GREAT LINES:
What it all boils down to is the simple fact that my mother is insane. Not dangerously insane, I’ll grant you, but nonetheless completely bats..
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Adam Chester’s mother is not just a helicopter mom, she takes it to a whole new level. And she manages to do it not just when her son is a small child, nor only when he lives near her. No, her nosy intrusion into Adam’s life is achieved largely through the US Postal Service and continues across state lines well into his adult life. She has opinions about his his roommates, the clothes he wears, his jobs, his wife and every other imaginable topic. As well, she is preoccupied with her own insurance and estate planning and regularly reminds Adam about these things. Her behavior is beyond neurotic and Adam’s exasperation is palpable. The overall effect would be bleak if it weren’t so darn funny. Not only does Adam’s writing make the material approachable, it was particularly delightful to listen to the audio version read by Adam and his mom. You can hear his annoyance, while she is strictly deadpan. On the whole this was a good bit of self-indulgent Schadenfreude. There is nothing like someone else’s misery to make me feel more satisfied with my own life, and at just 3 1/2 hours it was over before I could start to worry about them.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: S’Mother
OPENING LINES:
I have to. I’ve been fighting it all night. I’m going to lose. My battle is as futile as a woman feeling the first pangs of labor and deciding it’s an inconvenient time to give birth. Nature wins out. It always does.
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This book, the first in the “Women of the Otherworld” series, takes a new angle on the werewolf underworld. Elena Michaels is a journalist and the only female werewolf in the entire world. She struggles and fights her inner demons and she wants to be normal at all cost. However the wolf in her and her love for her maker brings her back to what she has left behind and what she has tried to forget. The author describes the emotions so vividly that you feel their joy and pain, you sympathize with the characters. But the book also has a bit of humor. It was refreshing to see a woman as the lead. I was fascinated by how the author was able to maintain an entire pack of male werewolves yet Elena was powerful enough to be respected by other members of her pack. The plot had some gaps that had to be filled in as I continued reading. And there is still some of the history about her makers left to be answered later in the series. This book leaves you wanting more. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Bitten
GREAT LINE:
Pete usually used his own door except when he could bully me into opening a people door for him, which he preferred.
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Dan Davis is on the verge of amazing riches when he successfully invents a household robot. But he is betrayed by his business partner and fiancee and his company is sold to a big corporation. He does get some money out of the deal and Dan uses that money to put himself into suspended animation. When he wakes up he finds that his money and his stocks are gone. Luckily in the time he has been asleep time travel has become possible. Now he needs to go back in time to set things right. There are many complications and plot twists as Dan works to be reunited with his soul mate and recover his fortune. At the same time Dan is trying to be reunited with his cat Pete. Pete is one of the great characters in this book and the title references him. When Pete finds that there is snow out of one door he asks Dan to open all of the other doors in the house to see if they might be a door into summer. Not only is this a charming bit of the story, it is also a good analogy for the novel’s plot as Dan keeps looking for a way into a sunnier situation.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Door Into Summer
OPENING LINE:
Properly trained a man can be a dog’s best friend.
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This is the story of Fiona Bristow and her three dogs. She lives in a little cottage on an island off the coast of Washington state. Her dogs are trained to be rescue dogs and she runs a dog training business. This sounds like a good life. But Fiona is the only survivor of a serial killer called “The Red Scarf Killer”. That man is still in prison but he has trained another man to copy his style and this man is coming after Fiona because she was the one that got away. To complicate matters, there is also a man named Simon who has recently moved onto the island and his young dog, Jaws, needs training. Could Simon be the one to share the rest of Fiona’s life? This book is especially good for how it weaves together a murder mystery with a romance in a very interesting way.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Search
GREAT LINE:
“If there is hope… it lies in the proles.”
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This is the story of the life of Winston Smith, a middle class intellectual worker living in Oceania, one of the world’s three superpowers at war. As it turns out, there has always been war everlasting between these superpowers. Winston’s job is to do the work of revising history, as ordered by his superiors in the “Inner Party.” People and events are fabricated and can vanish from history, and even the names of the enemy changes. Discovering the true purpose of everlasting war and manipulation of history leads Winston and the reader to the climax of this gripping and profoundly disturbing touchstone of a novel.
It is very tempting to draw comparisons to the social conditions of the current world. Themes of nationalism, class warfare, ubiquitous surveillance, and an overworked, distracted lower class ring true today. Orwell’s sensational writing is juicy and compelling reading and, like other works of great fiction, contains a seed of truth and a warning for all peoples of civilization.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: 1984
GREAT LINES:
Was this the answer? After all, an illusion, no matter how convincing, remained nothing more than an illusion. At least objectively. But subjectively, – Quite the opposite entirely.
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Philip K. Dick’s collection of short stories muses on alternative realities centered on one bizarre concept each. All of the stories in this collection are a bit of mind-bending fun! The collection’s namesake is first. It takes the idea that a certain kind of person can accurately predict crimes that happen in the future. But what happens when the chief of the department is implicated? The next two stories pretend that technology creates the ability to modify human memories and are about what impact it would have on an individual or a company. They are fun explorations of the concept of memory and impact of our choices on our future, whether we remember them or not. The first, “”We can remember it for you Wholesale”" is the basis for the Arnold Shwarzenegger sci-fi action movie “”Total Recall”". (The story is nothing like the movie, though, so is not spoiled at all by it.) And the last is “Paycheck.” In it, Dick shows how a bag of junk can be more valuable than a pile of money to a man who has lost his memory. I really enjoyed this story because of its message about perspective.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Minority Report
GREAT LINE:
I didn’t like Wuthering Heights at first, but the minute that specter, Cathy, scrabbled her bony fingers on the window glass- I was grasped by the throat and not let go.
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The story is on the surface rather pedestrian and predictable. In postwar Britain, a young writer finishing the book tour for her highly successful account of life in wartime London searches for a new topic for her next book, while being courted by a dashing, wealthy American. Enter a letter from a young farmer on the isle of Guernsey with a taste for Charles Lamb, and so begins her fascination with the plucky Guernsey folk who weathered the German occupation with courage and wit. Although it’s quite clear who our heroine will end up with, the journey to that satisfying conclusion is delightful, peopled with eccentric pig farmers, gay publishers, outspoken herbalists and the fierce 4 year old illegitimate daughter of a German medical officer and the book’s never-met but ever-present center, Elizabeth. Honestly, if I’d been reading it as a book, I would have put it down. But because of the multiple excellent readers, I couldn’t wait for an opportunity to drive so I could continue the story. Here is a case where good readers made all the difference in the world. The construction of the book, it consists entirely of letters between the many characters, lends itself to multiple readers one of whom is the fabulous English actress Juliet Mills.Themes of compassion, tolerance and global connections make this a true feel-good book but manage to avoid icky-sticky saccharine oversimplification of human nature. But the most delightful thing for me was how much all the characters were moved by the books they read, from Charles Lamb to Emily Bronte! It’s really about the joy of reading- or in this case of being read to.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
OPENING LINES:
Nine months Landman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.
In the Yiddish Policemen’s Union Chabon has created an alternate history of post WWII Jews resettled to Alaska. Readers step into this alternate place 60 years later as the district of Sitka is preparing for reversion and the Jews who populate the book are preparing for the unknown next steps in their individual and communal lives. The primary story teller is Meyer Landsman, a sad sack police detective working one of the last homicides before reversion. As the case proceeds the story grows larger to encompass not just the building where the murder took place and where Landsman lives but the local community, then the larger political and religious framework of the District and finally the global geopolitics of America and the Middle East. It is a nice blend of speculative and detective fiction with plenty of politics and sociology thrown in. And the fictional community of Sitka Jews has a language that was entirely new to me so I loved learning this language through the story while unraveling the alternate history. It’s more weighty than many mysteries, but not as dense as some historical fiction which made it just about right for me.
Check the BPL Catalog for this title: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union