Thursday, April 16, 2015

Fiction of Choice

The next Reader’s Advisory Roundtable meeting will be on Wednesday, June 10th at 9am at the Trussville Library and the topic up for discussion will be Science Fiction & Fantasy.  I look forward to seeing you there!

On Wednesday, April 15th, the fine folks over at Homewood Library hosted RART for a discussion of Fiction of Choice and there was more than a little Stephen King love going around!

In attendance were:
Holley, Emmet O'Neal
Samuel, Five Points West
Leslie, Homewood
Richard, Central
Jon, Avondale
Leigh, North Birmingham
April, Pinson
Mary Anne, BPL


Just After Sunset by Stephen King (Mary Anne, BPL)
"In the introduction to his first collection of short fiction since Everything's Eventual (2002), King credits editing Best American Short Stories (2007) with reigniting his interest in the short form and inducing some of this volume's contents. Most of these 13 tales show him at the top of his game, molding the themes and set pieces of horror and suspense fiction into richly nuanced blends of fantasy and psychological realism. "The Things They Left Behind," a powerful study of survivor guilt, is one of several supernatural disaster stories that evoke the horrors of 9/11. Like the crime thrillers "The Gingerbread Girl" and "A Very Tight Place," both of which feature protagonists struggling with apparently insuperable threats to life, it is laced with moving ruminations on mortality that King attributes to his own well-publicized near-death experience. Even the smattering of genre-oriented works shows King trying out provocative new vehicles for his trademark thrills, notably "N.," a creepy character study of an obsessive-compulsive that subtly blossoms into a tale of cosmic terror in the tradition of Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft. Culled almost entirely from leading mainstream periodicals, these stories are a testament to the literary merits of the well-told macabre tale."Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)


Duma Key by Stephen King (Mary Anne, BPL)
"In bestseller King's well-crafted tale of possession and redemption, Edgar Freemantle, a successful Minnesota contractor, barely survives after the Dodge Ram he's driving collides with a 12-story crane on a job site. While Freemantle suffers the loss of an arm and a fractured skull, among other serious injuries, he makes impressive gains in rehabilitation. Personality changes that include uncontrollable rages, however, hasten the end of his 20-year-plus marriage. On his psychiatrist's advice, Freemantle decides to start anew on a remote island in the Florida Keys. To his astonishment, he becomes consumed with making art — first pencil sketches, then paintings — that soon earns him a devoted following. Freemantle's artwork has the power both to destroy life and to cure ailments, but soon the Lovecraftian menace that haunts Duma Key begins to assert itself and torment those dear to him. The transition from the initial psychological suspense to the supernatural may disappoint some, but even those few who haven't read King (Lisey's Story) should appreciate his ability to create fully realized characters and conjure horrors that are purely manmade."Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)


From a Buick 8 by Stephen King (Mary Anne, BPL)
"[G]oes down like a shot of moonshine, hot and clean, much like Cujo....While the book's relative brevity and simplicity does lend comparison to earlier King...the author's stylistic maturity manifests in his sophisticated handling....This novel isn't major King, but it's nearly flawless and one terrific entertainment." Publishers Weekly


11/22/63 by Stephen King (Mary Anne, BPL)
"[O]ne of the best time-travel stories since H. G. Wells. King has captured something wonderful. Could it be the bottomlessness of reality? The closer you get to history, the more mysterious it becomes. He has written a deeply romantic and pessimistic book. It's romantic about the real possibility of love, and pessimistic about everything else." Errol Morris, The New York Times Book Review

GENERAL DISCUSSION:


Making History by Stephen Fry
"Availing himself of that durable literary device, time travel, Fry entangles Michael Young, history student at Cambridge University, in a scheme to prevent the birth of Adolf Hitler....[Y]es, this is a funny novel, albeit an uneasily amusing one....A simultaneously zany and serious yarn spinner, Fry creates here a bizarre but skillfully controlled alternative world, with the virtuoso pacing and tension that attract readers." Booklist


Time and Again by Jack Finney
Publisher Comments:
"Sleep. And when you awake everything you know of the twentieth century will be gone from your mind. Tonight is January 21, 1882. There are no such things as automobiles, no planes, computers, television. 'Nuclear' appears in no dictionary. You have never heard the name Richard Nixon."
Did illustrator Si Morley really step out of his twentieth-century apartment one night — right into the winter of 1882? The U.S. Government believed it, especially when Si returned with a portfolio of brand-new sketches and tintype photos of a world that no longer existed — or did it?


The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty (Leslie, Homewood)
From Publishers Weekly
Australian author Moriarty, in her fifth novel (after The Hypnotist's Love Story), puts three women in an impossible situation and doesn't cut them any slack. Cecilia Fitzpatrick lives to be perfect: a perfect marriage, three perfect daughters, and a perfectly organized life. Then she finds a letter from her husband, John-Paul, to be opened only in the event of his death. She opens it anyway, and everything she believed is thrown into doubt. Meanwhile, Tess O'Leary's husband, Will, and her cousin and best friend, Felicity, confess they've fallen in love, so Tess takes her young son, Liam, and goes to Sydney to live with her mother. There she meets up with an old boyfriend, Connor Whitby, while enrolling Liam in St. Angela's Primary School, where Cecilia is the star mother. Rachel Crowley, the school secretary, believes that Connor, St. Angela's PE teacher, is the man who, nearly three decades before, got away with murdering her daughter—a daughter for whom she is still grieving. Simultaneously a page-turner and a book one has to put down occasionally to think about and absorb, Moriarty's novel challenges the reader as well as her characters, but in the best possible way. Agent: Faye Bender, Faye Bender Literary Agency. 


Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (Leslie, Homewood)
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2014: What is it about Liane Moriarty’s books that makes them so irresistible? They’re just classic “domestic” novels about marriage, motherhood, and modern upper-middle-class family life, after all. And despite the fact that Big Little Lies is Moriarty’s sixth adult novel (and it comes decades after the grandmother of this kind of thing, Bridget Jones’ Diary), it is remarkably new and fresh and winning. Set in an Australian suburb, Big Little Lies focuses on three women, all of whom have children at the same preschool. One is a great beauty married to a fabulously rich businessman; they have a “perfect” set of twins. One is the can-do mom who can put together a mean preschool art project but can’t prevent her teenage daughter from preferring her divorced dad. The third is a withdrawn, single mother who doesn’t quite fit in. Right from the start--thanks to a modern “Greek chorus” that narrates the action--we know that someone is going to end up dead. The questions are who and how. Miraculously, Moriarty keeps this high concept plot aloft, largely because she infuses it with such wit and heart. She also knows not to overplay the message she’s sending: that we all tell lies--to each other and, more importantly, to ourselves. --Sara Nelson


The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty (Leslie, Homewood)
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Moriarty (Three Wishes) presents a stunner several shades darker than typical chick lit, about a family and the outsider who inherits a house on Scribbly Gum, their (fictional) Australian island and a popular tourist destination. Sophie Honeywell hasn't heard from ex-boyfriend Thomas Gordon since she broke his heart three years ago. He's since married and fathered a child, while Sophie remains single, pining for a baby. When Thomas's Aunt Connie leaves her house on Scribbly Gum Island to Sophie, the family is largely nonplussed—but then, they're used to mysteries. The famous 1932 discovery of baby Enigma by Connie and her sister, Rose Doughty, led to the successful "Munro Baby Mystery" tour that kept the sisters afloat for years. Among the large, eccentric family, Sophie starts a new life, befriending Thomas's cousin Grace, who is suffering through postpartum depression; finding a dangerous mutual attraction with Grace's husband, Callum; and dealing with bitter, intense Veronika, Thomas's sister, who covets Connie's house. Moriarty expertly handles a large cast and their relationships, keeping everyone guessing as the true story of baby Enigma—and its role in Sophie's strange inheritance—is slowly revealed. Moriarty's prose turns from funny through poignant to frightening in an artful snap. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty (Leslie, Homewood)
“A witty modern love story in the age of cohabitation, blended families, and second chances, this is a compassionate, absorbing tale. Moriarty has crafted an incredibly likable heroine in Ellen, the hypnotherapist who can solve her clients’ problems but can’t seem to keep her own life from spiraling into soap opera. Readers who enjoy Jennifer Close and Marian Keyes will adore Moriarty’s wit and warmth.”—Booklist (starred review)

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The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin (Leslie, Homewood)
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Benjamin, author of the highly acclaimed Alice I Have Been (2010) and The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb (2011), delivers another stellar historical novel based on the experiences of an extraordinary woman. In this outing, she spotlights Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of wildly famous Charles Lindbergh and pioneering aviatrix and accomplished author in her own right. Though their courtship is the stuff of every girl’s romantic fantasy, time and reality combine to reveal a much different story. Plagued by tragedy and often stifled by her domineering husband, she eventually manages to carve out a quasi-independent life and career for herself. Fictional biography at its finest; serious readers may want to pair this with the recently published Against Wind and Tide, the sixth and final volume of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s copious letters and journal entries. --Margaret Flanagan

GENERAL DISCUSSION:

“Grabs you from the opening pages, providing hints of the absorbing and entertaining story to come . . . a delightful cavalcade of late nineteenth-century Americana.”—Library Journal


Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Benjamin draws on one of the most enduring relationships in children's literature in her excellent debut, spinning out the heartbreaking story of Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Her research into the lives of Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and the family of Alice Liddell is apparent as she takes circumstances shrouded in mystery and colors in the spaces to reveal a vibrant and passionate Alice. Born into a Victorian family of privilege, free-spirited Alice catches the attention of family friend Dodgson and serves as the muse for both his photography and writing. Their bond, however, is misunderstood by Alice's family, and though she is forced to sever their friendship, she is forever haunted by their connection as her life becomes something of a chain of heartbreaks. As an adult, Alice tries to escape her past, but it is only when she finally embraces it that she truly finds the happiness that eluded her. Focusing on three eras in Alice's life, Benjamin offers a finely wrought portrait of Alice that seamlessly blends fact with fiction. This is book club gold. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A Touch of Stardust by Kate Alcott (Leslie, Homewood)
"Readers of Nancy Horan's Loving Frank and other biographical fiction will love this well-written, thoroughly researched look at Hollywood's glamorous and not-so-glamorous past."
— Library Journal starred review

Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig (Leslie, Homewood)
From Publishers Weekly
Was it strictly necessary to our understanding of Gone With the Wind's dashing hero to flesh out his backstory, replay famous GWTW scenes from his perspective, and crank the plot past the original's astringent denouement? Perhaps not, but it's still a fun ride. In this authorized reimagining, Rhett, disowned son of a cruel South Carolina planter, is still a jauntily worldwise charmer, roguish but kind; Scarlett is still feisty, manipulative and neurotic; and the air of besieged decorum is slightly racier. (Rhett: "My dear, you have jam at the corner of your mouth." Scarlett: "Lick it off.") But it says much about the author's sure feel for Margaret Mitchell's magnetic protagonists that they still beguile us. McCaig (Jacob's Ladder) broadens the canvas, giving Rhett new dueling and blockade-running adventures and adding intriguing characters like Confederate cavalier-turned-Klansman Andrew Ravanel, a rancid version of Ashley Wilkes who romances Rhett's sister Rosemary. He paints a richer, darker panorama of a Civil War-era South where poor whites seethe with resentment and slavery and racism are brutal facts of life that an instinctive gentleman like Rhett can work around but not openly challenge. McCaig thus imparts a Faulknerian tone to the saga that sharpens Mitchell's critique of Southern nostalgia without losing the epic sweep and romantic pathos. The result is an engrossing update of GWTW that fans of the original will definitely give a damn about.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Ruth’s Journey by Donald McCaig (Leslie, Homewood)
“Exquisitely imagined, deeply researched, Donald McCaig's Ruth's Journey brings to the foreground the most enigmatic and fascinating figure in Gone With the Wind. This is a brave work of literary empathy by a writer at the height of his powers, who demonstrates a magisterial understanding of the period, its clashing cultures and its heartbreaking crises.” (Geraldine Brooks, author of March)

GENERAL DISCUSSION:

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Inspired by the true story of early-nineteenth-century abolitionist and suffragist Sarah Grimké, Kidd paints a moving portrait of two women inextricably linked by the horrors of slavery. Sarah, daughter of a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner, exhibits an independent spirit and strong belief in the equality of all. Thwarted from her dreams of becoming a lawyer, she struggles throughout life to find an outlet for her convictions. Handful, a slave in the Grimké household, displays a sharp intellect and brave, rebellious disposition. She maintains a compliant exterior, while planning for a brighter future. Told in first person, the chapters alternate between the two main characters’ perspectives, as we follow their unlikely friendship (characterized by both respect and resentment) from childhood to middle age. While their pain and struggle cannot be equated, both women strive to be set free—Sarah from the bonds of patriarchy and Southern bigotry, and Handful from the inhuman bonds of slavery. Kidd is a master storyteller, and, with smooth and graceful prose, she immerses the reader in the lives of these fascinating women as they navigate religion, family drama, slave revolts, and the abolitionist movement. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Beginning with her phenomenally successful debut, The Secret Life of Bees (2002), Kidd’s novels have found an intense readership among library patrons, who will be eager to get their hands on her latest one. --Kerri Price

Someone Killed His Boyfriend by David Stukas (Samuel, Five Points West)
From Booklist
Wealthy, handsome, butch Michael; his plainer, poorer, rather nelly friend, Robert, an underpaid copywriter for feminine hygiene products; and Robert's friend, the towering lesbian Monette, are a trio of detectives in this campy sleuther. Michael, a slut to the manner born, gives his all to marry breathtakingly gorgeous Max, a southerner with money. When the wedding day arrives, however, Michael is stood up at the altar, humiliated in front of 1,500 close friends, and minus an original Matisse. With Robert in tow, Michael tracks Max to that summertime gay mecca, Provincetown, only to find him dead. Since Michael is the prime suspect and clues indicate the murderer is a Bette Davis impersonator, Michael and Robert take lessons from drag legend Beyonda Sea and land jobs in a drag revue to pursue the fiend. Sure, the plot is outlandish, and the sleuths are improbable. But this breezy page-turner is laugh-out-loud entertainment. Irresistible. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Something Like Summer by Jay Bell (Samuel, Five Points West)
One of Amazon's selections for Best Gay Books of 2011, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, and soon to be a movie from the makers of Judas Kiss.  Praise from Queer Magazine Online: "Something Like Summer not only has lots of passion, humor, angst, and twists and turns, it also takes an in depth look at how the choices we make in life affect not only ourselves, but everyone around us."  Five stars from ALPHA reader: "Jay Bell has written one of the most heart-felt and sincere M/M romances I have ever encountered. This is a love story that spans twelve years - a story all about getting a second chance with 'the one that got away'."

Leaving Time by Jodi Picoult (April, Pinson)
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2014: Jodi Picoult’s Leaving Time weaves elephant behavior into a search for a missing mother. The connection isn't as odd as it might sound at first, and Picoult has written another page-turning novel, even as it focuses on motherhood, loss, and grief. Teenager Jenna Metcalf was just three years old when her mother disappeared from an elephant sanctuary. Ten years later, she takes up the search for her mother, Alice, by studying Alice’s decade-old journals on grieving elephants. The research itself is fascinating, the hints about Alice’s disappearance are compelling; but Jenna cannot find her mother on her own. By enlisting the help of a formerly famous—now infamous—psychic, as well as a down-and-out private detective whose career went south during the botched investigation of Alice's disappearance, Jenna forms a sort of new family to help her in her quest. As the facts begin to come together—described in alternating chapters by Jenna, the psychic, the private detective, and Alice’s journals—it all heads toward a thrilling conclusion. And, yes, there is a big twist at the end. – Chris Schluep

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (April, Pinson)
From School Library Journal
Gr 9 Up - Eleanor, 15, is the new girl at school and bullied because she's overweight and dresses in a flamboyant manner. Park is a half-Korean boy who has lived in Omaha, Nebraska, all his life but still feels like an outsider. This is a story of first love, which very slowly builds from the first day Eleanor sits next to Park on the school bus. First they ignore each other, and then they slowly become friends through their love of comic books and 1980s alternative music. Park is the only good thing in Eleanor's life. Her home life is a miserable exercise in trying to stay out of her abusive stepfather's way, and finding new ways to wear the same clothes repeatedly since there is no money for anything extra. Park adores everything about Eleanor, and she finds refuge at his house after school with his understanding parents. Things finally explode at Eleanor's house and Eleanor and Park's relationship is truly tested. The narrative points of view alternate between Eleanor and Park, adding dimension to Rowell's story (St. Martin's Griffin, 2013), and narrators Rebecca Lowman and Sunil Malhtra competently voice the pair. Give this to teenage girls who crave romance.-Julie Paladino, East Chapel Hill High School, NCα(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Landline by Rainbow Rowell (April, Pinson)
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2014: In Landline, Rainbow Rowell once again shares her insightful, funny perspective on love and relationships, this time delving into a marriage floundering in the wake of kids, careers, and the daily grind. Georgie and Neal have been married for fifteen years and have two young girls who Neal cares for while Georgie works as a sitcom writer. When Georgie skips the family trip to her in-laws in Omaha for Christmas and the rest of her family goes without her, she realizes that maybe her marriage is going too. When a line to the past (literally) gives Georgie a chance to re-live an earlier pivotal moment in their relationship, she sees it as an opportunity to figure out if she and Neal should have been together in the first place. Landline is a deeply resonant story about being willing to go all in--at the start or after being together for many years--for the kind of love that makes “everything else just scenery.” --Seira Wilson

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (April, Pinson)
Amazon.com Review
Best Books of the Month: Teen & Young Adult, September 2013: At first glance Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl has a lot in common with Eleanor & Park: idiosyncratic girl with troubled family meets good, normal boy and falls in love for the first time. But this is why Rowell is so talented--from the same basic ingredients she can create something new and special. In Fangirl, quirky introvert, Cath, is safe within the immensely popular Simon Snow (think Harry Potter) fan-fiction blog she writes with her twin sister, but college turns her life upside down, leaving her feeling like an awkward outsider. When she writes, Cath knows exactly what her characters should say to each other, but when it comes to forging real-life friendships, much less a romance, she hasn’t a clue. An immensely satisfying coming-of-age novel, Fangirl deftly captures the experience of discovering your true voice and clumsy, vulnerable, remarkable, first love. --Seira Wilson

GENERAL DISCUSSION:
Fans of audiobooks may be interested in Rebecca Lowman.  From Audiofile Magazine: “In five years of narration, Lowman has performed single, dual, and multiple narrations. By nature a collaborator, she feels multiple narrators can give listeners different perspectives. She doesn't meet her fellow actors and seldom records with them. "But when it's working right, the narration sounds so seamless that the listener feels the actors are sitting in the same room together--that there's some connection between them. That magic is created by the book."


Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (April, Pinson)
From Booklist
King’s interest in crime fiction was evident from his work for the Hard Case Crime imprint—The Colorado Kid (2005) and Joyland (2013)—but this is the most straight-up mystery-thriller of his career. Retired Detective Bill Hodges is overweight, directionless, and toying with the idea of ending it all when he receives a jeering letter from the Mercedes Killer, who ran down 23 people with a stolen car but evaded Hodges’ capture. With the help of a 17-year-old neighbor and one victim’s sister (who, in proper gumshoe style, Hodges quickly beds), Hodges begins to play cat-and-mouse with the killer through a chat site called Under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. Hodges’ POV alternates with that of the troubled murderer, a Norman Bates–like ice-cream-truck driver named Brady Hartfield. Both Hodges and Hartfield make mistakes, big ones, leaving this a compelling, small-scale slugfest that plays out in cheery suburban settings. This exists outside of the usual Kingverse (Pennywise the Clown is referred to as fictive); add that to the atypical present-tense prose, and this feels pretty darn fresh. Big, smashing climax, too. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: No need to rev the engine here; this baby will rocket itself out of libraries with a loud squeal of the tires. --Daniel Kraus

GENERAL DISCUSSION ON GREAT AUDIOBOOKS:

Jack Torrance’s new job at the Overlook Hotel is the perfect chance for a fresh start. As the off-season caretaker at the atmospheric old hotel, he’ll have plenty of time to spend reconnecting with his family and working on his writing. But as the harsh winter weather sets in, the idyllic location feels ever more remote . . . and more sinister. And the only one to notice the strange and terrible forces gathering around the Overlook is Danny Torrance, a uniquely gifted five-year-old.

From Publishers Weekly
Iconic horror author King (Joyland) picks up the narrative threads of The Shining many years on. Young psychic Danny Torrance has become a middle-aged alcoholic (he now goes by Dan), bearing his powers and his guilt as equal burdens. A lucky break gets him a job in a hospice in a small New England town. Using his abilities to ease the passing of the terminally ill, he remains blissfully unaware of the actions of the True Knot, a caravan of human parasites crisscrossing the map in their RVs as they search for children with the shining (psychic abilities of the kind that Dan possesses), upon whom they feed. When a girl named Abra Stone is born with powers that dwarf Dan's, she attracts the attention of the True Knot's leader—the predatory Rose the Hat. Dan is forced to help Abra confront the Knot, and face his own lingering demons. Less terrifying than its famous predecessor, perhaps because of the author's obvious affection for even the most repellant characters, King's latest is still a gripping, taut read that provides a satisfying conclusion to Danny Torrance's story. Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents.

The Stand by Stephen King
From Publishers Weekly
In its 1978 incarnation, The Stand was a healthy, hefty 823-pager. Now, King and Doubleday are republishing The Stand in the gigantic version in which, according to King, it was originally written. Not true . The same excellent tale of the walking dude, the chemical warfare weapon called superflu and the confrontation between its survivors has been updated to 1990, so references to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Reagan years, Roger Rabbit and AIDS are unnecessarily forced into the mouths of King's late-'70s characters. That said, the extra 400 or so pages of subplots, character development, conversation, interior dialogue, spiritual soul-searching, blood, bone and gristle make King's best novel better still. A new beginning adds verisimilitude to an already frighteningly believable story, while a new ending opens up possibilities for a sequel. Sheer size makes an Everest of the whole deal. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
"Gone with the Wind is one of those rare books that we never forget. We read it when we're young and fall in love with the characters, then we watch the film and read the book again and watch the film again and never get tired of revisiting an era that is the most important in our history. Rhett and Scarlet and Melanie and Ashley and Big Sam and Mammy and Archie the convict are characters who always remain with us, in the same way that Twain's characters do. No one ever forgets the scene when Scarlet wanders among the wounded in the Atlanta train yard; no one ever forgets the moment Melanie and Scarlet drag the body of the dead Federal soldier down the staircase, a step at a time. Gone with the Wind is an epic story. Anyone who has not read it has missed one of the greatest literary experiences a reader can have." -- James Lee Burke, bestselling author of The Tin Roof Blowdown 

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Waters (The Night Watch) reflects on the collapse of the British class system after WWII in a stunning haunted house tale whose ghosts are as horrifying as any in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Doctor Faraday, a lonely bachelor, first visited Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked as a parlor maid, at age 10 in 1919. When Faraday returns 30 years later to treat a servant, he becomes obsessed with Hundreds's elegant owner, Mrs. Ayres; her 24-year-old son, Roderick, an RAF airman wounded during the war who now oversees the family farm; and her slightly older daughter, Caroline, considered a natural spinster by the locals, for whom the doctor develops a particular fondness. Supernatural trouble kicks in after Caroline's mild-mannered black Lab, Gyp, attacks a visiting child. A damaging fire, a suicide and worse follow. Faraday, one of literature's more unreliable narrators, carries the reader swiftly along to the devastating conclusion.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Affinity by Sarah Waters
From The New Yorker
Her first, Tipping the Velvet, was good; her second is just terrific. Moody, haunting, and haunted (it's about love among Victorian spiritualists), Affinity is two parts Wilkie Collins, with whose The Woman in White it shares an obsession with prisons, madness, journal-keeping, and elaborate, carefully engineered deceits; and just a dash of Jeanette Winterson for up-to-the-minute lesbian-historical-fiction flavor. ("He, she--you ought to know that in the spheres there are no differences like that.")

The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale (Jon, Avondale)
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The Bard of East Texas is back, this time with the turn-of-the-twentieth-century coming-of-age tale of 16-year-old Jack Parker and his 14-year-old sister, Lula. Still shocked by the sudden deaths of their parents from smallpox, they see their grandfather murdered by outlaws, who then abduct Lula. The same outlaws have killed the sheriff Jack hopes will rescue Lula, and Jack must turn to bounty hunters Eustace Cox and Shorty. Eustace is a black man who carries a giant shotgun; his constant companion is a 600-pound feral hog. Shorty is a dwarf with an attitude who was taught to shoot by Annie Oakley. 

Their bond is the discrimination they face, and they are willing to chase the outlaws into the primordial and lawless deep woods of East Texas’ Big Thicket. Lansdale’s premise seems borrowed in part from Charles Portis’ True Grit. But anyone who knows Lansdale knows he will put his own spin on the material. He has been writing brilliantly about East Texas for three decades (in both historical fiction and his contemporary series starring Hap Collins and Leonard Pine), but never has the region appeared stranger or more violent than it does here. The oil boom has begun, and Jack, a naive and pious farm boy, is introduced to boom towns, brothels, lynchings, and all manner of new things. Memorable characters, a vivid sense of place, and an impressive body count make The Thicket another Lansdale treasure. --Thomas Gaughan

Far As the Eye Can See by Robert Bausch (Jon, Avondale)
As expansive as the country it traverses, Bausch's majestic odyssey through the Old West finds rich nuance in a history often oversimplified . . . The novel's patient, searching first-person narration is finely balanced, with a voice at once straightforward and lyrical, grand and particular. Bausch's characters defy facile judgments; each is sharply distinctive, yet all struggle to find a footing amid the clash of human difference that is, in Bobby Hale's words, the 'most spacious war of all.' (Publishers Weekly)

The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man by W. Bruce Cameron (Jon, Avondale)
The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man introduces my favorite kind of flawed cynical protagonist in Ruddy McCann, former football star, now Repo Man in a small town full of memorable weirdos. It's suspenseful, action-packed, romantic, and above all, truly funny.  I loved it.”—Nelson DeMille, New York Times bestselling author

GENERAL DISCUSSION:

True Grit by Charles Portis
Charles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America's foremost comic writers. True Grit is his most famous novel--first published in 1968, and the basis for the movie of the same name starring John Wayne. It tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash money. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father's blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the homicide into Indian Territory.  True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true cult status, this is an American classic through and through. 

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Amazon.com Review
"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence.

The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan (Jon, Avondale)
Stunning…A remarkable novel... It's almost hard to believe that it's a debut…. It's a portrait of the West as a sometimes desolate and cold place, full of possibility, maybe, but also full of danger from every corner. It's a modern West, caught between the romance of the frontier and the mundane, harsh realities of living in the present day United States. And it's absolutely beautiful, from its tragic opening scene to its tough, necessary end. Zupan is an unsparing writer, but also a generous, deeply compassionate one. (NPR)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (Richard, BPL Central)
Alex, a teenager from a future Britain, loves to maim, kill, rape and steal. Scarier than him is the government which wants to put him in an experimental program that will turn him into a model citizen.  This novel is tamer now than it was in the early sixties when it came out, but it still wallops your imagination.  Part of the reason it does is its language, specifically Alex’s language Nadsat, a blend of standard English, Russian, Gypsy usage and whole cloth Burgess inventions. It’s seductive, whether used to describe beating someone up or Beethoven.  And it gives us a harrowing view of a human being who is, despite his hideous faults, much more sympathetic than the chilling State.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (Richard, BPL Central)
Post-apocalyptic stories are hot now, and when we look back on our time, I’m sure very few will ever equal this one. A nuclear war has long since devastated the world. A young man, Riddley Walker, tries to makes sense of this world, a future Inland (England) and the efforts of some to recreate a weapon from pre-war times. Riddley speaks in an invented language, largely a phonetically-spelled English.  To understand it you need to read slowly. Doing this will allow you to think as Riddley does, see the world through his eyes. This is, despite what it sounds like, not a burden for the reader but a bridge to a new way of reading, a new way of empathizing with a protagonist. When experimental fiction works, as it does here, it can rewrite the rules of the reader and the book. Riddley’s language is nothing less than magical. Here he is trying to describe the transcendent Other: “Its some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals…It aint you nor it don’t even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.” Our narrator lives in an Iron Age land that is beaten down but may be slowly rising up. He is more than merely wise beyond his years. He’s a future Huck who will unlock many things in us. You’ll probably be entranced by him and this book which, through its use of irony and inheritance, has much to say about our time and our spiritual poverty.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Jon, Avondale)
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, September 2014: A flight from Russia lands in middle America, its passengers carrying a virus that explodes “like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth.” In a blink, the world as we know it collapses. “No more ballgames played under floodlights,” Emily St. John Mandel writes in this smart and sober homage to life’s smaller pleasures, brutally erased by an apocalypse. “No more trains running under the surface of cities ... No more cities ... No more Internet ... No more avatars.” Survivors become scavengers, roaming the ravaged landscape or clustering in pocket settlements, some of them welcoming, some dangerous. What’s touching about the world of Station Eleven is its ode to what survived, in particular the music and plays performed for wasteland communities by a roving Shakespeare troupe, the Traveling Symphony, whose members form a wounded family of sorts. The story shifts deftly between the fraught post-apocalyptic world and, twenty years earlier, just before the apocalypse, the death of a famous actor, which has a rippling effect across the decades. It’s heartbreaking to watch the troupe strive for more than mere survival. At once terrible and tender, dark and hopeful, Station Eleven is a tragically beautiful novel that both mourns and mocks the things we cherish. –Neal Thompson

Death of a Liar by M.C. Beaton (Leigh, North Birmingham)
Sergeant Hamish Macbeth is alarmed to receive a report from a woman in the small village of Cronish in the Scottish Highlands. She has been brutally attacked and the criminal is on the loose. But upon further investigation, Hamish discovers that she was lying about the crime. So when the same woman calls him back about an intruder, he simply marvels at her compulsion to lie. This time, though, she is telling the truth. Her body is found in her home and Hamish must sort through all of her lies to solve the crime.

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