Staff Recommendation: Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Archives staff member, Robin Melland, recommends listening to the audiobook version of Maria Semple’s novel. “It is a silly and fun book where crazy, weird things keep happening – pure entertainment.”    

Student worker, Colleen Roach, recommends reading the hardcover edition from the fourth floor browsing collection. “This book has just enough drama and mystery in it to keep you hooked but not so much that you get sick of the story and characters. It is interesting to see the path that Bernadette's life takes in response to her successes and failures and how that path affects those around her. 

It was an easy book to stay interested in because of the slight twists that happen throughout the story.”  

Where’d You Go, Bernadette

By Maria Semple

New York: Hachette Audio, 2013 (9 CDs) or

New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2012

Available in the library on 4^th floor.

Call number:

 PS3619.E495 W54 2013 (Audiobooks) 

 PS3619.E495 W54 2012 (Browsing books)

Janet Maslin from The New York Times writes “The tightly constructed “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is written in many formats — e-mails, letters, F.B.I. documents, correspondence with a psychiatrist and even an emergency-room bill for a run-in between Bernadette and Audrey. Yet these pieces are strung together so wittily that Ms. Semple’s storytelling is always front and center, in sharp focus. You could stop and pay attention to how apt each new format is, how rarely she repeats herself and how imaginatively she unveils every bit of information. But you would have to stop laughing first.

Everyone in this sparkling novel is wily, smart or even smarter. The brainiest character is arguably Elgin, who works at Microsoft and leads the design team for what, the book says, is Bill Gates’s favorite project. Elgin is famed for not wearing shoes, for giving the fourth-most-watched TED talk and for generally being Microsoft’s version of a rock star.” Full Review

Browsing Area Books for July 2013--Whodunits

Spider Bones by Kathy Reichs. Call Number: PS3568.E476345S65 2010.

          Reich’s 13^th book starring Temperance Brennan has the forensic anthropologist trying to unravel a mystery concerning James Lowery, a man recently drowned in a bizarre fashion in Quebec.  But Lowery died 40 years before, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. And in Hawaii to reanalyze the old remains, Brennan finds yet a third body identified as Lowery. It’s obvious something sinister is at work, but what?

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane. Call Number: PS3562.E426M66 2010.

          Twelve years earlier, police investigators Kenzie and Gennaro had tracked Amanda McReady down when she’d vanished at the age of four, taking her from a loving couple who’d gone to prison and returning her to a drunken, neglectful mother because that was the law.  Now, haunted by the wrongness of that act, the duo once again tracks Amanda’s steps, a hunt that takes them to identity thieves, ruthless Russian mobsters, meth addicts and a priceless religious icon.

 

Mad River by John Sandford. Call Number: PS3569.A516M33 2012.

          Virgil flowers is back in his sixth story, this time chasing three teenaged thrill killers who are rampaging through southern Minnesota, shooting  a woman during a robbery, then killing a man for his car. And after that, they can’t seem to get enough.  But Virgil can’t quite make the pieces fit and as the dragnet tightens around the killers, he knows there’s more to the story.  But he never sees how it’s going to end.

White Heat by M.J. McGrath. Call Number: PR6113.C4775W55 2011.

          McGrath’s first book features Edie Kiglatuk, an Inuit woman living on the top of the world. Guiding two men on an alleged hunting expedition, she realizes they are looking for something besides ducks. Then one of the men is shot and killed.  Anxious to avoid the authorities, the elders on Ellesmere Island call it an accident.  But Edie knows better.  And when her nephew kills himself because of something to do with the murder, Edie takes matters into her own hands.

 

 

 

 

 

Browsing Area Books for June 3013--New Sci-Fi

 

Dragon’s Time by Anne & Todd McCafferey.  Call Number: PS3563.A255D755 2011.

Another chapter in the iconic Dragonriders series.  In this book the planet Pern is in desperate straits.  The deadly Thread is falling, a life-form that feeds on anything organic and falls through space from an erratic planetoid above.  Able to breathe fire, Dragons can burn Thread before it touches ground, but a plague has killed many of the dragons and their riders are desperately attempting anything they can think of to save their planet.  One possibility is to use the dragons’ abilities to teleport back in time, but mixing the past and future can lead to…consequences.

Fourth Wall by Walter Jon Williams. Call Number: PS3573.I456213F68 2012.

Mixing the near future with bits of surreal humor and suspense, Williams tells the story of Sean Makin, a washed-up child actor desperate for work, who gets a call from the famous Dagmar Shaw.  Dagmar’s made millions in alternative reality video games and now she wants to make a movie, with Sean as the star.  The only hitch is people seem to die around her.  And the movie may be a little something more than Sean knows.

  Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reyonlds. Call Number:PR6068.E95B58 2012.

            One hundred and fifty years from now, the Akinya business empire is worried.  The matriarch, Grandmother Eunice Akinya, has died while exploring the solar system and she’s left something awkward behind on the moon.  Her grandson doesn’t want to leave his biological research of elephants, but the family needs him to keep a lid on whatever Eunice left, so he’s sent to contain the damage.  Unfortunately the effects are a lot more extensive than the family guessed and the results could tear civilization apart.

Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey.  Call Number: PS3603.O73428C35 2012.

            Second book in the Expanse Trilogy, sees war break out between Mars and Earth, as a Martian outpost on Ganymede is slaughtered by one invincible super soldier.  James Holden, the idealistic Captain of the space ship Rocinante, finds his crew out of a job until a scientist from Ganymede asks them to return to the war-torn moon and help him find his child.  Holden has no way of knowing that the bioengineered soldier responsible for starting the war was only the first glimpse of an alien invasion beyond any expectations, even those of the evil corporations seeking to control it.  A powerhouse novel.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, May 13, 2013.



The First Clash: the miraculous Greek victory at Marathon—and its impact on Western civilization by Jim Lacey.  Library Call Number: DF225.4.L332011.

          Author Lacey, a veteran and military historian, takes a fresh look at the battle of Marathon, when a small army of about 9,000 Athenians, aided by 1,000 Plateans, took on the vanguard of the Persian army of Darius I.  Outnumbered about 2 to 1, the battle developed in such an unexpected way that it left possibly half the Persians dead at the loss of less than 200 Greeks.      

         The book jacket states:

…Lacey shows how the heavily armed Persian army was shocked, demoralized, and ultimately defeated by the relentless assault of the Athenian phalanx, which battered the Persian line in a series of brutal attacks. He reveals the fascinating aftermath of Marathon, how its fighters became the equivalent of our “Greatest Generation,” and challenges the view of many historians that Marathon ultimately proved the Greek “Western way of war” to be the superior strategy for fighting—and winning—battles to the present day.

          Immediate, visceral, and full of new analyses that defy decades of conventional wisdom, The First Clash is a superb interpretation of a conflict that indeed made the world safe for Aristotle, Plato, and our own modern democracy. But it was also a battle whose legacy and lessons have often been misunderstood—perhaps, now more than ever, at our own peril.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, May 6, 2013.

 The Reversal by Michael Connelly Library Call Number:PSO51165R48 2010.

          Mickey Haller, hero of Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer, returns a third time to the Los Angeles county courthouse, but with a twist—this time he’s working the other side of the bench, prosecuting Jason Jessup, a man who has spent 24 years in prison for killing a child before DNA evidence got his sentence reversed.  The District Attorney wants to retry him, but doesn’t want his office tainted by failure if the reversal is upheld.  He offers Haller a proposition: convict Jessup and your ex-wife, currently prosecuting criminals in the Valley, far from LA, gets out of exile and returns downtown.  Haller, in turn, agrees, as long as his half-brother, Harry Bosch, can be the chief investigator.  Both of them believe Jessup is guilty.  And since both have daughters about the age of Jessup’s victim, they both have an emotional stake in putting him back behind bars.

          So begins another taught courtroom drama from a writer who matches Scott Turow in turning legal cases into page turners.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, April 29, 2013.



 

War by Sebastian Junger.  Library Call Number: DS371.4123K67J86 2010.

     Throughout the long war in Afghanistan, the Korengal Valley has been one of the most dangerous places on earth.  Fighting between American forces and the Taliban flare up at any time and without warning.
     Into this environment went Sebastian Junger, author of the Perfect Storm.  Junger embedded himself with the Second Platoon of Battle Company and spent a tour with them, sharing their dangers and their missions in a spot he defines as, “sort of the Afghanistan of Afghanistan: too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off.”
     In a world of sudden death and destruction, what Junger finds is that the abstract notions of what soldiers fight for—“good” or “right”—all give way to the simple truth that when they are put in harm’s way, they fight for each other.



Browsing Area Book of the Week, April 22, 2013.

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey.
Library Call Number: PS3603.O73428L48 2011.

                       Mars and Earth are in an uneasy truce, the Outer Planets Alliance is testing the limits of their independence and over all of them are the super-corporations that own so much of the solar systems resources.

          When Jim Holden’s ship, an ice miner hauling water from Saturn’s rings, receives an SOS from the ship Scopuli that’s dead in space, the captain directs they go to its aid.  But the rescue mission quickly turns into a race for survival when an unknown warship nukes the rescuers, leaving only Holden and his shuttle crew alive.  For there is a horrible secret aboard the Scopuli, something that will change the solar system forever.
          Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to The Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.
          Holden and Miller form an uneasy alliance in their search for the truth and know the odds are against them. But something evil is loose in the solar system and  if something needs to be done, a police officer and a ship’s XO and misfit crew might be the ones who can make things right.
          Part one of a trilogy called the Expanse, this is fast-moving sci-fi with an awful twist, that’s hard to put down once started.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, April 15, 2013.

Shock Wave by John Sandford. Library Call Number: PS3569.A516S54 2011.
          They’re building a PyeMart in the small river town of Butternut Falls, Minnesota and many people are unhappy about it.  Environmentalists say the run-off from the parking lot and the building site will pollute the pristine river, the local merchants see themselves being put out of business by the megastore. So when a bomb goes off at the trailer of the construction site’s foreman, killing him,  the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension calls in their ace investigator, Virgil Flowers, canceling his vacation and telling him to find out who’s responsible.     
       Three weeks earlier, a bomb had gone off at PyeMart’s executive headquarters, narrowly missing the company’s Executive Board and killing a worker. No one can figure out how the bomb was even placed in the penthouse meeting room.
          Arriving in Butternut Falls, Flowers has to contend with a lot of suspects, the high-powered President of PyeMart, his Executive Secretary, unhelpful city officials and residents, and some truly strange individuals. Before it’s over he will lose his boat and (perhaps worse) nearly his life.
          In Sandford’s books, sometimes you know the bad guy, sometimes it’s a mystery.  This is one of the truly good mysteries in his series of nearly forty books.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, April 1, 2013.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson.  Library Call Number: PS3569.T3868R43 2011.

Richard “Dodge”  Forthrast is a world-famous game designer, a former draft dodger and  pot smuggler, who parlayed his money from carrying weed across the border into a start-up company that produced the blockbuster video game T’rain.  T’rain is a multiplayer, multi-billion dollar success that allows interaction in virtual and real worlds in ways no one has ever thought of before.  Like organized crime, who has figured out how to use T’rain to virtually launder real-world money, or terrorists, who are using the game for their plotting.

Unfortunately, the game’s popularity gives it a high profile.  Hackers develop a program called Reamde that can hijack a player’s electronic files and hold them for ransom, a dangerous game when you don’t know anyone’s real identity. 

Soon gamers, fantasy writers and hackers are all trying to outplay bad guys, who are popping up left and right from the cybersphere, and Forthrast finds himself dead-bang center in a high stakes and deadly conflict.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, March 18, 2013.

The Girls of Murder City: Fame, lust and the beautiful killers who inspired Chicago by Douglas Perry. HV6517.P475 2010.

In 1924, with Prohibition the law of the land, booze in Chicago was more prevalent than ever.  Speakeasies, illegal gin joints and jazz clubs were everywhere, well supplied by Dion O’Banion, Johnny Torrio and Johnny’s lieutenant, Al Capone.  It was also a time when women journalists were hired for the Sunday articles—home and fashion—and the men did the hard news. 

But Maurine Watkins, a preacher’s daughter from Indiana was determined to make it as a newswoman; she started at the Tribune covering homicides.  Chicago, after all, was rich with murder, even before the gang wars, and nothing was more peculiar than the tendency of women in the Second City to get drunk and shoot their boyfriends; nothing, that is, except the other peculiar fact that all-male jurors seemed to find an attractive young woman accused of murder “Not guilty.”

          For Maurine, with her religious morals, this was unconscionable.  Two beauties, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner were both coming to trial, both of them guilty as hell.  Maurine tried to become the voice of justice and morals for the city, all the while swimming against the tides of sexism and sensationalism. 

But eventually, she would get a hit Broadway play out of it.

 

Browsing Area Book of the Week, March 11, 2013.



Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson.  Library Call Number: PR6123.A884B44 2011.

          Every day, Christine Lucas wakes up and doesn’t know her name or the name of the man in bed next to her.  She has no memories at all until he tells her he’s her husband, Ben, that they are married and that she’s had a car accident that has damaged her brain’s ability to remember. She has been this way for a number of years, ever since the accident.   But, lately, each day after Ben goes to work, Christine gets a phone call from a man who says he’s her doctor, who tells her to look for a journal she is keeping hidden in the closet.  The journal contains all the pages she has written in the course of days past, where she is attempting to recollect and recreate her life.  There are glimpses of friends and family in the journal, shadows of people who might once have been important in her life, although she can’t remember them.  And written in the front cover are three unsettling words: Don’t trust Ben.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, March 4, 2013.

God is Not One: the eight rival religions that run the world—and why their differences matter by Stephen Prothero.  Library Call Number: BL80.3.P76 2010.

 

          Prothero sets out with the interesting premise that religions are not all pointed in the same direction—at the same omniscient, omnipotent Being—but are, on the contrary, beginning at different philosophical points and experiences of faith and order, and expanding from there.  By contrasting their differences, he hopes to paint a fuller picture of different cultures and what they seek in their faith.  The book is controversial, especially in the inclusion of Confucianism—which can be argued is a philosophy and not a faith—and atheism, which is shown only at its furthest extreme.  Still, the author has written an illuminating book with plenty to ponder.  Readers may come away from the book with a feeling that, like the blind men with the elephant, they have not yet reached a full comprehension of what God means.  They may, however, find a larger appreciation of the beliefs of others.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 25, 2013.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett.  Library Call Number: PS3619.T636.H45 2009.                                 

 

Excerpted from Kirkus Reviews:      “The relationships between white middle-class women and their black maids in Jackson, Mississippi, circa 1962, reflect larger issues of racial upheaval in…Stockett's ambitious first novel.  …recent Ole Miss graduate Skeeter [Phelan] returns to Jackson longing to be a serious writer. While playing bridge with…friends Hilly and Elizabeth, she asks Elizabeth's seemingly docile maid Aibileen for housekeeping advice to fill the column she's been hired to pen for a local paper. The two women begin what Skeeter considers a semi-friendship, but Aibileen…is careful what she shares…Encouraged by a New York editor, [Skeeter] decides to write a book about the experience of black maids and enlists Aibileen's help. For Skeeter the book is primarily a chance to prove herself as a writer. The stakes are much higher for the black women who put their lives on the line by telling their true stories. Although the exposé is published anonymously, the town's social fabric is permanently torn. Stockett uses telling details to capture the era and does not shy from showing Skeeter's dangerous naiveté. Skeeter's narration is alive with complexity—her loyalty to her traditional Southern mother remains even after she learns why the beloved black maid who raised her has disappeared. In contrast, Stockett never truly gets inside Aibileen and Minnie's heads (a risk the author acknowledges in her postscript). The scenes written in their voices verge on patronizing.”

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 18, 2013.

Life upon these Shores: Looking at African American History 1513-2008 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Library Call Number: E185.G27 2011.

          A bold, beautifully illustrated book by the eminent historian uses countless portraits, drawings, pictures and documents to illustrate the long history of African American involvement in the American story, from the first group of “twenty and odd” Angolans captured in African Civil wars and sold into slavery, ending up in 1600’s Jamestown, Virginia; Jean Baptiste Point  DuSable’s founding of an early farm and trading post that would come to be known as Chicago; the paroxysm of violent struggle that wrenched America apart in the Civil War; W.E.B. DuBois’ magnificent photographic essay of blacks in America shown at the Paris Exposition of 1900; Jack Johnson’s extraordinary fights in and out of the ring; the Civil Rights era of the 60’s and 70’s to the recent first  inauguration of President Obama.  Most importantly, Gates notes the hundreds of black Americans who made significant contributions to all aspects of American life and culture.  This is a book of constant struggle, heartbreaking setbacks and triumphant victories. Most importantly, it is an integral part of American history.

Browsing Area Book of the Week February 11, 2013.

The Last Holiday: A Memoir by Gil Scott-Heron.  Library Call Number: PS3569.C7Z46 2012.

     Premier poet and songwriter  and so-called “godfather of rap” Gil Scott-Heron looks back on his life and opens up an illuminating career that ran for decades on the cutting edge of social commentary.  Written in the last few months before his death, the creator of 20 albums and many singles recalls his childhood, his first piano, hauled into his grandmothers Tennessee house by a junk man, his never-to-be-forgotten song, “The Revolution will not be televised,” and insights into many of the most wrenching experiences of the civil rights era.  With a poet’s eye and cadence, he describes decades of the fight for equal rights around the world. 

     As reviewer Ben Ratliff noted in the New York Times Review: “Scott-Heron himself, along with two black classmates, desegregated a Jackson[TN]  junior high school, and he writes lucidly about that experience and its aftermath -- including his mother's decision not to push him into it, and the strangeness of studying the Civil War in a white Southern school: ''It was like reviewing it from the loser's locker room.''

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 4, 2013.

Devil in the Grove: the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King.  Library Call Number: KF224.G76K56 2012.

From the liner notes: In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps. So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as "Mr. Civil Rights," into the fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the "Florida Terror" at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight--not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall's NAACP associates and Marshall had endured threats that he would be next. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”

Browsing Area Book of the Week, December 10, 2012.

Never-Ending Snake by Aimee & David Thurlo.  Library Call Number: PS3570.H82N48 2010.

From Booklist: “Ella Clah, member of the Navajo Nation and special investigator for the Navajo Tribal Police, is one of the most intriguing and best-realized characters in today’s crime fiction. The Thurlos give added value to the character by slowly developing Ella, deepening her commitments and problems, throughout the series. At the beginning of this [sixteenth] Clah mystery, Ella is facing a critical choice between working for much more money and much less stress for a private security firm in D.C. or remaining with the Rez police. Just as Ella returns home from her D.C. interview, she and her two companions (tribal attorney Kevin Tolino, who fathered Ella’s daughter, and alternative-fuel lobbyist Adam Lonewolf) are met with a hail of gunfire. The ready-made mystery here is determining which of the three was the target? Motives abound for all of them. Action also abounds, sometimes to an almost pulp-novel degree. Still, a thoroughly satisfying crime novel.” --Connie Fletcher

Browsing Area Book of the Week, December 3, 2102.

City of the Big Shoulders: an anthology of Chicago Poetry, edited by Ryan G. Van Cleave.  Library Call Number: PS572.C5C58 2012.

           Rather than a compilation of poets from Chicago (though most hail from there), Van Cleave has collected poems from 100 writers with the same thematic impulse: to pull a piece of Chicago out for poetic examination.  Notable poets such as Joy Harjo, Barry Silesky and Bob Hicock and Nina Corwin all represent the past, present and future of the Windy City in their work.

           As in any collection, some of the poems are more successful than others, but the best evoke the spirits of Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks and the hundreds of other past artistic voices of America’s Second City, while capturing the unique and vibrant neighborhoods, lakefront views, open spaces, hidden corners and individual characters of some of Chicago’s citizens.  One of the more encompassing descriptions of the town, by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz:

I want to eat

in a city smart enough to know that if you

are going to have that heart attack, you might

as well have the pleasure of knowing

  you’ve really earned it.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, November 19, 2012

Caught by Harlan Coben. Library Call Number: PS3553.O225C38 2010.

The author of The Woods and Hold Tight returns with another high-octane, contemporary thriller.

When a 17-year-old girl, a high school superstar, doesn’t come home one night and vanishes, the community assumes the worst. That’s when tabloid reporter Wendy Tynes gets involved; she identifies sexual predators via a news program called Caught in the Act, featuring elaborate, nationally televised sting operations. She targets a social worker, Dan Mercer, known to work with troubled teens, and labels him a sexual predator. But is he?
          “In a novel that challenges as much as it thrills, filled with the astonishing tension and unseen suburban machinations that have become Coben's trademark, Caught tells the story of a missing girl, the community stunned by her loss, the predator who may have taken her, and the reporter who suddenly realizes she can't trust her own instincts about this story-or the motives of the people around her.”

Browsing Area Book of the Week, November 12, 2012.

Kivalina: A Climate Change Story by Christine Shearer.
Library Call Number: E99.E7S463 2011.

Forcibly moved by the U.S Government in the early 20th century to a narrow island near the Arctic Circle called Kivalina, the Inupiat people endured the harsh conditions because of their traditional “understanding of and close connection to the cycles and rhythms of the land." As early as the 1950’s however, they noticed ocean storms were eroding the island at an alarming rate.  Now the permafrost is melting and the entire village is at risk, yet Government agencies “who contradicted their knowledge of the area,” are blocking their attempts to relocate.  With an estimated relocation cost of $400 million, the residents finally filed a climate change lawsuit, charging Big Oil with contributing to the loss of their homes. Shearer’s story shines a light on another David and Goliath story: the oil corporations who continue to dissemble and blur the real costs of climate change, their undue influence on American government  “and the cultural disconnect between Native Alaskans and American agencies whose clumsy, often patronizing management of Kivalina's dire situation has only exacerbated the community's problem.”