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 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, 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, October 29, 2012.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness.   Library Call Number: PS3608.A7436 D57 2011.

          Diana Bishop grew up an orphan and became a Yale scholar in history.  When she uncovers an enchanted text in Oxford’s ancient Bodleian Library, she’s forced to come to terms with her own past. Her parents both came from long lines of witches and wizards and, though she wants nothing to do with magic, the book she’s found leaves a trail soon followed by all sorts of demons, witches and vampires, anxious to get their hands on the magical tome full of potent alchemical spells. 

          With the help of a 1,500 year old vampire, Bishop is the only one who can stop the magic of the book from being unleashed into the world.  She has to come to terms with her family’s secrets and turn back the mystical evil threatening the world.

          Sub-titled all Souls Trilogy, this is the first in a projected series of books that may grow to pop status.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, October 22, 2012.

The Weird: a compendium of strange and dark stories. Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Library Call Number: PN6071.H727W45 2012.

          Reaching back and forth through time, the VanderMeers pull together 110 classic and newer short stories of the 20^th and 21^st centuries from around the world.  Alongside Kafka’s gruesome “In the Penal Colony,” and H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmare, “The Dunwich Horror,” are lesser known but still unsettling stories, such as Maruki Murakami’s tale of a woman who meets and marries an Ice Man, Stephen King’s “The Man in the Black Suit”, the story of a nine year-old who goes fishing alone and lives to regret it, Marc Laidlaw’s tale of a police photographer who gets too close to his work in “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio”, and other creepy stories by great authors of fiction, science fiction and fantasy. Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Jorge Luis Borges, Neil Gaiman, Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates all make an appearance in this incredible collection of stories, arrived just in time for Halloween.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, September 24, 2012.

Soft Target by Stephen Hunter. Library Call Number: PS3558.U494S57 2011.

     Stephen Hunter, the recognized king of the sniper novel, began writing books about a World War II Marine turned Arkansas sheriff in the 50’s named Earl Swagger who had an unerring knack with rifle or pistol. He continued by writing about Earl’s son, Bobby Lee Swagger, a Marine during Vietnam and also a dead shot, then came up to present-day with Bobby’s son, Ray Cruz, also a legendary Marine sniper.  In Hunter’s latest book, a terrorist group calling itself the Mumbai Brigade takes over a Minnesota mall, the largest in America (sound familiar?), rounding up thousands of holiday shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving.  Among those trapped and hiding in the stores are Ray Cruz and his fiancé.  But Ray has no intention of hiding for long.  As city, state and Federal law enforcement officials converge, the situation’s politics begins to overwhelm any outside intervention. But Cruz doesn’t know about the political side; when in doubt, he’s in favor of action. First, though, he needs a gun.

          Hunter’s latest hriller features wall-to wall action, a near-familiar setting to all, (America, the Mall, or AtM, instead of Mall of America, or MOA), a surprising villain and a not-so-subtle dig at the President.

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

 

The Holy Thief by William Ryan.  Library Call Number: PR6118.Y37H65 2010.

          In 1936 Moscow, Captain Alexei Korolev of the Moscow Militia must investigate the mutilation killing of a young American nun in a deconsecrated church.  Because the woman is a foreigner, the case attracts the attention of the NKVD—Stalin’s dreaded secret police—and soon Korolev finds himself reluctantly patnered with an NKVD investigator named Colonel Gregorin.  Stalin has begun the great purges and one denunciation from any source can lead a person to be disappeared to a gulag, never to return.  It’s a bad time to be an honest cop in a city full of politics, intrigue and suspicion. 
          A well-reviewed first novel, with similarities to the best of Martin Cruz Smith's more contemporary Russian Inspector, Arkady Renko, or Philip Kerr's German Bernie Guenther.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, May 17, 2012.

The White Devil by Justin Evans. Library Call Number: PS3605.V366W47 2011.

     From Publisher’s Weekly:  Harrow, the elite English boys school, provides the setting for Evans’ gripping second novel (after A Good and Happy Child). Andrew Taylor, a 17-year-old American expelled from a Connecticut prep school for heroin use, gets into Harrow thanks to his father’s generous gift to the school, one of whose more illustrious alumni is Lord Byron. In a cemetery on nearby Harrow-on-the-Hill, Andrew is horrified to witness the murder of a fellow student and resident of the Lot, a dilapidated dormitory reputed to be haunted, at the hands of a pale skeletal figure in an old-fashioned frock coat. Soon plagued by nightmares, Andrew learns that someone resembling this gaunt figure appeared in a performance of John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy, The White Devil, at Harrow in 1803. Meanwhile, cast in the role of Lord Byron in a play written by drunken and bitter housemaster Piers Fawkes, Andrew finds himself adopting Byron’s exotic lifestyle amid a love affair, a TB epidemic, and various bizarre elements in this disturbing gothic thriller.

Library Video of the Week, April 2, 2012.

Everything is Illuminated starring Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz and Boris Leskin. Directed by Liv Schreiber. 2005.  Library Call Number: PN1995.9.U45 E94 2006.

          Jonathan Safran Foer’s book comes alive on screen with Elijah Wood as the author who finds a mysterious woman in a picture of his grandfather from before World War II.  Anxious to find out more about his family, he journeys to the old country, picks up an eccentric interpreter who doesn’t know English all that well, the interpreter’s grandfather who acts as his chauffeur and the grandfather’s deranged dog in a cross-country odyssey through the new Ukraine.  Little does he know the odd and emotional journey he’s about to undertake in a strange land that somehow seems familiar.

Browsing Area Boook of the Week, February 27, 2012.

When the Thrill is Gone by Walter Mosley.

Library Call Number: PS3563.O88456W45 2011
          From Publisher’s Weekly: Mosley fills his third thriller featuring New York City PI Leonid McGill (after Known to Evil) with insights even deeper than the mysteries McGill is trying to solve. Chrystal Tyler, a potential new client, tells McGill that she's afraid her billionaire husband is having an affair and may kill her. While McGill realizes the woman is lying, he needs the case and agrees to see what he can do to make her husband back off. Meanwhile, McGill's wife of 24 years, Katrina, is having an affair; his favorite son, Twill, has a new scam working; and longtime boxing mentor Gordo Tallman is living in his apartment, fighting cancer. Then Harris Vartan, a dangerous organized crime figure, asks a favor that will lead McGill on a journey of self-discovery.
          Readers will encounter the full panoply of complex Mosley characters, from deceitful women to ruthless killers, but it's the often surprising bonds of love and family that lift this raw, unsentimental novel.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, February 13, 2012.

Juice! by Ishmael Reed. Library Call Number: PS3568.E365J85 2011.

Reed has written a biting, satiric look at what passes for race relations in the American “post-racial” society.  O.J. Simpson’s trial in 1994 acts as a catalyst to the story here of five aging friends, all in a different art, all worried about the numerous illnesses and injuries of aging, watching America progress through the 90’s into the 21^st century.  Told through the eyes of African-American Paul Blessings, a diabetic television cartoonist for an alternative station, “Juice!” is an obsessive account of Simpson’s trial, the rise of the corporation and the burial of culture.  Blessings, who pens a cartoon called Attitude the Badger, says, “Jonathan Kraal, who had taken over this…network kept me on.  He wanted his station to appeal to high school teachers, dot commers and MBAs.  I have nothing in common with these people.” 

          Dalkey Archive says, “Juice! serves as a comi-tragedy, chronicling the increased anxieties of ‘post-race’ America.”

Library Video of the Week, January 30, 2012.

Over the Hedge, A DreamWorks animation directed by Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick.  With the voices of: Bruce Willis, Gary Shandling, Wanda Sykes, Nick Nolte, Allison Janney and Steve Carrell, among others. 2006.

Library call number: PN1995.5.A5O93 2006.
          A clever, very funny movie from the creators of Shrek.  When a crew of forest animals awaken from hibernation, they not only find a new subdivision right next to their forest, they discover RJ, the raccoon, waiting for them.  He’s anxious to show them the huge amount of food humans throw away that’s sitting in trash cans just across the hedge.  The sometime leader of the animal crew, Verne the tortoise, wants nothing to do with the humans, after a bad experience with two boys, but RJ tempts the rest into bad behavior. What they don’t know is, RJ ate a bear’s entire stock of food and only has two weeks to replace it—or become a bear lunch himself.  Throw in a manic guard dog and a crazy animal control officer and it’s obvious the animals are in way over their heads.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, December 5, 2011

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick Witt. Library Call Number: PS3604.E923S57 2011.

          Eli and Charlie Sisters are hired guns, instructed by their boss, the Commodore, to head down from Oregon City to San Francisco and there shoot an old prospector named Herman Kermit Warm.  It’s a long ride on horseback to San Francisco, though, and Eli, being the introspective type, has come to question their long association with killing, not to mention his brother’s shortcomings and his own choice of horses.  Eli’s narration of their journey is full of many striking characters, among them: a witch, an insane hermit, a forlorn lost boy, murderous hiders and dangerous saloon girls.

      A funny, sad, truly unique, genre-twisting Western, that portrays the boys as alternately bloodthirsty and bound by blood, horrifying and somehow sympathetic. 

Browsing Area Book of the Week, November 14, 2011

The Last Bridge by Teri Coyne. Library Call Number: PS3603.O975L37 2009.

          "For ten years, Alexandra 'Cat' Rucker has been on the run from her past. With an endless supply of bourbon and a series of meaningless jobs, Cat is struggling to forget her Ohio hometown and the rural farmhouse she once called home. But a sudden call from an old neighbor forces Cat to return to the home and family she never intended to see again. It seems that Cat's mother is dead. What Cat finds at the old farmhouse is disturbing and confusing: a suicide note, written on lilac stationery and neatly sealed in a ziplock bag, that reads: 'Cat, He isn't who you think he is. Mom xxxooo' One note, ten words--one for every year she has been gone--completely turns Cat's world upside down. Seeking to unravel the mystery of her mother's death, Cat must confront her past to discover who 'he' might be: her tyrannical, abusive father, now in a coma after suffering a stroke? Her brother, Jared, named after her mother's true love (who is also her father's best friend)? The town coroner, Andrew Reilly, who seems to have known Cat's mother long before she landed on a slab in his morgue? Or Addison Watkins, Cat's first and only love? The closer Cat gets to the truth, the harder it is for her to repress the memory and the impact of the events that sent her away so many years ago" -- from publisher's web site.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, October 17, 2011.

The Quiet War by Paul McAuley. Library Call Number: PR6063.C29Q54 2009.

          Earth in the 23^rd century has been decimated by ecological catastrophe. Dissidents fleeing the corporate nations of the home planet have long ago terraformed and colonized the far corners of the solar system and reaped huge benefits through biogenetic alterations to the human body.  The corporations, complete with their own governments and military forces, are beginning to look at the “Outers” as increasingly foreign, possibly no longer even part of the human race.  Already they’ve had to deal harshly with a rebellion on Mars.  The people of Earth also desire the riches promised by the innovators of the outer planets. The corporations believe they own the colonies on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, on Neptune and even faraway Pluto.  But the colonists have their own ideas of freedom and many would like nothing better than to cut all ties with Earth. Something has to be done; the ruling Earth families begin small provocations, ratcheting up the pressure, beginning a quiet war.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, October 3, 2011.

Juliet by Anne Fortier. Library Call Number: PS360.O7487J85 2010.

Itinerant theater director Julie Jacobs is shocked when her beloved great-Aunt Rosa dies, leaving almost everything to Julie’s twin sister Janice.  Julie receives only a letter and a key—the letter tells her the lock for the key is in a safe-deposit box in Siena, Italy.  Traveling there, she discovers her roots go all the way back to the original Juliet of Shakespeare’s play. And that’s just the first part of a combined treasure hunt and love story that involves the modern-day Montagues and Capulets, numerous relics for clues, vendetta, danger, mystery and, of course, a love story worthy of the descendants of Giuletta. Publisher’s Weekly says, ”Readers enjoy the additional benefit of antique texts alternating with contemporary narratives, written in the language of modern romance and enlivened by brisk storytelling. Fortier navigates around false clues and twists, resulting in a dense, heavily plotted love story that reads like a Da Vinci Code for the smart modern woman.”

Browsing Area Book of the Week, September 19, 2011.

What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz.  Library Call Number: PS3561.O55 W48 2011.

     Dean Koontz, one of America’s premier suspense and horror authors, began 2011 with this ghost story of terrifying dimensions.  Homicide detective John Calvino finds a serial killer is stalking and murdering whole families, in a fashion similar to a previous killer twenty years before.  What shakes the detective to his core is that two decades before, when he was 14, his entire family was the last murdered and Calvino had killed the homicidal maniac himself in self defense.  But he has always suspected that some evil refuses to stay buried and now he’s certain that same spirit has turned its attention to his wife and children.  Bookreporter.com call this “…a fast-paced novel of hurt and evil, redemption and love. The first half will have you jumping at every little noise, afraid of things that go bump in the night, and the second half will convince you that danger is often closer than you think.”

Library Video of the Week, May 2, 2011.

The Blind Side, starring Quentin Aaron, Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw and Kathy Bates. Directed by John Lee Hancock. 2009. Library Call Number: PN1995.9.S67 B55 2010.
          Tip-toeing through what could be saccharine/maudlin territory, and managing to mostly avoid it, The Blind Side is based on the true story of Michael Oher, an abandoned, shy and gentle teen-aged boy who is literally plucked off the streets by the Touhys, a white Republican, Evangelical family, and taken in to their Nashville home. Mother Leigh Anne Touhy takes an interest in the teen and begins to nurture him, helping him in school and on the football field—he’s never before touched a football. Oher, in turn, blossoms, becomes an All-American left guard, wins a scholarship to the University of Mississippi and eventually becomes a professional football player.
          Wesley Morris, film critic for the Boston Globe, points out an interesting sub-text in this film: though it’s actually Michael Oher’s story, it’s told primarily from the point of view of Leigh Anne Touhy. This makes it, he says, a more comfortable, Hollywood view of race in America, where no one wonders why the city schools seem all black and the private schools except for their athletes, are primarily white. Still, this is a smart film, worth watching; the main characters are pitch perfect and Bullock won an Oscar for her role.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, May 2, 2011

The Garden of Betrayal by Lee Vance. Library Call Number: PS3622.A58595 G37 2010.
          From the book jacket:   Manhattan, 2002: Mark Wallace has it all--he's married to Claire, the love of his life; they have two bright, beautiful children, and his is a high-powered Wall Street job. Until one night while on a neighborhood errand by himself, his twelve-year-old son, Kyle, vanishes, brutally snatched off the streets of New York.
          Seven years later…the loss, guilt, and mystery surrounding their son's disappearance have almost destroyed the Wallaces' marriage, leaving their daughter alienated and distant. Now, on the same day that a natural gas pipeline in remote western Russia is blown up by suspected terrorists, a new lead opens in Kyle's case…Politically savvy, emotionally complex, and frighteningly believable, The Garden of Betrayal is a tense and timely imagining of the casualties of recession-era Wall Street gaming and the backroom global oil wars, a riveting, compulsive read that will grip you from first page to last. It also places Lee Vance on the level of today's best and best-selling thriller writers who not only thrill us but make us think

Library Video of the Week, April 18, 2011.

Chungking Express, a film by Wong Kar-Wai. Starring Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Takeshi Kanishiro, Brigitte Lin, Faye Wong and Valerie Chow. In Cantonese and Mandarin. English Subtitles. 2008.
Library Call Number: PN1995.9..F67 C48 2008
          Director Wong made this art film while editing a completely different type of movie; Express follows the lives of two Hong Kong policemen, both at the end of relationships. Officer 223 was dumped by his girlfriend a month before his birthday. Officer 633 is pretty sure he’s been dumped—his flight attendant girlfriend left a letter for him at his usual diner—but he won’t take it from the waitress. The film divides itself between their stories, where, except for a brief section in the middle, they don’t overlap. Following the ups and downs of their romances, the movie gives the viewer an episodic look at modern Hong Kong, while relating two simple slices of life. No big resolutions, no intricate plots, simply intervals in a pair of lonely lives as they look for something more.
          Roger Ebert noted: "If you are attentive to the style, if you think about what Wong is doing, Chungking Express works. If you're trying to follow the plot, you may feel frustrated...When Godard was hot, in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was an audience for this style…Many of today's younger filmgoers, fed only by the narrow selections at video stores, are not as curious or knowledgeable and may simply be puzzled by Chungking Express instead of challenged.“