OPENING LINE:
There was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party.
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Miles Garth goes to a dinner party in an upper middle class neighborhood in Greenwich. Somewhere between the main course and dessert he goes upstairs to a guest bedroom and locks himself in. Over the course of the next days and weeks he develops a cult following as people seek to solve the mystery of the guest who over-stayed his welcome. The story is told in four parts, first by the woman whose phone number is found in the cell phone Miles left downstairs, then by the man who’d accompanied him to the dinner party, thirdly by an elderly woman he visits each year on the anniversary of her daughter’s death and last by the girl who came to the dinner party with her parents. Each has had a small but significant relationship with Miles and their experiences shed some light on what might have happened. But whether or not the reader fully comes to understand the circumstances of Miles’s confinement, there is much to understand about the way the world works through this story. It is a smart commentary on race, class, and the incomplete relationships we form with one another. Added to this, Smith is clearly a word-lover and her language was a pleasure to read. Whether it was the precocious puns of an 11-year-old girl or the rhymes of the voice in a grown man’s head, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: There but for the
OPENING LINES:
Miss Perspicacia Tick sat in what little shelter a raggedy hedge could give her and explored the universe. She didn’t notice the rain. Witches dried out quickly.
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When Tiffany’s baby brother is taken by the Queen of the fairies she prepares a rescue armed with a skillet and the company of the Nac Mac Feegle, a bellicose race of blue fairies who have a lust for life and strong drink. Terry Pratchett offers up a novel loaded with humour, social commentary, and a strong (and interesting) female protagonist who turns out to be a witch. One in a solid series (five books so far) that sees Tiffany mature and have other harrowing, hilarious encounters with the denizens of Disc World.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Wee Free Men
OPENING LINES:
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. First I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.
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In Old Man’s War, we learn that Earth has a surplus of senior citizens and a shortage of soldiers to fight all the hostile alien races trying to chase us out of space and back to our own ball of mud. The solution that the Colonial Defense Force (CDF) has come up with is to convince aging Earthers to join the army. Their minds are transferred to new bodies pumped full of genetic enhancements and handy technology, and they are sent off to war. Scalzi takes us along with recruit John Perry as he leaves everything he knows behind to fight the CDF’s wars; going through basic training, fighting his first battles, and even a little romance. The author has admitted to playing on the pattern laid down by Robert Heinlein, but he managed to go beyond that inspiration to develop a new space opera universe where he has set multiple bestselling novels. This is a story that packs a lot of action and excitement, but also manages to subtly explore issues of aging, loss, humanity and the futility of war.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Old Man’s War
OPENING LINES:
September is like a quiet day after a whole week of wind. I mean real wind that blows dirt into your eyes and hair and between your teeth and roars in your ears after you’ve gone inside.
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This is the story of a year and a half in the life of a young woman named Ellen Webb. Her father is from a substantial New England family and her mother a poor peasant from rural Russia. They met during World War I when her father was stationed in Russia then wounded and nursed back to health by the young woman with whom he falls in love. When he brought his bride home she was not accepted by his traditional New England family. So the young couple bought a ranch in eastern Montana where they are both accepted. Together they established a dry land wheat farm and adjust to the cycle of good and bad years.
Ellen grows up an only child. When it is time for her to go to college they have a full crop and prices are good so they can send Ellen to college. She goes off to college in Minnesota, meets a young man from Vermont and they become engaged. When she brings him home to the meet her family he is shocked by the isolation and the foreignness of her mother and he breaks off the engagement. When the next year’s crop is bad and there is no money for Ellen to go back to college, she takes a job teaching in a one room school house. There she experiences tragedy and misunderstanding. When she returns home she learns to love the beauty and isolation of the high plains and to be proud of her heritage.
This is not a new book, having first been published in 1944 and then reissued in 1992 by the University of Nebraska Press. But it doesn’t matter how old the book it. It is a timeless story about dealing with people and difficult circumstances.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Winter Wheat
GREAT LINEs:
Mrs. Klapper shifted impatiently beside him.
“Rebeck, pardon an old woman, but are you laying an egg?”
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I first discovered this book as a teenager obsessed with cemeteries- I loved the way cemeteries are a microcosm of their city/country, the myriad stories behind each stone, the melancholic romance and slight morbidity. I found that Peter Beagle loved cemeteries as much as I did, and gobbled down this first novel by our finest living fantasy writer, in which two ghosts fall in love in a cemetery while drifting toward the great forgetting of their mortal lives. It’s always dangerous to love a book so much as an impressionable teen- one’s memories sometimes don’t live up to present day tastes- but I’ve reread this title at least 3 times as an adult, in different decades, and find my fondness for it does not diminish. Laura and Michael are the two ghosts, one ready to leave behind all memories of earthly life and the other constantly grasping for those memories. Their non-ghostly friend Jonathan Rebeck is a gentle soul and failed pharmacist, who lives in a mausoleum and serves as a sort of guide and company for those on their way out of one world and into the next. Mr. Rebeck has a faithful companion in a talking raven who brings him food and news of the world and his life is fairly stable, until he meets the widowed Mrs. Klapper, and feels the siren call of the living. Beagle’s writing is imaginative, lyrical and richly creative. He combines wry humor and aching pathos, without ever becoming sentimental. Many people know Mr. Beagle for his second novel, The Last Unicorn, which deserves its own entry. It’s time to discover (or rediscover) his first novel, written when he was 19.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: A Fine and Private Place
OPENING LINES:
Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest. I was sitting in my hideout watching cartoons when the news bulletin broke in on my video feed, announcing that James Halliday had died during the night.
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Get ready to get your nerd on! In particular get ready to get your 1980s pop culture, comic book, gaming nerd on. In Ready Player One Cline has given readers of a certain age (mid-30s to mid-40s) a completely satisfying, indulgent piece of nostalgia that is really fun to read. Here’s the premise. In a future time, the real world is suffering crippling energy crises and mass poverty. But the simulated world of the OASIS has evolved to be fully immersive and for many has become an alternative to living in the real world. When the creator of the OASIS dies without heirs, he designs a game to be completed in the OASIS and the winner will inherit everything. They stand not only to become wealthy beyond imagining, but the future of the OASIS will be in their hands. The nostalgia comes in because the game is based on challenges and riddles that revolve around the 1980s. Family Ties, D&D, Blade Runner, PacMan, and literally hundreds of other pop culture references are made. But there is more to the book than just these juicy tidbits. The underlying story is about the competition between independent players like the protagonist Wade and the corporate behemoths lining up resources to defeat them. And as much as it’s a David and Goliath story, it is also a story about the distinctions between living in the real and the virtual world. What do relationships, successes, and safety mean in the OASIS and how do they compare with the physical places you eat and sleep? These are real questions for me, and the topics of many discussions I have with others of my generation. This book was a really fun addition to the conversation.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Ready Player One
OPENING LINES:
Perspective. I need to get perspective. It’s not an earthquake or a crazed gunman or a nuclear meltdown, is it? On the scale of disasters, this is not huge. Not huge. One day I expect I’ll look back at this moment and laugh and think, Ha-ha, how silly I was to worry—
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Poppy Wyatt feels like the luckiest girl in the world, about to marry a gorgeous man and celebrating her engagement at a hotel with all her friends. But when she loses her expensive heirloom engagement ring and her phone on the same day, she panics. Salvation appears in the form of a cell phone she finds in a trash bin, and under the age-old rule of “finders keepers” she takes possession, giving the number to the hotel staff who are looking for her ring, as well as to all her friends. The trouble is the phone used to belong to the personal assistant of businessman Sam Roxton and he not only wants it back, he really wants Poppy to stop reading his personal texts and emails. Kinsella has a great ear for dialogue and character and her comic timing helps carry the reader over any of the more wacky plot points. The frothy premise works, thanks mostly to loveable Poppy who struggles with self-esteem issues but remains plucky and adorable.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: I’ve Got Your Number
OPENING LINES:
“They’ve found the pilot.” Twelve hundred miles away in New York, Red Queen breathed out. “What do we know?” “More or less nothing…”
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Oh my…this was a juicy, nerdy, contemporary fiction read. Mathematicians, graduate students, operatives from the Directorate of the Extremely Improbable populate this fun, funny book about what happens when ordinary people get caught in the middle of very strange things happening. Why are all the cars on the freeway white? Why does the iPod play the same song over and over even though it is set on random? Why do you end up in the same motel as the person you are trying to find, only you don’t learn this until the next day? Are these things truly coincidental, or is there some mechanism driving the probabilities? And if there is, what is it, who created it, and what is its purpose? Two fictional (or are they?) government agencies are trying to answer these questions as they chase a young Brit across the southern United States on his quest to reach his girlfriend in San Francisco where he plans to propose marriage. It sounds zany…and that’s because it is. I knew a book that started with a vintage airplane that seemed to create itself out of tin cans in the middle of Alabama and then promptly exploded leaving behind a stripper dressed as a pilot was going to be good. But I didn’t bank on it being filled with dry British wit and characters so quirky I wanted to meet them at a cocktail party.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Coincidence Engine
GREAT LINES:
That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.
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Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Quebec has retreated to Quebec City during Winter Carnival to try and recover from a disastrous case in the company of an old friend. While spending time in a small library devoted to the history of the English in Quebec, he is embroiled in a murder case that threatens to awaken both his recent traumatic memories, and the long-standing tensions between Anglos and Francophones in Quebec. The city, with its history and charm, becomes a character. You can practically taste the café au lait and brush away the croissant crumbs. Penny always gives us lovely, flawed characters, and so it is in Bury Your Dead. But the character we most like to spend time with is the quiet Inspector with the kind eyes, Armand Gamache, who here struggles to move past memories of a case that cost him a member of his team, and almost cost him his life. Narrator Ralph Cosham does a superb job with all the voices for this series, especially Gamache, making this a rare series that I always prefer to experience in audio.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Bury Your Dead
GREAT LINE:
For the general and the court in Petersburg the episode presented itself as a happy turn of events, but for Hadji Murat it was the greatest crisis of his life.
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In his youth Tolstoy went to the Caucasus to observe and then join the Russian army as it fought another of its interminable frontier wars against the mountain tribes. In old age Tolstoy wrote a fictional account of how one tribal leader, Hadji Murat, had attempted to switch sides and join the Russians. As word of the attempt spreads first through the general’s ballroom and then up the ranks as far as the Tsar himself, the story reveals the absurdity and corruption of war. This short novel has distilled much of the insight and force of Tolstoy’s longer works, without all the unnecessary commentary.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Hadji Murat