Rosemary and Rue, by Seanan McGuire (2009)

We finish out the week with two posts from Circulation Services Director Melissa Simpson.
There seem to be a lot of fantasy novels on the shelves — vampires, werewolves,  and faeries abound!  It’s refreshing to run across a new author that offers some inventive takes on the genre.
Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire introduces us to [...]

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The Gifts of the Jews, by Thomas Cahill

 
What is it about a ragtag group of nomads that has both inspired and outraged civilizations for four millenia?  In the second book of his Hinges of History series,  Thomas Cahill digs into the larger themes that separate the Jewish peoples from the people around them, and shows how the evolution of a culture, a [...]

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Ordinary Heroes, by Scott Turow

Turow is well-known for his legal thrillers, including Presumed Innocent, which I think paved the way for a new generation of legal writers, including John Grisham.  Although he hasn’t scored as big since, his character development, courtroom drama, and exploration of the legal personality of the fictional Kindle County keep his books selling and circulating.  [...]

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The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald

It is my unscientific but educated opinion that most authors are better at short stories than longer works. With full-length narratives, authors are prone to blathering on or cramming in unnecessary details or cluttering the story with extraneous characters. With short stories they are forced to make careful choices about each word and sentence. The [...]

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Northlanders: Sven the Returned, by Brian Wood

“Vikings finally done right!” effuses the cover blurb from Entertainment Weekly (whose reviewers obviously never saw the Viking Kittens doing Led Zeppelin, but I digress). If we understand “Vikings” to mean “violent” and “gritty” and “bleak,” then the Northlanders series succeeds with flying colors…
…or, if we’re going to be literal about it, the Northlanders series [...]

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The Flickering Light, by Jane Kirkpatrick

Do you want your picture taken? Grab a digital camera and you’ll have it in an instant. But just a mere one hundred years ago, a photograph was a treasured object. Having your picture taken meant a trip to the photographer’s studio and spending considerable money. Today’s story is about a portrait photographer, his studio and his assistant in [...]

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The King’s Coat, by Dewey Lambdin

This is a good, rousing tale of sailing life in 1780. You will learn much about ships and how they work as well as battles of the time and the weapons used. Our “hero,” (and we use the word loosely) is a wild young fellow who suddenly finds himself in a new world. Think Horatio Hornblower, but [...]

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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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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, you [...]

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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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