Maybe in This Lifetime

I use Goodreads to keep track of books I’ve read and want to read and every time I put another book in my “to read” list, I feel like I’m setting myself up for failure. I understand that I will never be able to read every book published and I’m fine with that. I just want to read every book I want to read and don’t seem to be making any headway. Even though I tell myself not to put any more books on my list until I finish a book or to review my current “to read” list to make sure I still want to read the books on the list, I never listen. The list grows and grows. Because not all books are created equal, there are some books in which I’m more interested in than others. Here are some books that scream at me when I look at my Goodreads list.

Fiction

        

    

At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories by Kij Johnson

• This is a book of science fiction short stories and while I read a lot of short stories, I haven’t read a lot of sci-fi short stories. The titles of the stories (“Schrödinger’s Cathouse”, “My Wife Reincarnated as a Solitaire”, and “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” are a few) make me think these stories will be ambitious and very interesting.

The Collected Stories of Grace Paley by Grace Paley

• I initially was interested in this book because it’s a. short stories and b. for some reason, I had confused Grace Paley with Grace Coddington and wanted to see what kind of stories Coddington had written. (Don’t worry about me; I’m fine.) Once I realized they were not the same person, I did a little research into Paley and she sounds like she was an interesting woman and was multi-talented, also writing poetry.

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

• I started this book about a group of adults who met at summer camp when they were young are still friends years later a couple of months ago, but didn’t have time to finish it. I really enjoyed what I read and have been hoping to get back to it. I also think the cover is beautiful.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

• Taking place in Mississippi right before, during, and just after Hurricane Katrina, Salvage the Bones follows the Batiste family as they deal with the storm along with their daily lives which are difficult enough in their poverty-stricken household.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

• Out of all the books on this list, this is probably the one I’ll get to next. Two founders of a poetry movement attempt to track down a vanished poet and end up on the run. The story follows them through several continents and is narrated by the people they encounter. I’ve also heard good things about Bolaño’s 2666 so may put that on my never-ending list once I finish The Savage Detectives.

Non-fiction

         

    

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman

• I picked this up because of the title. It has chapters on not thinking positively, the hidden benefits of insecurity, and embracing your errors. The concept reminded me a little of Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Bruce by Peter Ames Carlin

• Since I’m from Indiana, I should probably have John Mellencamp’s biography on this list, but if I had to choose between reading a bio of Springsteen or reading a bio of Mellencamp, I’d probably choose Springsteen. (Sorry, John. It’s nothing personal. I used to dance in front of the TV when you came on. I remember you when you were John Cougar Mellencamp. I went to grad school near your town and never once stalked you. I sing your songs way more than I sing Springsteen songs. I respect you. I just think Bruce’s biography might be slightly more interesting.)

Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff

• While I know a little about why the city of Detroit has declined, I’ve not yet sat down and read a book about it. LeDuff, a reporter and native of Detroit, dissects what led to Detroit’s decline with what I’ve heard is a darkly humorous eye.

Her by Christa Parravani

• I had this checked out and returned it because I had just finished Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites by Kate Christensen and didn’t think I was in a place to read another memoir just yet. Her is about twins, the author, Christa, and her sister, Cara. Both talented artists, their lives split apart and Cara dies while Christa struggles with being alone without her twin.

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss

• This has been recommended to me by several people. I don’t usually like to know how bad for me the food I’m eating is, but this sounds more like an investigative book and less like a health book so I’m more likely to read it and enjoy it.

Are there books you keep intending to read, but somehow they keep getting pushed down your to-read list? Or are you able to keep a tight rein on your to-read list? (If so, please tell me how.)

~Aisha

What I Did (Read) on My Winter Vacation

I just emerged from two weeks of hibernation to rejoin productive society. In other words, I’ve been on vacation. I participated in the usual family holiday festivities, sure, albeit fewer than most others did due to the small size of my clan. To be honest, I was actively trying to keep this vacation relaxed and low-key. I felt I needed it and deserved it. My promise to myself was to spend as much time reading as I possibly could. And read I did. I may not have made as huge a dent in my To-Read pile as I might have hoped, but over the course of 15 days, I read 6 books. Considering that I currently average about 1½ books per month, I was pretty thrilled with those results. I was also thrilled that I read books from several genres. Reading outside my usual categories was one of my goals for 2012, one that I will continue to explore in 2013.

So here’s a run-down of what I read on my winter holiday break (in the order read):

Sapphire Blue by Kerstin Gier — The second book in a trilogy about a time-traveling teen who is now a reluctant member of a secret society that goes back generations in her family. I read the first book (Ruby Red) earlier this year and couldn’t wait for this one to come out in October. There’s mystery, a sinister villain from the past, fencing and a convoluted romance (of course). The only problem is now I’m stuck waiting for the last volume to come out in fall of 2013. Sigh. This series was originally published in Germany and has been since translated into several languages.

Lou! #1- Secret Diary by Julien Neel — This graphic novel tells the story of a tween and her single mom. You get to follow along as they survive adopting a stray cat, a visit from Memaw, video game addiction, love and each other! The self-deprecating humor and colorful panels make the story a stand-out. I can’t wait to see about getting my hands on numbers 2-4. (Update: I read volumes 2 & 3 last night and they were just as funny and cute as the first one!)

Driving the Saudis: A Chauffeur’s Tale of the World’s Richest Princesses (Plus Their Servants, Nannies, and One Royal Hairdresser) by Jayne Amelia Larson — If you’ve read the subtitle, you’ve pretty much read this book. You’re going to get exactly what you expect, stories about the uber-rich spending like there’s no tomorrow. Only, there is a tomorrow and they spend just as much money that day too. What is also included, that you may not expect, is the opportunity to get to know the people who take care of these wealthy Saudis. Their servants and caretakers are real people, with real feelings, and hopes and dreams that they, all too realistically, know won’t come true. To sum up: the princesses are spoiled (not necessarily their fault) and the author, as well as the rest of their domestic help, was overworked.

A River in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters — This more recent, and possibly last, of the Amelia Peabody mystery series finds her archeological family in the Holy Land instead of their beloved Egypt. Amelia’s son, nicknamed Ramses, and his brother from another mother, David, are kidnapped (as usual). Amelia uses her wits to deduce what’s happened to them and her pointy parasol to prod the story along. Her dashing and boisterous husband, Emerson, uses his massive countenance and forceful personality to orchestrate the rescue of Ramses and David.

White Jacket Required: A Culinary Coming-of-Age Story by Jenna Weber — Just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be another cooking-blog-turned-book, here it is! Jenna always wanted to be a writer and the idea of combining her love of cooking and writing into a career led her to culinary school. Her journey, from making the decision to attend school, through graduation and entrance into the world of work, is interesting. You come to understand that the culinary arts are not as simple as they may appear and no one’s career path is smooth and straight. We all have bumps and roadblocks to make life interesting, and hopefully worthwhile.

Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding by Jessie Sholl — I’ll admit it. I’m kind of fascinated by the television shows about hoarding. Well actually, more than kind of. It’s like the proverbial train wreck that you can’t look away from. I am always shocked by the living conditions of these people, some more than others, and I am always rooting for them to get it together so they can pitch the stuff, mental as well as physical, that’s keeping them a prisoner in their own home. This book approaches hoarding from a slightly different point of view. You get to see how this mental illness specifically affects the child of the afflicted. Jessie finally comes to the realization that she has to “divorce” herself from her mother’s house. Accepting that she cannot change her mother, however, doesn’t mean Jessie loves her any less.

“What’s Melissa going to read next?” you may ask. The answer is I’m reading the book for the Mystery Book Group which is meeting on Friday, January 18th at 1pm in the Teen Meeting Space on the First Floor. Our current theme is Middle East Mysteries and the book for January is Belshazzar’s Daughter by Barbara Nadel. All are welcome!

Happy Snuggly Winter Reading!
-Melissa M.

What are the Most Popular (Nonfiction) Books in the Library?

With all due respect to CBS and you-know-who’s top ten lists.

That is one of the more frequently asked questions I am asked, or a variation thereof.  It might be “What’s the most popular?” or maybe “What has gone out the most?”  It’s kind of intriguing so I decided to see if I could find out.  We have a tool that lets us mine the staff side of the catalog, the pages that aren’t web-based and intuitive to use.  It has the business-like name of Create List, and we use it pretty frequently to check collections, locations of materials, copies of titles and things like material codes (book, microfilm, DVD) and publisher information.  It’s our inventory control software.

On its surface what I wanted to find sounds straightforward – find the books (nonfiction) with the most circulations in the library.  With Create List, that search is reduced to two lines of a controlled vocabulary search-string that looks like this:

• ITEM  LOCATION  starts with  “xros”  AND
• ITEM  TOT CHKOUT  greater than  “10”

The xros locations cover the 3 floors with circulating non-fiction (except parts of the music collection) and I felt 10 total checkouts was a safe starting point to keep the search time short.  You might know them as 2nd floor, the mezzanine, and 3rd floor.

Now, here’s the caveat.  As old as our collection is – there are titles going back to before 1900 – for the purposes of the online catalog, the oldest records date from September, 2002.  This is electronic inventory sleight-of- hand; the arbitrary point in time when we migrated catalog records to the online system. Doesn’t matter when a book was originally published, its digital record was created in 2002.  So, what I have is a listing of the most circulated nonfiction titles using September 2002 as the circulation starting point of the whole collection.  I don’t have, or at least don’t have access to, any of the paper records that might have been saved with the retro information prior to 2002 . In reverse order (total checkouts in parentheses) the top 10 most circulated nonfiction titles are:

#10 (125)  The Right Dog for You: Choosing a Breed that Matches Your Personality, Family, and Life-Style / Daniel F. Tortora

#9  (127)  The Psychology of Dreams / by Paul R. Robbins

#8  (129)  An American Childhood / Annie Dillard

#7  (132)  Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament / Kay Redfield Jamison

#6  (134)  Magic of a Mystic: Stories of Padre Pio / Duchess of St. Albans

#5  (140)  Survival in Auschwitz; and, The Reawakening: Two Memoirs / Primo Levi

#4  (142)  Think & Grow Rich / Napoleon Hill

#3  (143)  Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies / Otto Kernberg. (Currently not available.)

#2  (147)  When God was a Woman / Merlin Stone

#1  (163)  How to Play Good Opening Moves / Edmar Mednis

Now that I know this, I can’t decide how I feel about it.  Did I / did you expect it to be more . . . classical or literary, and is that expectation really a euphemism for what we wanted the list to be, what it would say about the collective us?  Even if I don’t particularly like Fitzgerald or Milton, don’t the rest of you?

– Richard

Love letters?

Or emails?  Or notes?  Or text messages?

I recently finished The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows, and rediscovered how much fun it can be to read epistolary novels. You know, the ones that tell the story through letters or other writings. (I had to look it up – can you tell?)

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society takes place just after World War II, and begins with a letter from a pig farmer to an author, asking for help finding a book and mentioning that the literary society kept them going through the war.  With that intriguing start, the letters build a story of the war and survival, of love and loss, and of the importance of books and stories in every life.

Of course, we all know that “no one writes letters any more,” and epistolary novels keep up with the times.  Boy Meets Girl, by Meg Cabot, uses emails, memos, faxes, and even restaurant receipts to tell the story of a young woman dealing with a nasty boss, a lawsuit, and a disarmingly handsome lawyer. Anyone who’s had their own “T.O.D.” (or “Tyrannical Office Despot”) can compare notes with Kate Mackenzie.

If you’re looking for other suggestions, you could also try:

• Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable, by Mark Dunn, takes place on the island of Nollop, home to the creator of the sentence “The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” whose residents are so proud of their facility with language that they’ve eschewed more modern forms of communication and kept letter-writing as their primary communication tool. When one of the letters falls off of Nevin Nollop’s statue, the island’s government decides it is a sign that the letter should be banished from use. As another letter falls, then another, the island’s inhabitants must use fewer and fewer letters in their letters, and try to figure out a way around the linguistically-challenging laws.
• A Celibate Season, by Carol Shields, Blanche Howard, in which each author wrote the letters for one partner in a marriage that’s going through a temporary separation after 20 years. When Jock takes a job assignment on the other side of the country, she and Chas decide that they will use letters to communicate. The combination of news, familiarity, and raw emotion that is so characteristic of this kind of interchange will strike a nerve in anyone who has corresponded with someone close to them.
• Another email novel, Dear Stranger, Dearest Friend, by Laney Katz Becker, starts on a bulletin board for breast cancer. Lara and Susan find an instant connection through a shared sense of humor, which blossoms into a full and loving friendship that goes far beyond a disease.
• In It’s Getting Later All the Time: A Novel in the Form of Letters, by Antonio Tabucchi, the letters appear to be one-sided communications that each tell the story of a relationship, until the final answer. As in any good epistolary novel, what has really happened is left to the imagination.

And if you’d like even more suggestions, do a search for “epistolary novels” in our good-book-finding database, Novelist. It requires a library card number if you’re not inside the library, and it’s so worth it. You might also try looking here, or here. If you’ve enjoyed one yourself, post it in the comments. Nothing beats a personal recommendation!

-Kaarin

five books I am always reading

It’s an occupational hazard for library workers to have booklists so long it would take several lifetimes to read them all, but certain titles keep their place at the top of mine, regardless of whatever distracting new temptations I happen upon.  Whether I keep coming back to re-read them, or just can’t seem to finish the whole thing, these five books stay on my “currently reading” shelves in my Goodreads and LibraryThing accounts (and in my livingroom).  They’ll probably be there for awhile, too, so long as I keep bumping them for impulsive replacements, like I did Saturday when I picked up Tresspass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land while shelving.

• Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell 

I’ve read at least a dozen books related to mythology that cite Campbell, and I love Bill Moyers’s Power of Myth interviews, but the bookmark in this one stays stuck somewhere early in the first chapter.   

 

• A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn –

This essential history starts with the staggering incidents and statistics of early explorers’ Native American genocide,  moves to the horrors of African slavery, then progresses into the violent roots of US class division and labor unrest, and before long gets me so upset, I shelve the book for a few months to process it all.  Luckily, though, Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle recently adapted Zinn’s work into a graphic novel called A People’s History of American Empire. 

 

• And Her Soul Out of Nothing by Olena Kalytiak Davis 

And Her Soul Out of Nothing is the perfect book of poetry.  Davis writes strange, haunting verse that incorporates daily language with profound questions, and gorgeous poetric turns with confronatational statements.  I could re-read “Another Underwater Conversation” every week for the rest of my life.

 

• The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry edited by Alan Kaufman

This volume includes Walt Whitman, Wanda Coleman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Eileen Myles, Joy Harjo, Alice Notley and more and more.  And it’s almost 700 pages long, so six years later, I’m still not done yet.

 

• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware 

If this graphic novel doesn’t break your heart, you probably don’t have one.  Not only is Ware the master of fantastically designed and colored layouts and intricate, vintage-inspired illustrations, but the story (which includes the Chicago World’s Fair and a superhero failure) of a self-conscious man in search of his father is to tender that sometimes I just have to put it down and walk away with my rotten little heart intact.

-renée