Previous Staff Picks
(Note: All Staff Picks are on display on the New Fiction/ New Mystery shelves in front of the Circulation Desk.)
The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
England, World War II. A Young boy: bookish, quiet, loses his mother to cancer, and his father quickly remarries and has another child. He lives in a world of books and stories in his room on the outskirts of London.
Until one day, he hears his mother's voice calling from the sunken garden. He follows it, goes through a crack in the stone, and emerges in another place. Here, all the stories he read in that quiet room, in that quiet house are playing themselves out: The Woodsman, Childe Roland, Snow White…but something is off, somehow. The stories aren't playing out quite right.
The story is gripping, cruel and tender, and has one of the most satisfying endings that I 've read in some time. I can't remember the last time I got such pure pleasure from such a quick and sprightly read. Don't be put off by the "other-worldly" elements. Sometimes, the more ridiculous and fantastical something becomes, so does it come to approximate "Real Truth".
Call Number: F CON
Chosen by Amy
Dune by Frank Herbert
This is a science fiction novel of towering aspirations. Dune brings to life an alternate universe ripe with wonder, yet so complete in its obsessive details that it seems as real as the reality occupied by you and I.
This novel has a lot to say about many topics from politics and war to ecological concerns. It covers its many themes with a confidence and depth that is inspiring, and merges them within sci-fi set pieces and intense action that will leave you frantically flipping pages.
Call Number: F HER
Chosen by Jeff
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
On his 83rd birthday, amusement park handy man, Eddie, dies while trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. In the afterlife, Eddie spends time with five people who explain his life to him. Ranging from dear loved ones to total strangers, the five people help Eddie to understand events from his past that he couldn’t understand until he was able to see them from the other side.
I wasn’t able to put this book down. There was suspense in wondering who the next person was and how he or she was connected to the old man’s life. The meeting with the fifth person is an emotional chapter that left me in tears.
Call Number: F ALB
Chosen by Renee
Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll
Another delicious mash-up of fantasy and reality by Jonathan Carroll, Outside the Dog Museum is a novel that readers will not soon forget.
Narrated by a world-famous architect who is recovering from a shattering nervous breakdown, this book is equal parts philosophy and fantasy that delights on multiple levels - this is truly a novel that can be read in many different ways.
As readers follow the construction of a billion dollar dog museum, they will meet Middle Eastern Sultans, mystical psychiatrists, and some dogs that are much more than they seem. If you are adept at suspending disbelief and giving into a writer who is truly a master of his craft, then Outside the Dog Museum is for you.
Call Number: F CAR
Chosen by Jeff
Into a Paris Quartier: Reine Margot's Chapel and Other Haunts of St. Germain by Diane Johnson
The popular novelist(Le Mariage, Le Divorce) gives an nonfiction account of her own neighborhood in Paris which is lively and engaging. This admittedly subjective guide to Paris is at once a quick lesson in history from the 16th through the late 20th centuries as well as an insightful look at the mind of a novelist and her inspiration.
Call Number: 944.3 J631I
Chosen by Mary
Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson
This author just died - write up in Sunday Times (or Journal) 11/1/09.
I read and enjoyed very much - A thriller with a real sense of place.
Call Number: F DAV
Chosen by Betsy
The Plague by Albert Camus
Set in Algeria, North Africa where a virus is moving dispassionately through the city, taking much of that city with it: Priest, Doctor and Fugitive alike. It reads a bit like Kafka -- the sentences can be read in many different ways -- and in fact, there is a character in the novel reading (or rather, misreading) Kafka's The Trial.
Although it is largely lauded as an "Existential" novel, Camus disagreed, claiming it to illustrate humanity's reaction to what he coined "The Absurd". And as the hand sanitizer comes out, as every innocent cough garners a wave of fear and animosity on my bus home, I can't help but agree.
Call Number: F CAM
Chosen by Amy
Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt
One of my top five all time favorite novels (in the Living Author Category), this is a Bookworm's dream of book about books and bookworms. Scholars Maud Bailey and Roland Michell find themselves embroiled in a most unlikely mystery.
Not police reports or crime scenes or forensic analysis, but dusty tomes, old libraries, forgotten correpondance, help them piece together a century-old mystery about two Victorian writers: Roland Ashe -- The Literary "Great", faithful husband and upstanding citizen, and Christabel LaMotte, a cross between Emily Dickinson and Christina Rosetti with the heart of a Suffragette.
A gripping story, at once a comfort and a thrill. (As you read, remember that all the poetry included as Ashe's and LaMotte's are all original to A.S. Byatt, which adds another layer of deliciousness). Maud Bailey says, "Literary critics make the best detectives…". Not as good as Librarians, of course. But I do see what she's saying.
Call Number: F BYA
Chosen by Amy
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
A dream one night of buried treasure miles away in Egypt, sparks a shepherd boy’s journey to discover his personal legend. Through Santiago’s journey, he meets strangers who become his spiritual guides and finds others who hinder his quest. With each relationship formed and lessons learned along the way, Santiago gets closer to his goal. This uplifting tale of a young man following his dreams will have readers asking themselves “What is my personal legend?”
Call Number: F COE
Chosen by Renee
Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The last time I waited for a new book with this much anticipation it was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I picked up his first book, The Shadow of the Wind about 2 years ago, and I've read it three times since then. And while Angel's Game features the same locations, and some of the same characters from Shadow, this is not a true sequel (or prequel, or what have you). Zafon's work incorporates Raymond Chandler's shadowy streets and characters, with the crumbling mansions of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Bronte, with the political wariness of Franz Kafka, and the wry wit of Charles Dickens.
Set in Barcelona in the 1920's, Zafon once again takes us back to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books of Shadow of the Wind. This time he brings us Daniel, the ambitious young author of City of the Damned. The book brings him attention from a mysterious patron, one Andreas Corelli, and so begins a strange Faustian pact that comprises the heart of the novel. Beautiful, lyrical and ultimately page turning, this book takes you to some strange, almost supernatural places. Don't let that deter you. Be brave.
Call Number: F RUI
Chosen by Amy
The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini
Pulled out of her tropical plantation home for a cold English boarding school -- followed by a career as a chorus girl in traveling musicals, followed by wild fantastic parties, alcholism, outrageous affairs and tears and despair. It's all just... so divine. Shadenfraude is real. And healthy. I promise.
But more than just a narrative of her life, Pizzichini provides psychological context in which to view her: she speculates on psychological reasons for her behavior, in a way treating her subject like a character in a novel -- this seems rather approriate, as Jean Rhys seemed like a character in her own novel very often.
This is a woman who started out as an Edwardian Gaity Girl and ended up forty years later being compared to Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols (at the time of this comparison, she was, after all, drinking heavily, running up hotel bills, smashing furniture and windows and yelling profanities at ministers. She was also 70 years old.)
I'm not ashamed to say I teared up a little at the very end of this book, which ends as most biographies do. And while I was sad at the passing of Jean Rhys, I was really sad at the fact that the book was over, and I would never again read it for the first time. Ah, such sweet despair.
Call Number: B RHY
Chosen by Amy
Cemetery Dance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
I’m a fan of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s writing. They collaborate on natural history/mystery/archeology and they are fast, fun, and farfetched. I read the current one, Cemetery Dance (2009) that we bought in May. Here's a review from Publishers Weekly:
"Bestsellers Preston and Child kill off a regular supporting character at the outset of this suspenseful tale of urban terror, their ninth to feature FBI special agent Aloysius Pendergast (after The Wheel of Darkness). William Smithback, a New York Times reporter, and his wife, Nora Kelly, an anthropologist with the New York Museum of Natural History, are celebrating their first anniversary when Smithback is fatally stabbed in their Manhattan apartment, apparently by a creepy neighbor, Colin Fearing, an out-of-work British actor. Given eyewitness descriptions of the killer, including one from Kelly herself, as well as surveillance footage showing a blood-stained Fearing emerging from the apartment building right after the crime, the case appears to be open and shut—until Pendergast and his NYPD ally, Lt. Vincent D'Agosta, learn that Fearing died almost two weeks earlier. This taut page-turner can only add to the authors' growing fan base."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Call Number: M PRE
Chosen by Mary Anne
The Emperor's Last Stand: A Journey to St. Helena by Julia Blackburn
I am not a big fan of Napoleon, but the combination of his last days and the history and geography of St. Helena filled a lot of gaps in my knowledge.
Call Number: 944 B562E
Chosen by Betsy
The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll
Growing tired with the routines of his life, prep school teacher Thomas Abbey decides to take a sabbatical to write a biography on his favorite children’s book author, Marshall France. Abbey and his girlfriend head to small Galen, Missouri where the once reclusive (and now deceased) France lived his life and wrote his stories.
Upon arriving in Galen, Abbey finds a quaint town strangely gripped by the memory of France and the spirit of his stories. Fiction begins to bleed into reality as Abbey becomes ever more entangled in the secrets of his favorite author and their hold over the small town of Galen.
Author Jonathan Carroll is known for crafting detailed worlds and characters that are grounded in a rich believability… and then turning those worlds on their heads and reveling in the chaos that follows. When dark fantasy elements begin to seep into the core of this story you will be left shocked, confused, and ultimately delighted.
Call Number: F CAR
Chosen by Jeff
Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell
Published in 1948, this novel takes place in the early 20th century in a small Midwestern town, where a visit from out of town relations leads to unexpected emotional havoc for a young lawyer, even though nothing actually "happens." The reader's experience is similar; somehow Maxwell tells a tale of incredible feeling and even suspense using the most lucid, logical prose with only the subtlest touch of lyricism, and nothing is sensationalized or sentimentalized.
Maxwell's brilliantly insightful evocations of the characters make the book at once funny and terrifying, he sees through everything to show us the real world below the surface. The psychological acuity will make you think of Henry James, but the language won't - it almost disappears, so perfectly does the book's style carry its meaning.
Call Number: F MAX
Chosen by Christina
The Vault by Peter Lovesey
For plotting and pacing, who's better than Lovesey? Nobody. The Vault is one of my favorite Lovesey novels, dealing as it does with the purloined personal notebook and writing-desk of Mary Shelley, Abbey Ruins, puppeteers, antiques enthusiasts and hapless American Scholars.
A skeletal hand turns up in an Abbey churchyard in Bath. Is this connected to a more recent murder? How is this connected to the missing items? If you're looking for finely drawn characters, written with pathos and empathy, look elsewhere (Elizabeth George, Tana French). But in long standing British-mystery tradition, these characters are drawn with broad strokes: Think Col. Mustard and Professor Plum -- who are in service to Lovesey's plot and pacing.
Call Number: M LOV
Chosen by Amy