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:

The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb by Melanie Benjamin

“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:

The Shining by Stephen King, narrated by Campbell Scott

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.

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King, narrated by Will Patton

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.

What are YOU reading?

a smorgasbord of books

In attendance today:
Holley, EOL
Mary Anne, BPL
Samuel, FPW
Michelle, IR
Richard, BPL
Maura, TR
Mondretta, LE
Jon, AV

The next RART meeting will be held on Wednesday, February 11th at 9am at the FIVE POINTS WEST LIBRARY located at 4812 Avenue W, Birmingham, AL 35208, where we’ll be kicking off our year of traveling meetings with a discussion of all things travel writing! 

Today was a tossed-salad discussion of book(s) of choice during the Potluck Food & Books.  We shared delicious snacks, exciting titles, and funny stories!

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, narrated by Ralph Cosham
(Amazon) ""Marley was dead, to begin with..."" And yet, he manages to visit his old partner, the miser Ebenezer Scrooge, and send him on a transformative journey, led by three ghosts. First to his own past, where he sees again the love he spurned, then to the present, where he sees those around him going about their holiday preparations, and then into his own future, to see his just reward. A Christmas favorite, it will warm your heart with favorite memories, and remind you how the true Christmas spirit comes from giving with love.
Michelle, Irondale

GENERAL DISCUSSION: There is another great audio edition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol narrated by Patrick Stewart (sadly, no longer available in the library system), who also stars in a film production of the same.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
(Powells) A. J. Fikry’s life is not at all what he expected it to be. He lives alone, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and now his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. But when a mysterious package appears at the bookstore, its unexpected arrival gives Fikry the chance to make his life over--and see everything anew.
Michelle, Irondale

GENERAL DISCUSSION: Our discussion of Zevin’s book brought to mind George Eliot’s Silas Marner.
(Powells) Silas Marner, a weaver in early nineteenth-century England, secludes himself to guard his gold and avoid relationships. The gold is one day stolen and replaced with a golden-haired child.

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
(Powells) In their six years of marriage, Elizabeth and Darcy have forged a peaceful, happy life for their family at Pemberley, Darcy’s impressive estate. Her father is a regular visitor; her sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, live nearby; the marriage prospects for Darcy’s sister, Georgiana, are favorable. And preparations for their annual autumn ball are proceeding apace. But on the eve of the ball, chaos descends. Lydia Wickham, Elizabeth’s disgraced sister who, with her husband, has been barred from the estate, arrives in a hysterical state — shrieking that Wickham has been murdered. Plunged into frightening mystery and a lurid murder trial, the lives of Pemberley’s owners and servants alike may never be the same.
Michelle, Irondale

GENERAL DISCUSSION: Phyllis Dorothy (PD) James,Baroness James of Holland Park, passed away on November 27, 2014.

What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton

As an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy from an early age, I felt like I was sitting down for a conversation with an old friend as I read this book. What Makes This Book So Great is a collection of Walton’s blog entries for Tor publishing as she read and re-read science fiction and fantasy novels. If you’re already a fan of Walton’s novels you’ll want to read this book, and if you’ve never read any of her work, this could go a long way toward making you a fan. Every entry shines with her love of reading and you may find yourself exclaiming in agreement, or shouting that no, she’s got it all wrong, or wondering why you’ve never read the book under discussion and how soon you can get your hands on it. Walton’s blogging has certainly expanded my reading list.

I also enjoyed the entries that weren’t so much about specific books as they were about the experience of reading in general, such as how it feels to fall in love with a series, living in anticipation of the next novel, and whether a series that ends badly should (or could) keep her from re-reading and loving the earlier books. I laughed out loud over the entry on “The Suck Fairy”:

“The Suck Fairy is an artifact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, that’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading – well, it sucks.”

As I said, I laughed—but we’ve probably all had some experience like this.

Another fun thing about this book is that you can browse through it and go straight to a chapter that interests you. I skipped around in it at first, going for intriguing-sounding chapter titles like “The worst book I love: Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday”; “The joy of an unfinished series”; “Licensed to sell weasels and jade earrings: the short stories of Lord Dunsany”; and “The Weirdest Book in the World.”

So if you enjoy science fiction and fantasy and you’re not quite sure what to read next, try What Makes This Book So Great for an entertaining read that will give you lots of ideas about what to add to your list. For more of Walton’s commentary on book and reading, visit her blog at Tor: 

www.tor.com/Jo Walton

Mary Anne, BPL Southern History

Dissolution by C.J. Sansom

If you enjoy historical mysteries and want a novel that gives you that “just one more chapter” feeling, try Dissolution by C.J. Sansom. The setting is Tudor England in the late 1530s when

Henry VIII did away with the monasteries and enriched his treasury with the spoil. One of these monasteries is on the prospective “hit list” and an officer of the crown, working for the king’s chief adviser Thomas Cromwell, has been sent to give the place the once-over and make a report on the monastic treasures—but when the officer is murdered in the monastery, Cromwell sends Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer in his service, to investigate the case.

Shardlake goes into the situation with several strikes against him. Any agent working for Cromwell would be a target of fear and hatred among those he is called to investigate, but Shardlake is also a hunchback, which would brand him as evil in a superstitious age that equated physical disabilities with spiritual shortcomings—twisted body equals twisted soul. Shardlake does have his share of faults: he is frequently short-tempered with his subordinates, partly because he is often in pain from his malformed back. However, he is an appealing character in spite of his quick tongue and hasty temper. Unlike some investigators, he does not seem all-powerful and all-seeing, and admits to the mistakes he makes when he is tired, afraid, and discouraged. As the body count multiplies at the monastery, Shardlake needs all the courage he can summon to solve the mystery before he joins the list of victims.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and stayed up much later than usual reading it because I had to have “just one more chapter.” I’ve already finished the second novel in the series, Dark Fire, and enjoyed it as well. I’m looking forward to the next novels and seeing how Shardlake makes his way in the shifting power balances of Tudor England. If you liked Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, put this series on your list of Things to Read Next. 

Mary Anne, BPL Southern History

GENERAL DISCUSSION: Our discussion of Sansom’s book brought to mind Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
(Powells) The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon — all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where "the most interesting things happen at night".  This book was adapted into a fairly decent film starring Sean Connery. 

CONTINUED: and also Ellis Peters’ Chronicles of Brother Cadfael books and the TV adaptation.
(PBS) Cadfael is a Welshman who took up the sword in the First Crusade and fought his way to Jerusalem and back. He has seen and done it all before deciding, at age 40, to devote the rest of his life to God's work. He hopes he might make a start at cleansing the bloody stains off his immortal soul by joining an order of Benedictine monks at the Abbey of St. Peter and Paul. While atoning for his sins, he also becomes England's first master detective.

Swamplandia by Karen Russell
(Powells) The Bigtree alligator-wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, formerly #1 in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava's mother, the park's indomitable headliner, has just died; her sister, Ossie, has fallen in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, who may or may not be an actual ghost; and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, who dreams of becoming a scholar, has just defected to the World of Darkness in a last-ditch effort to keep their family business from going under. Ava's father, affectionately known as Chief Bigtree, is AWOL; and that leaves Ava, a resourceful but terrified thirteen, to manage ninety-eight gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief.

Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, Karen Russell has written an utterly singular novel about a family's struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking. An arrestingly beautiful and inventive work from a vibrant new voice in fiction.
Maura, Trussville

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
(Powells) Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.

In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.

Doerr’s gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work
Maura, Trussville

A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy by Sarah Lazarovic
(Powells) Like most people, Sarah Lazarovic covets beautiful things. But rather than giving in to her impulse to spend and acquire, Sarah spent a year painting the objects she wanted to buy instead. Based on a visual essay that was first published on The Hairpin, A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy is a beautiful and witty take on the growing slow-shopping movement. Sarah is a well-known blogger and illustrator, and she writes brilliantly without preaching or guilt-tripping. Whether she’s trying to justify the purchase of yet another particleboard IKEA home furnishing, debating the pros and cons of leg warmers or calculating the per-day usage cost of big-ticket items, Sarah’s poignant musings will resonate with any reader who’s ever been susceptible to an impulse buy.
Maura, Trussville

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, narrated by Nathaniel Parker
I listened to this audiobook (12 CDS/13hrs, 35min) for a bookclub I’m in and fully expected to not like it.  While it was not an easy read, it IS one that has stuck with me ever since. This book was originally published anonymously in 1874 as a monthly serial and was considered quite scandalous in its day.  The main character, Bathsheba Everdene, is one of the most unlikeable creatures I’ve ever met (or read about, what have you), and the various men in the story aren't much better as she leads them a merry chase and they try to outdo one another in shameless ways.  I spent a good deal of time angry with the whole cast, but I was never bored.  This story resolves so conclusively and in such a satisfying manner, in my humble opinion, that I halfway want to re-read it to see if I missed anything while being annoyed with everyone.  The narration is pretty well done, though Parker's voices for the country folk sometimes tended to blend together and were sometimes hard to understand.  Remember that episode (Country Retreat) of Keeping Up Appearances when Hyacinth and Richard go out to look at country cottages and she stops to ask directions to Honeysuckle Cottage?  It sometimes sounds like that dear old gentleman.  Still, Far From the Madding Crowd is a great classic and I'm glad I read it!
Holley, Emmet O’Neal

GENERAL DISCUSSION: A discussion of the peculiarities of Victorian literature led us a merry chase, culminating with one member sharing the time-devouring website, bizarrevictoria.

Ghosts: A Natural History: 500 Years of Searching for Proof by Roger Clarke

This is a first, a history of ghost investigation. It’s mostly about England and contains an abundance of fascination, creepy and even hilarious accounts. Clarke is a skeptic and a former investigator, but he knows when to pull back and tell a thrilling tale. He enjoys presenting stories of frauds, though, and often these are funny, and sometimes they’re side-splitting. There is here a uniquely odd assortment of particulars, such as England’s first ghost hunter, why ghosts have clothes, famous scientists who researched ghosts, how the EEG was first used to detect telepathy and why Victorian séances were all about sex. My personal copy has much underlining, checkmarks and stars so I can easily go back to the good parts.

Richard, BPL Fiction

Family Blessings by Fern Michaels
(Powells) Right before Thanksgiving, a freak tornado drops down into the town of Larkspur in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains and destroys the house where matriarch and candy magnate Loretta Cisco has lived for fifty years. Thanks for nothing, Mother Nature! As if that's not enough, Cisco sees that her beloved triplet grandchildren, Hannah, Sara, and Sam — all newlyweds — are having marital problems and yet they refuse to tell her what's going on. So as Cisco's neighbors help to rebuild her home in time for the holidays, she vows to work a miracle that will get her family back on track. Can she do it? Even without a roof over her head?

Join the rambunctious Cisco clan, where passions, tempers, and humor run high — and the warm-hearted citizens of Larkspur — for a holiday celebration full of surprises, reunions, good old-fashioned family therapy, and maybe even a wedding!
Mondretta, Leeds

The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion by Fannie Flagg
(Powells) Oh, it's a happy day when there is a brand-new Fannie Flagg novel! There is something so comforting and soothing about diving into her version of small-town Alabama. Here she follows two families; the Simmonses of Point Clear, Alabama, in 2005 and the Jurdabralinskis of Pulaski, Wisconsin, during WWII. Flagg deftly weaves the stories of her families closer together as the novel progresses, but the real fun in a Flagg novel is not necessarily the plot yielding its secrets, but much more so the journey. The characters and the tiny Alabama town will completely charm you; how lovely it is to feed the birds in the morning, to know all of your neighbors, to sleep with the doors unlocked, and to hear that screen door banging shut. Even if, like me, you've never lived in a small town, you will instantly recognize and long for Flagg's version of "home." As an added bonus, this novel is completely hilarious!
Recommended by Dianah, Powells.com
Mondretta, Leeds

How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
(Powells) In his trademark style, Johnson examines unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated fields: how the invention of air-conditioning enabled the largest migration of human beings in the history of the species — to cities such as Dubai or Phoenix, which would otherwise be virtually uninhabitable; how pendulum clocks helped trigger the industrial revolution; and how clean water made it possible to manufacture computer chips. How We Got to Now is the story of collaborative networks building the modern world, written in the provocative, informative, and engaging style that has earned Johnson fans around the globe.
Jon, Avondale

GENERAL DISCUSSION: Johnson’s book was adapted into a six part PBS documentary series of the same name.

Dad Is Fat by Jim Gaffigan
(Powells) In Dad is Fat, stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan, who’s best known for his legendary riffs on Hot Pockets, bacon, manatees, and McDonald's, expresses all the joys and horrors of life with five young children — everything from cousins ("celebrities for little kids") to toddlers’ communication skills (“they always sound like they have traveled by horseback for hours to deliver important news”), to the eating habits of four year olds (“there is no difference between a four year old eating a taco and throwing a taco on the floor”). Dad is Fat is sharply observed, explosively funny, and a cry for help from a man who has realized he and his wife are outnumbered in their own home.
Jon, Avondale

Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan
(Amazon) Bacon. McDonalds. Cinnabon. Hot Pockets. Kale. Stand-up comedian and author Jim Gaffigan has made his career rhapsodizing over the most treasured dishes of the American diet (“choking on bacon is like getting murdered by your lover”) and decrying the worst offenders (“kale is the early morning of foods”). Fans flocked to his New York Times bestselling book Dad is Fat to hear him riff on fatherhood but now, in his second book, he will give them what they really crave—hundreds of pages of his thoughts on all things culinary(ish). Insights such as: why he believes coconut water was invented to get people to stop drinking coconut water, why pretzel bread is #3 on his most important inventions of humankind (behind the wheel and the computer), and the answer to the age-old question “which animal is more delicious: the pig, the cow, or the bacon cheeseburger?”
Jon, Avondale

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
(Powells) One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.

Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.

Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.
Jon, Avondale

Zone One by Colson Whitehead
(Powells) In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuilding civilization under orders from the provisional government based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street — aka Zone One — but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety — the “malfunctioning” stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.

Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams working in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world. And then things start to go wrong. Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One brilliantly subverts the genre’s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century.
Jon, Avondale

The Peripheral by William Gibson
(Powells) Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran's benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC's elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there's a job he’s supposed to do — a job Flynne didn't know he had. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. The job seems to be simple: work a perimeter around the image of a tower building. Little buglike things turn up. He's supposed to get in their way, edge them back. That's all there is to it. He's offering Flynne a good price to take over for him. What she sees, though, isn't what Burton told her to expect. It might be a game, but it might also be murder.
Jon, Avondale

Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
(Powells) Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie — magical, comforting, wise beyond her years — promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.
Samuel, Five Points West

Annotated works of Jane Austen, ed by David Shapard
These first-ever fully annotated editions of the most beloved novels in the world are a sheer delight for Jane Austen fans. Here is the complete text of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion with more than 2,300 annotations on facing pages, including:

 • Explanations of historical context

Rules of etiquette, class differences, the position of women, legal and economic realities, leisure activities, and more.

 • Citations from Austen’s life, letters, and other writings

Parallels between the novel and Austen’s experience are revealed, along with writings that illuminate her beliefs and opinions.

 • Definitions and clarifications

Archaic words, words still in use whose meanings have changed, and obscure passages are explained.

 • Literary comments and analyses

Insightful notes highlight Austen’s artistry and point out the subtle ways she develops her characters and themes.

 • Maps and illustrations of places and objects mentioned in the novel.

 • An introduction, a bibliography, and a detailed chronology of events

 Of course, one can enjoy the novel without knowing the precise definition of a gentleman, or what it signifies that a character drives a coach rather than a hack chaise, or the rules governing social interaction at a ball, but readers of Jane Austen will find that these kinds of details add immeasurably to understanding and enjoying the intricate psychological interplay of Austen’s immortal characters.
Samuel, Five Points West

Decision at Doona by Anne McCaffrey
(Powells) After the first human contact with the Siwannese ended in a mass suicide, the Terran government made a law that no further contact with sentient aliens would be allowed. But since their own planet was overcrowed, they looked to colonize Doona--until they found the Hrubbans. Their choice was simple but dangerous. They could kill the cat-like Hrubbans, or for the first time in history, learn to to coexist with an alien race....
Samuel, Five Points West

Doona: Crisis on Doona & Treaty at Doona by Anne McCaffrey
(Powells) Crisis on Doona & Treaty at Doona, two previously published works, are collected here together in one volume. Synopsis: Over twenty-five years ago, the first humans came to the unspoiled planet of Doona. They ignored one important fact: They were not alone. Doona was the home of the cat-like alien race of Hrrubans. And so began an experiment in cohabitation that lasted for a quarter of a century. Their contract is now up for renewal. Now, their delicate alliance is threatened by new alien visitors offering friendship. But not everyone believes in their motives. And as a battle of diplomatic unrest ensues, Doona once again falls under the dark shadow of uncertainty and self-destruction.
Samuel, Five Points West

Vintage Science Fiction ed by Peter Haining
(Powells) From the cerebral 2001 to the B-grade It Came From Outer Space — both of which are from stories by Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury, respectively, and are collected here — sci-fi films have always drawn from the printed word. In addition to tales by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, and Clive Barker, several stories appear in book form for the first time, such as James Blish's Star Trek scenario, while others such as Werner von Braun's The Conquest of Space, are out of print or hard to find.
Samuel, Five Points West

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
(Powells) Rosemary Woodhouse and her struggling actor husband Guy move into the Bramford, an old New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and mostly elderly residents. Neighbors Roman and Minnie Castavet soon come nosing around to welcome the Woodhouses to the building, and despite Rosemary's reservations about their eccentricity and the weird noises that she keeps hearing, her husband takes a special shine to them. Shortly after Guy lands a plum Broadway role, Rosemary becomes pregnant, and the Castavets start taking a special interest in her welfare. As the sickened Rosemary becomes increasingly isolated, she begins to suspect that the Castavets' circle is not what it seems...
Samuel, Five Points West

Rosemary’s Baby, feature film
(Rotten Tomatoes) In Roman Polanski's first American film, adapted from Ira Levin's horror bestseller, a young wife comes to believe that her offspring is not of this world. Waifish Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her struggling actor husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), move into the Bramford, an old New York City apartment building with an ominous reputation and only elderly residents. Neighbors Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon) soon come nosing around to welcome the Woodhouses to the building; despite Rosemary's reservations about their eccentricity and the weird noises that she keeps hearing, Guy starts spending time with the Castevets. 

Shortly after Guy lands a plum Broadway role, Minnie starts showing up with homemade chocolate mousse for Rosemary. When Rosemary becomes pregnant after a mousse-provoked nightmare of being raped by a beast, the Castevets take a special interest in her welfare. As the sickened Rosemary becomes increasingly isolated, she begins to suspect that the Castevets' circle is not what it seems. The diabolical truth is revealed only after Rosemary gives birth, and the baby is taken away from her. Polanski's camerawork and Richard Sylbert's production design transform the realistic setting (shot on-location in Manhattan's Dakota apartment building) into a sinister projection of Rosemary's fears, chillingly locating supernatural horror in the familiar by leaving the most grotesque frights to the viewer's imagination. 

This apocalyptic yet darkly comic paranoia about the hallowed institution of childbirth touched a nerve with late-'60s audiences feeling uneasy about traditional norms. Produced by B-horror maestro William Castle, Rosemary's Baby became a critically praised hit, winning Gordon an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Inspiring a wave of satanic horror from The Exorcist (1973) to The Omen (1976), Rosemary's Baby helped usher in the genre's modern era by combining a supernatural story with Alfred Hitchcock's propensity for finding normality horrific. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
Samuel, Five Points West

Cabal by Clive Barker
(Publisher’s Weekly) Comprised of a novel and four long stories, this volume is classic Barker, full of lurid, bloody imagery and action involving large-than-life characters. It's great fun and provides plenty of thrills or giggles, depending on how seriously you take it. In the novel, Cabal , Boone, a recovering psychotic, is cleverly manipulated by his psychiatrist, Decker, into believing that he has committed several savage murders. Decker, of course, is the villain, but Boone does not catch on. Considering himself unfit for human society, Boone flees, eventually to come upon Midian, a large crypt inhabited by the Nightbreed, dead souls in shape-changing bodies, neither good nor evil, who turn Boone into one of their own. Of the shorter works, the best written is "The Life of Death," about a woman who becomes enthralled by death and is transformed into a kind of Typhoid Mary. Another, "The Last Illusion," which concerns the fate of a magician's corpse, is full of intriguing moments.
Samuel, Five Points West

Nightbreed, feature film adapted from Clive Barker’s Cabal
(Rotten Tomatoes) Multimedia horror maven Clive Barker followed the success of his feature directorial debut, Hellraiser, with this equally surreal effort, based on his novella Cabal. The story involves the plight of Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer), a young man tormented by visions of monstrous, graveyard-dwelling creatures. Seeking the aid of his clinically cold therapist Dr. Decker (played by Canadian horror auteur David Cronenberg) in deciphering his nightmares, Boone becomes convinced that his frequent blackouts are linked to a recent spate of mutilation murders in the area. His frantic search for the truth leads him to the subterranean city of Midian, the dwelling place of a mythical race of undead nocturnal monsters known as the "Nightbreed." But it is only after he is cornered and shot dead by police that Boone's real journey begins -- he finds himself resurrected as one of the Breed. Though Barker's unique and graphic vision is somewhat blunted by choppy editing (thanks to relentless tampering from the studio), this is nevertheless a fine sophomore project from a talented storyteller; the central conceit of presenting the monsters as the "good guys" -- at least compared to the gun-and-bible-toting lunatics who hunt them -- is handled with verve and originality. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi
Samuel, Five Points West

Books of Blood by Clive Barker

(Powells) With the 1984 publication of Books of Blood, Clive Barker became an overnight literary sensation. He was hailed by Stephen King as "the future of horror," and won both the British and World Fantasy Awards. Now, with his numerous bestsellers, graphic novels, and hit movies like the Hellraiser films, Clive Barker has become an industry unto himself. But it all started here, with this tour de force collection that rivals the dark masterpieces of Edgar Allan Poe. Read him. And rediscover the true meaning of fear.
Samuel, Five Points West

Book of Blood, feature film
(Rotten Tomatoes)  A paranormal expert investigating a brutal murder discovers a house that stands at the intersection of several supernatural "highways" designed to transport souls to the afterlife in this adaptation of an original story by horror icon Clive Barker.
Samuel, Five Points West

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