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:
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:
“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:
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 was born in 1960 on Taiwan the island of my father’s exile. War, Communism and the resulting famine had driven Baba from his native Manchuria, in the northeast reaches of China. Later we moved to California via Japan. Baba named me Xuan. It means “Forget Sorrow.”
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This beautiful graphic novel is part memoir and part history as it spans several generations in Yang’s father’s family. In this book her ancestors face war, famine, and communist oppression in Manchuria. The stories of their successes and failures as well as their shifting family dynamics are captivating. And because these stories are recounted to Yang by her father, it means pieces from Yang’s own life are interwoven into the story. Her personal history hiding from an abusive ex-boyfriend stalker and working toward reconciliation with her father in contemporary America add another layer to the narrative. All of this complexity is captured by Yang’s gorgeous black-ink drawings which are evocative of the places and her character’s emotions. I read this book as slowly as possible fearing every time I picked it up that I would finish it and not have it to read the next day. It was wonderful and I highly recommend Forget Sorrow to fans of graphic memoirs.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Forget Sorrow
OPENING LINE:
On a fine June weekend in 2007, in the verdant reaches of Northern New Hampshire, I decided to change the world.
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Are you a word nerd? Have you ever driven across the country with someone you love? Both?!? Then The Great Typo Hunt should be on your reading list. The premise is simple. Deck conceived a mission to save the world one grammatical correction at a time. He recruited Herson and a couple sidekicks and they set out on an epic road trip. Their plan was to circle the United States locating typos on signs and when possible correcting them. They philosophize about grammar’s importance in communication and wax eloquent about the elixir of correction that is a mainstay of their typo correction kit. But as seriously as they take their quest, they are also really funny and we are in on all the jokes. The result is a really funny travel book about grammar. It is Strunk & White meets National Lampoon’s vacation and I found it a pure pleasure.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Great Typo Hunt
GREAT LINES:
“You got family in New York?”
“No…I’m gonna see about a girl. My parents think I’m going for a job interview, and it’s sorta true. If it works out with this girl, I’m gonna try and find a job as a web designer.”
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When I opened this graphic novel I saw the first panel showed two people standing outside of an Oakland Public Library branch and I knew I was going to love it. Shiga’s artwork is very easy on the eyes and the story is charming. A young man who works at the public library by day and hacks away at a website by night makes a cross-country journey to see his best friend Sara, a young woman with dreams of becoming a publishing intern. It’s a nerdy, sweet “will they or won’t they” story, filled with wry comments about what it means to be 20-something these days. The illustrations are clean and approachable. The two color palettes – pinks and light blues – are used effectively for jump cuts and moving the reader through the story. It was a fast read, and I was so delighted by it that as soon as I finished I read it clean through a second time. If you want to see pretty illustrations of some local spots, or if you like your comics to read like romantic comedies this is the book for you.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Empire State
OPENING LINE:
I am a forty-one-year-old woman living by myself, in the same one-bedroom flat where I have always lived, in a derelict building on the outskirts of Beijing that is threatened to be demolished by government-backed real estate developers.
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This is a powerful collection of stories by local author Yiyun Li. Most are set in 20th century China and certainly there is a strong sense of time and place. But the dominant feature of the stories are the characters. Li’s main characters are outsiders, people who in various ways have positioned themselves away from their family members, co-workers and the rest of society. They often have different expectations for their lives than the people around them and in many ways they are alone. Through these people Li explores the themes of fidelity, loyalty, family, responsibility, isolation and loss. Each is victim as well as hero and their stories were so attuned to the human experience they made me ache.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
OPENING LINE:
When Isaac Amin sees two men with rifles walk into his office at half past noon on a warm autumn day in Tehran, his first thought is that he won’t be able to join his wife and daughter for lunch, as promised.
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It is September 1980 and the Amin family’s existence is turned inside out by the Iranian revolution. Isaac Amin, a gem dealer and a Jew is arrested and taken to prison on charges that are unclear. He does not know whether he will be released, killed or subjected to constant torture until he dies alone in prison. Farnaz, his wife, is unable to learn anything about Isaac’s arrest or confinement. She does know that her family and their lifestyle are at risk and she becomes less and less able to function in their home. Daughter Shirin is off balance at school as she tries to understand who are friends or enemies and what she can say to each. Son Parviz has been living in New York, sent away from the family to protect him from the revolution. An exile living among people who are not his own, he is friendless, out of touch with his family, and as his money runs out increasingly dependent on the Hasidic Jews with whom he lives. This is the story of how each finds a way to survive the painful ordeal of Isaac’s arrest. Inextricably tied to time and place it is also a story about a cultural revolution and how people who have thought of themselves as coexistent with a place may need to become independent of it. It is a hard and beautiful book.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Septembers of Shiraz
OPENING LINE:
We tend to think of mental hospitals as snake pits, hells of chaos and misery, squalor and brutality.
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I was gobsmacked by this book! This volume is filled with beautiful photographs of crumbling asylums. It is a form of photojournalism that tells of the majesty of asylums: their architecture, interiors, landscaping and purpose. And it also tells the story of their decline and decay: the shattered windows, peeling paint, abandoned suitcases and trees growing up through cement. The pictures themselves are stunning and the story they paint is equally moving. Coupled with an introductory essay by Oliver Sacks who clearly loves these facilities and what they represent for our society, the result is a marvelous book.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Asylum