarming animal story set in the most unlikely of places, Fallujah, during the most intense time of the Iraq War in 2004.  Lt. Col. Jay Kopelman and the members of the First Battalion, Third Marines, known as the “Lava Dogs,”  stumble upon a puppy while clearing a house in [...]

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The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures: 1001 Things You Hate to Love, by Sam Stall, Lou Harry, and Julia Spalding

Warning:  Once you  start reading this book, you will not be able to stop. You will be chuckling and laughing out loud, so reading it in the  library might not be a good idea.  This is a great collection of pop-cultural icons that we love to hate, or hate to love, including junk food (Cracker [...]

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Dogtown: New Beginnings and Dogtown: Second Chances

Anyone interested in dogs or animals in general won’t want to miss these collections of episodes of the show Dogtown, which ran originally on the National Geographic Channel.  Dogtown is a large dog-rescue facility that is a part of the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in the beautiful canyon country of southern Utah. It has cared [...]

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