Some Random Musings

Some random musings:

Carl Hiaasen was featured on NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" in a replay of an old interview.  He is a native Floridian and contends that everyone in Florida is crazy.  He is funny, irreverent and a light mystery of his would fit the bill for a good summer read.

 Katherine Howe was so charming when she visited our library last year.  Her first book , The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, is about the Salem witch trials.  Her second book,  The House of Velvet and Glass, was just released.  It has received some very positive reviews. But - here's one very minor complaint.  It just somehow bugs me that authors (or more likely their publishers) take the title of a popular book and copy it.  One of my favorite books is The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III.  I wonder how the family of Stieg Larsson feels about copycats of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo title.  There are already several ripoffs of that unique title including a best selling I Am The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Another good summer read that you may have missed is Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer.  Her website describes the book as weaving "together three stories of human love within the larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia". US Magazine says  “Kingsolver deftly addresses the struggle between mankind and nature ... A lush ... novel of love and loss in Appalachia."

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The Tower, the Zoo, and The Tortoise

tortoise

sugar glider

bearded pigs

zorilla

bird of paradise

love birds

water dragon

If you want to know what The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise has to do with these pictures you have to read the book.  Expect to be enchanted!  This is not Noah's Ark or Life of Pi (thank goodness) but it's own clever story filled with engaging characters, human and otherwise.  Enter the world of the Tower of London and the people that live there and learn how these animals and birds came to live there too. 
 

Julia Stuart is a British author and journalist. Her first novel, published in 2007, was The Matchmaker of Périgord. This is her second, published in 2010 and  is a New York Times and national bestseller. It is definitely worth checking out!

The Chicago Way by Michael Harvey

 Do you ever go through the piles of books you have, pick one up and then be so happy to have discovered a "new" author? This one escaped my notice for several years.  

 In The Chicago Way "Private detective Michael Kelly is hired by his former partner to solve an eight-year old...case long gone cold. But when the partner turns up dead, Kelly enlists a team of his savviest colleagues to connect the dots between the recent murder and the cold case it revived.  ...Kelly will have to face the mob, a serial killer, his own double-crossing friends, and the mean streets of the city he loves." (description from Vintage Crime publisher). 

"Heartfelt, ambitious...Kelly, a wisecracking Irish scrapper, slings metaphors like Phillip Marlowe, reads Homer and Aeschylus in Greek... Harvey ends up delivering the goods." Kirkus Review.  

The Chicago Way  has what to me are two or three of the most perfect descriptive paragraphs ever written.  Now, this is  not Tolstoy or anything close but if you're from Chicago you will definitely appreciate reading Pages 144 and 145 of this engrossing detective novel. 

Michael Harvey is the creator, writer, and executive producer of the television series Cold Case Files, as well as an Academy Award-nominee for his documentary Eyewitness, and is a former investigative reporter for CBS. He earned a law degree at Duke, a masters in journalism from Northwestern and a bachelor's degree in classical language from Holy Cross College.  He also owns a bar in Chicago called The Hidden Shamrock.  Here's what he is quoted as saying about Chicago:  "I live about a half mile from Wrigley Field. Another place of great tragedy in the city".  

His novel contains many details that only Chicagoans might recognize: Tom Skilling giving a weather report, someone reading Michael Sneed’s column, the typical behaviors of Irish south-siders.
 He says "I try to find places in the city that people might relate to, or find interesting. I especially look for scenes that convey the intangibles and atmospherics of Chicago. It’s a great city, so why not?".

It is my favorite city and now I think Michael Harvey has become one of my favorite crime writers because he evokes the city so perfectly.   Check out his books, you too may be happy to have found a new favorite author:

We All Fall Down (Michael Kelly #4, July, 2011)

The Third Rail (Michael Kelly #3, April, 2010)

The Fifth Floor (Michael Kelly #2, September, 2008)

The Chicago Way (Michael Kelly #1, September 2007)

Let's Visit with Author Katherine Howe

It is early but we have exciting news - author Katherine Howe is making time to visit our library amid her busy book tour.  She will be speaking here on Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 1 p.m.

Our program director, Dina Ferree, was an early fan of Katherine's first book, the New York Times bestseller The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane about the Salem witch trials.  Dina contacted the author early in her new life as a famous author and convinced her that small town libraries have a thirst for meeting authors to discuss their books in person.  Katherine was so gracious and interesting during that first visit that we are thrilled to have her back.

Katherine lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts and was raised in Houston.  She began writing fiction while working on her doctoral dissertation in American and New England Studies at Boston University.  Her ancestors settled in Essex County, Massachusetts in the 1620s.  She is a descendant of accused Salem witches Elizabeth Proctor and Elizabeth Howe.  While the story she told was interesting, it is her extensive research and knowledge of the time period that made the book special.

Her new novel, The House of Velvet and Glass, was just released and sounds like it will be just as good as the first.  It is also an historical novel, set in 1915. It tells the story of a young woman reeling from the death of her mother and sister on the Titanic. It involves spiritualism, the opium dens of Boston’s Chinatown and a harrowing mystery.  According to Goodreads "The House of Velvet and Glass weaves together meticulous period detail, intoxicating romance, and a final shocking twist that will leave readers breathless".

Check it out before you visit with Katherine on June 2 at 1 p.m.!