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 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
OPENING LINE:
It wasn’t a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance.
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The year is 1945, World War II has ended. Claire Beauchamp and her husband are on holiday in Scotland. Having served as a combat nurse in the British army, she needs the rest. But then one day when she touches one of the standing stones in an ancient stone circle she is transported back in time to the year 1743, just before the Jacobite Rebellion. There she encounters an English officer who looks like her husband but does not act like him. And then she meets Jaimie Fraser who will change her entire life. With one action scene after another, this book is hard to put down! It made me glad that this is just the first book in a great series!
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Outlander
GREAT LINE:
But now she seemed to him like a wilted flower, the beauty that had moved him to take her was gone.
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Anna Karenina has been regarded as the greatest novel by the greatest novelist of all time, filled with wonderfully thought-out characters. As the story opens Russia had ended serfdom (which was agricultural slavery) just a few years before — in fact just a year before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The story centers around a group of people in the very highest Russian society, where idle young men killed time with drinking, sports, and adultery; where the energies of more ambitious men were consumed in pointless bureaucratic intrigues; and where women went on endless rounds of parties requiring endless changes of clothes. Tolstoy is brilliant in his portrayal of flawed human beings trapped in a world of rigidity and fear, ultimately based on slavery. And yet, for me, there is something missing as he seeks to portray the inner thoughts of people trying to escape the prison of high society. None of it seems remotely convincing. So there is another way to read this work. Tolstoy himself was born into the aristocracy and grew up on a farm with 300 serfs. There he fathered at least one illegitimate child. Without intending it, Tolstoy reveals so much of the arrogance of someone surrounded by slaves and brought up to believe that he alone had all the answers. It is the tragedy of Russia.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Anna Karenina
OPENING LINE:
When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake–not a very big one.
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This 1985 Pulitzer Prize winner is the story of two retired Texas rangers. In the years following the Civil War they lead one of the first cattle drives from Texas to Montana. They have rivers to cross, bandits to deal with and clashes with Native Americans. The book is real dealing with real people in the backdrop of a big open country. First, you have the friendship between Gus and Call, the two old rangers. Then Gus still has a crush on a woman from his past who the pair meet on their way to Montana. There are people trying to do good and those that are bitter. With these characters and the well-written landscapes, McMurtry has brought this period of history to life. My grandfather was a cowboy at this time in history and through that lens I could picture every thing that happens in the story.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Lonesome Dove
GREAT LINES:
Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original.
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At the end of World War I German sniper Fidelis Waldvogel returns to the village where he grew up. He marries Eva, the pregnant girlfriend of his best friend who had been killed in the war. But he wants to start a new life in America so he sets out for Seattle. When his money runs out in Argus, North Dakota Fidelis gets a job working for the local butcher. Soon he has earned enough money to send for Eva and her baby and then to open his own butcher shop. Argus where they live is a town filled with a cast of quirky characters. Roy is the town drunk and Delphine was raised by him but does not know her own family. Then there is Step-and-a-Half, one of the town’s homeless who is constantly walking across the vast prairie. The Master Butchers Singing Club is a story about the good and bad in people and how they play out in the characters lives.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Master Butchers Singing Club
GREAT LINE:
“For a moment Jack felt the strongest inclination to snatch up his little gilt chair and beat the white-faced man down with it…”
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That quote from Master and Commander is in the first chapter, and seems an unlikely start to a friendship that is one of the most interesting in fiction. When Jack Aubrey meets Stephen Maturin at a concert, they have a rather violent disagreement about music. The two are such opposites: Jack, a straightforward, blunt captain in the Royal Navy and Stephen a naturalist and physician with a tendency towards secrecy. In this opening volume Jack is a lieutenant desperate for his first real ship to command. When he does finally get his ship, he rather impulsively asks Stephen along as ship’s doctor. Set in the Napoleonic era, the book is full of nautical slang and ship’s jargon, but somehow that all fades into the background as the reader is swept into a vivid picture of a time, and a gripping series of adventures on the high seas.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Master and Commander
GREAT LINES:
I have let others- one in particular- tell my story for far too long. Now is the time to set the record straight, to sort out the humbug from the truth, and vice versa.
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This portrait of “little person” Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump Stratton Magri, aka general Mrs. Tom Thumb, has depth and pathos, while immersing the reader in United States history. Vinnie is 2 feet 10 inches tall, a pituitary dwarf who is not content to stay at home in Middleborough, Massachusetts with her farming family. Recruited by an unprincipled carnival boss, Colonel Wood, she eventually winds up working with the fascinating P. T. Barnum, marrying General Tom Thumb, traveling the world, meeting royalty, and losing her beloved sister in a harrowing childbirth death scene. What elevates this title from a laundry list of interesting life events is Benjamin’s extraordinarily full character development. Vinnie is brilliant, determined, ruthless, loving, and fiercely protective of her little sister. P. T. Barnum is the ultimate showman, but he is also a man seeking an intellectual equal, and he finds that in Vinnie. Benjamin inserts newspaper articles, ads from magazines and other primary source documents in a series of “intermissions”, which take the reader deeper into Vinnie’s world. Meticulously researched, with an extensive bibliography, Benjamin has developed the facts of Vinnie’s life into a heartfelt, fascinating story.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb
GREAT LINES:
Espionage is an art really.
A fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants affair.
The less rhyme or reason… the better.
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Intricately connected vignettes tell the stories of ordinary people caught up in the deadly business of espionage across World War Two-era Europe. People who do not normally read graphic novels may find themselves surprised by this book, which lingers on the large and small ways that these people betray themselves and others as they play their parts in the spy game. Of course, there is also plenty of action and suspense to go along with the pathos and dense character work. Artist Matt Kindt is relatively unknown, even in the comics world, but shows himself to be a genius of the form. In addition to employing several styles to help differentiate the plot lines, he also litters his panels with clues and codes that sharp readers will enjoy untangling as they connect the dots between the troubled characters. Super Spy is a dazzling work that is sure to appeal to readers who love twisty, believable tales of espionage.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Super Spy
GREAT LINE:
The feminists had divined that, who once, when she rose to speak at a meeting, had hissed and cat-called, assuming her crowning glory to be the seductive and marketable product of an inhumanely tested bottle.
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With luck, once in a lifetime a novelist can take all the pieces and fit them together and come out with an absolutely wonderful work. Possession is one of those rare books. There is beautiful storytelling as each scene works in itself, drives the fast-moving plot forward toward solving a mystery, and reveals an extraordinary understanding of literature and ideas. It begins when two young academics discover secret love letters from a long-dead Victorian poet. There are amazing characters, including a brilliant professor who has spent a career studying that poet and has produced the definitive biography, proving that here was a great man who surely lived up to his own lofty ideals. On the side, the professor has a hobby of stealing anything he can get his hands on from the poet’s life. There is also poetry and interwoven tales that expand the inner hopes and thoughts of the characters. Most of all, it is the result of a life-long appreciation of the beauty of great writing and the joy of discovery, and also of the emptiness and cruelty of academic lives devoted to the study of beauty. This is, in all senses, a mature work by an author who has loved words, stories, books, and ideas and wants to make sense of all such love.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Possession