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 LINES:
Losing someone you love is akin to a deep physical wound. It will eventually heal but there will always be a scar.
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Be warned: this is a three-hankie book. At age 14, both of the author’s parents were diagnosed with cancer. Her mother died when Smith was 18 and a freshman in college; her father died when she was 25. What’s remarkable is the lack of self-pity and clear-eyed analysis of her own grief, which will resonate with anyone who has ever lost a dear one. Smith eventually became a grief counselor with hospice services, and I have no doubt she is an amazing resource for her clients. What makes this memoir different from the many existing “I lost my parents/brother/sister/husband” titles is Smith’s background as a therapist, in conjunction with her personal experience. She divides her story into sections based on Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). However, she tells her story in a non-linear fashion that frames grief in the larger concept of survival. So while you watch her engage in substance abuse and abusive relationships, you’re also seeing her as a compassionate, competent individual who has lived through incredible loss and come out the other side, stronger and grateful for the experience. The description of her father’s death is simply put, exquisite prose, unembellished and real. This is the defining story of the author’s life, but I sure hope she writes another book- she is a remarkable writer.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Rules of Inheritance
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:
Actors are our spectral friends. They are figures who loom in our lives as large as or maybe even larger than our actual acquaintances, but with an important difference: they don’t know who we are.
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Eclectic culture-vulture Sante (author of the deliciously seedy Lowlife) teams with Pierson in this compilation of essays about Hollywood actors from the great years of the 20th century. There are some real gems here: John Updike on “Suzie Creamcheese” (Doris Day), Berkeley’s own Griel Marcus on the eternally squalid J.T. Walsh, Siri Hustvedt on Franklin Pangborn, and–my favorite–Sante on “Warner Brothers Fat Men” (e.g. Eugene Palette, Sidney Greenstreet et. al.). An agreeable and engaging dossier for devoted movie buffs and definitely an argument in favor of a William Demarest Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars: given naturally, to our underappreciated character actors.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: OK You Mugs
OPENING LINE:
Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years: with an idiot — in this case, my brother, Shaun — deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens.
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Many stories of zombies give a glossed over explanation involving a disease run amok, but few tales of the living dead bother to think through the epidemiology of how a zombie plague might behave, and what it would be like for the survivors of that plague. In Feed, author Mira Grant has thought about it a great deal, and the life for brother and sister Shaun and Georgia is one where every place you go, every thing you do, is about just staying alive and proving that you haven’t been infected. When a medical cure turns into a medical nightmare where the dead rise again, the survivors are still trying to go on with a semblance of civilizaition, including electing an American president. Shaun and Georgia are bloggers who are picked to follow the campaign of a promising candidate, hoping it will be their ticket to success and ratings. They just have to stay alive in a world still riddled with pockets of zombies, where everyone left on the planet harbors the infection and could turn into a zombie themselves. Not only is this a remarkable look at a post-apocalyptic world, it is a page turner that will have you racing to the end as you are rooting for characters that are funny and loyal and true.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Feed
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
GREAT LINE:
The river that erased her past will write her future.
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Up the Yangtze, a documentary about the changes that happen along the Yangtze River due to the government’s decision to dam it, is a visual feast. It is a slow-paced film, but quite engaging. We follow the lives of two young villagers as they are sent to work on a luxury cruise ship. Although you see the negative impact of modernization on what was once a beautiful land, you are also presented with the perspective of progress and necessity. Farmers need to send their kids off to the city to work for money, and some of this work contributes to the destruction of their land. Many of the scenes are poignant, such as one in particular when the camera shows a family’s house being overtaken by rising waters. A must-see!
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Up The Yangtze
GREAT LINES:
[T]heir chief enemies knew how to write, whereas the Vandals despised the art of writing to the end of their days. Whatever information we have about the Vandals … is inevitably less than favorable.
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Wisława Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. Don’t let that scare you. This is a breezy, charming collection of responses to reading – don’t call them book reviews, she pleads. Think of “Nonrequired Reading” as a blog between covers. In the first essay Szymborska lets herself feel superior to scientists who have made their names discovering chloroform or proving the germ theory. “[D]id I ever forget to show up at my own wedding like Pasteur?” In an essay about terrariums, Szymborska protests that she can’t stand the creepy crawlies that live in them. “I’m not this book’s ideal reader. I’m reading it only because since childhood I’ve derived pleasure from accumulating useless knowledge. And after all, who’s to say what’s useless and what isn’t?” Knowing how to pack a frog for mailing might come in handy one day, right? Szymborska takes issue with authors who say the clothing one wears reflects the type of society in which one lives. In Rome, she protests, “[i]t wasn’t easy to tell a slave from a free man on the street; a slave might strut covered in gold, whereas free citizens just tossed on any old thing.” All the pieces are short, a page or two. If you have no interest in the topic at hand, well, maybe Szymborska doesn’t either and uses it as an excuse to talk about something else, some mishap from childhood, say, or how unfair it is that widgeons have yet to appear in poems. Szymborska is an intellectual, well-read and thoughtful; rarely, however, does her chatty, chiding, bemused voice talk down to us. A fun read and, possibly, you’ll find fresh leads through Szymborska’s reading to more of your own.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Nonrequired Reading
GREAT LINES:
Yet though the bridge might last still for many years, the rust would eat deeper and deeper. The earthquake would shake the foundations, and then on some stormy day a span would go down. Like the man, so the creation of man would not last forever.
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A young man, Ish, is a graduate student at Berkeley who goes on a camping trip. On this outing he is bitten by a rattlesnake and forced to doctor the wound himself. When he recovers he walks down the mountain and finds that the people of the world have been wiped out by disease. He adopts a dog and takes up residence in his parents’ empty house. On outings he does encounter some survivors but they seem to either be living in the past or have mental problems. In his solitude he drives to New York City and back. Again the people he meets are not those with whom he wants to share his life. Then one evening he sees fireplace smoke coming from West Berkeley. What happens when Ish discovers other people he can form a tribe with gives this early post-apocalyptic story its most human elements. And as an added bonus the descriptions of the landscapes are truly amazing. I cannot get them out of my head!
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Earth Abides
GREAT LINES:
The warm air, the wine, and the melancholy beauty of the night filled me with a delicious sadness. It would always be like this, I thought. The brilliant, friendly island, full of secrets, my family and my animals around me and, for good measure, our friends.
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I think it’s hard to find a more appealing book to read aloud than Gerald Durrell’s accounts of growing up with an eccentric family on the island of Corfu in the 1930s. His two books of memoirs, of which this title is the second (the first being My Family and Other Animals) are a marvelous combination of rich, evocative language and hysterically funny accounts of a family of determined iconoclasts- human, animal and reptile. Durrell later became a famous naturalist, and from birth was fascinated with living things. He collected pets of all sorts, even as a young boy in London, but his passion for animal collecting got a huge shot in the arm when the Durrell family moved to the Greek island of Corfu. It’s hard to say what’s more fun, his accounts of the family (the artsy brother Lawrence, of Alexandria Quartet fame; the gun-toting blowhard brother Leslie; sister Margo, obsessed with fashion and spirituality; their long-suffering mother, who dealt with most situations with remarkable equanimity; and a cast of wonderful Greek characters who become family of choice) or his adventures in the natural world, catching and collecting creatures from octopi and turtles to bats and owls. But the reason I read Durrell aloud to my children is the language: it is sublime. Save for Kipling, there’s no better way to bathe a young ear in beautiful prose and awaken a love of the written and spoken word. The chapter I reread to them most often describes Gerry’s lunch with a crazed gourmand Countess, and the descriptions of food are deliciously over the top. If you didn’t read these as a child or teen, it’s not too late- and indeed, Durrell’s work is intended for an adult audience, but suitable for anyone over 6.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Birds, Beasts and Relatives