Book reviews by library staff and guest contributors
Do you want something funny to read? I ran across a Publishers Weekly article where an essayist with a new book listed her 9 favorite essay collections. Below is her list, along with her new book.
Not only is this an open letter to the women who will run the world one day, it's also a first-hand account of what it was like to be a part of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and how future candidates (and all of us) can learn from the way a woman candidate was treated and how upcoming elections will be different.
Resourceful cook Kat Holloway has a new mystery to solve in the second of this historical mystery series. Though Kat is still the cook for Lord Rankin's household in Victorian London, but the people she's cooking for have changed a bit (after the events of Death Below Stairs). Lord Rankin has departed for the country and Lady Cynthia, though nominally chaperoned by an aunt and uncle, is left mostly to her own devices.
I’m a total Carrie.
How about you?
If you’re fan enough to get my meaning, especially if you dig behind-the-scenes showbiz nonfiction, you will probably love entertainment journalist Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s fresh look at the enduring zeitgeistiness of HBO’s landmark sitcom Sex and the City.
I picked this book up thinking it was a collection of darkly mischievous stories based on fairy tales. Perfect! That is just my cup of tea! But there's more to it than that. The Merry Spinster is a collection of stories representing classic children's literature, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Scottish folklore, the Book of Genesis, and more. That's a lot to take on!
Jade Dragon Mountain is a classic manor mystery set in 18th century China. Playing the role of Poirot (or Nero Wolfe or Ellery Queen, you can make your reference of choice) is Li Du. Li Du is a librarian who was exiled from the Imperial City and has spent the last five years traveling on his own throughout China. His recent travels have brought him to southern China (near the Tibetan border) and he has to seek permission from the local magistrate to travel within the district.
This book is an interesting view on immortality and complete harmony. Centuries into the future, anything that brought despair has been eliminated - government, war, illness, famine, etc. This leaves life almost limitless. The only people who can kill are in the Scythe Legion. Offending a Scythe leads to certain death. However, the main character, Citra, is taken to be an apprentice Scythe. This novel creates a very realistic world, if the world was a perfect, idealistic, utopia.
This month’s new releases are filled with familiar names as publishers compete for readers’ attentions in the final month of the summer season. On to the highlights:
I am a proud Gen X-er and the 1995 film Empire Records is part of my lexicon. This graphic novel replicates the independent record store vibe, the staff is all female and it's set in 1998, so for me, it's the coolest. It's also about a girl fight club hiding underneath the record store. And the girl vigilantes must save missing rock stars. Like I said. The coolest.
Morgan Parker, poet author of the explosive collection There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, leaves the title open to interpretation, but with one exception: She isn’t suggesting that Beyoncé isn’t beautiful, because Beyoncé is beautiful. Like the rest of us, Parker is clearly a fan. She is however suggesting that her muse -- the “flawless” Queen Bey -- might not actually be the be-all, end-all for American popular culture or Black womanhood.
This summer, join fellow readers in OverDrive’s Big Library Read, available through Wisconsin’s Digital Library!
The library owns about two billion gardening books. I’m pretty sure that is hardly an exaggeration. It can be a bit overwhelming.
So let me recommend one as a librarian and a gardener: Emily Murphy’s Grow What You Love: 12 Food Plant Families to Change Your Life. It isn’t the only gardening book you’ll ever need, but it’s a darn good start.
If this were a reality show on television today, I would totally watch it.
"I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don't know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure."
Really smart, funny, feminist, anti-capitalist satire about what it's like to be a teen girl (and not necessarily just a cis/straight/able-bodied and/or white teen girl).
The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen’s melancholic and metaphor-laden Himalayan travelogue, a true story, is an essential, definitional work of 1970s American literature. It is also one of my favorite books of all time.
Grace Burrowes is pretty much an auto-read for me when it comes to historical romances. I don't get to every book of hers the minute it comes out, but eventually I'm going to read them. And the reason she's on my auto-read list is because she just does what she does so well. She writes engaging heroes and heroines. Her historical settings are well done - no major klinkers like a Lady Kardashian in Regency England. And the emotional journey she creates in each book always hits me just right.
What image comes to mind when ‘Lolita’ is mentioned? A knock-kneed schoolgirl, all innocence and trust, a puppet under the thrall of pedophile? A calculating ingénue who knows more than she lets on, as envisioned by Stanley Kubrick in his 1962 film? The brilliant, if unsettling, creation of one of the great masters of American writing?
