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Book reviews by library staff and guest contributors
'Tis the season for chilling and creepy, ghostly and ghoulish, gory and grisly. This makes it the perfect time to read Carmilla! Victorian writer Le Fanu wrote Carmilla in 1872 and it's considered the first Vampire novel and a precursor to Bram Stoker's Dracula. It's a quick read and the perfect listen if you're driving for approximately 3 hours on a dark and rainy night.
I Love Libraries is an initiative of the American Library Association and this month (starting yesterday) they're starting a new program called Libraries Transform Book Pick, a new digital reading program that will connect readers nationwide to the same ebook through us (your public libraries).
Ready for some rollicking and roaring word play? Check out Forget-Me-Nots: Poems to Learn by Heart by Mary Ann Hoberman for some unforgettable poems. This is a wonderful treasury for elementary school kids. The poems are joyful and include bright and colorful illustrations by Michael Emberley. The book has 123 poems by 57 authors (ranging from A.A. Milne to Shel Silverstein to Valerie Worth, and many more phenomenal poets). It is also a great book for reading aloud as the days get shorter and the nights a bit longer.
This is really a plug for this whole wonderful series set in the south of France. Bruno is the first mystery and you do really need to start there for the full flavor and to get to know the recurring characters who surround Bruno Courreges, Chief of police in St. Denis. Set in the late twentieth century, it emphasizes that the French have long memories. That what happened during the war and after has long aftereffects that sometimes show up in surprising ways.
It's been two steps forward, one step back for women in media organizations across the United States over the past four decades. Kristin Gilger and Julia Wallace have gathered stories from many of the most influential women of the newsrooms and dissect what it takes to succeed in male-dominated organizations when you are female. Some of the stories cemented my admiration for media superstars in perpetuity. International correspondent and legend Christiane Amanpour, that shout-out is for you.
Have we recovered from September yet? It seemed like last month had a very full slate of new offerings to check out, along with the announcements of a couple of notable award lists and Big Important Books.
Beethoven is everywhere. Cell phones trill ‘Fur Elise,’ parents dote as their offspring murder ‘Ode to Joy’ and the first four notes of the Fifth Symphony practically define classical music for many. For all his familiarity, though, Beethoven the man is frustratingly hard to pin down. Little written evidence survives of the composer’s formative years, and later documents have become burnished by fame over the years. Beethoven scholar and British radio host John Suchet tries to fill in some of the holes in a very user-friendly portrait in Beethoven: The Man Revealed.
This short and thought provoking comic will tug at your heartstrings. It's the first day of school and an introverted girl who wants to be left alone finds an empty seat on the bus. She settles in for a ride of quiet and solitude. This is interrupted by a curious and talkative little boy who keeps pestering her for school supplies. His constant requests and questions wear her down and she finally snaps at him.
I had no sooner finished reading Angelo's debut novel than I started to see people tweeting about an article about an Instagram "influencer" and the woman who was her friend and un-sung (according to her) ghostwriter for a number of years. I found the article and had to double-check the date it was written because the story told there of two young women who meet in New York and team up to take on social media. One has low self-confidence but the ability to work hard and write and the other is a super-confident, though somewhat feckless, woman who wants nothing more than to be famous.
Author Bobby Hall, a.k.a. Logic, is one of my niece Abby's favorite artists and she recommended I read this book. So I did! My brief summary of the book is that the main character, a twenty-something man named Flynn, works at a grocery store. On a surface level, libraries and grocery stores are very similar. They have lots of stuff organized in specific ways and many people coming and going, using the space in a variety of ways. I was thinking about this as I was reading the novel. I was also thinking about the fact that Abby works in a grocery store, too.
