OPENING LINE:

The truly revolutionary promise of our nation’s founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.

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For the founding fathers pursuing happiness was an American ideal. Dan Savage takes up the challenge. For spice (and as a backhanded tribute to the separation of church and state) Dan adds the naughty flavoring of sin, traveling the nation in pursuit of happiness via the seven deadlies: greed, lust, sloth, gluttony, envy, pride, and anger. In the Gluttony chapter Dan Savage flies in to a Fat Acceptance convention in search of people unashamed of excess. Peculiarly skinny in a sea of Big Beautiful Women, Dan finds himself a center of attention. “’So how long have you been an FA?’ ask[s new acquaintance] Teresa. An effay? ‘Fat admirer,’” the woman explains. Though Dan’s lead in to the convention is often very funny, with self-deprecating remarks and misjudgments, the stories he hears once there can be tragic. Teresa tells him she has had surgery to slim down, and mourns friends lost to obesity. In the Envy chapter, Dan signs up for a week at a $500-a-night health spa, thinking he will get pampered and catered to, experiencing firsthand a lifestyle he has envied from afar. When Dan arrives and is repulsed by the “cheap, tacky décor,” it’s not the first hint he’s taken a wrong turn on envy road. Though Dan Savage can be opinionated, occasionally even a scold, the tone is more like that of the curmudgeonly Andy Rooney than the high moral dudgeon of a Robert Bork (Dan’s title is a play on a tract by the rejected Supreme Court nominee). The kvetching is hilarious often enough, so I forgive him for when it’s not. For the Greed chapter Dan goes to a casino; for the Lust chapter he hangs out with Swingers; for the Anger chapter he learns how to fire a pistol; for the Pride chapter he hangs out in L.A. with yuppie gays; and for the Sloth chapter, well, wouldn’t doing something to indulge one’s sloth be working at cross purposes? And how much happiness does Dan Savage run to ground? Some. But the pursuit, perhaps, is the goal.

Check the BPL catalog for this title: Skipping Towards Gomorrah

OPENING LINES:

It was dark where she was crouched but the little girl did as she’d been told. The lady had said to wait…

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In the year 1913 a little girl aged 4 is left alone on a dock in Melbourne, Australia. All she has is a little white suitcase that contains a book of fairy tales by Eliza Makepeace. The little girl is later named Nell and raised by the dockmaster and his wife. What happened to lead up to this child being abandoned is the mystery that must be solved in this atmospheric novel. Nell, and years later, her granddaughter search for clues. The answer involves a great manner house in Cornwall, England, smugglers caves, and of course a forgotten garden. Read the book to unravel the mystery along with them.

Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Forgotten Garden

OPENING LINE:

A white light seeped through the shoji windows and into the room, along with the morning chill.

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Tsukiyama’s sprawling historical fiction title covers Japan before, during and after World War II, yet maintains an intimate tone thanks to richly developed characters. One would expect it to feel like War and Peace in its complexity, with the large time span, several sets of families and multiple interconnecting story lines, but Tsukiyama’s characters and plots are fascinating and clearly drawn. We follow a set of brothers (Hiroshi and Kenji) and sisters (Aki and Haru), whose fates intertwine as they explore the worlds of Noh theatre and sumo wrestling. I never thought I’d have any interest in sumo, but Tsukiyama has a gift for getting the reader invested in the character, and I would have followed Hiroshi’s story with interest no matter his career choice. What stayed with me, though, was not so much the myriad details of these two very different worlds, but a sense of what WWII did to the Japanese civilian population, as they struggled to survive and then rebuild. One character develops significant mental illness, and her suicide is heartbreaking, because the reader has seen her grow from a light-hearted girl to a young woman haunted by what she has lived through. Excellent historical fiction makes us realize our human similarities to people from other times and cultures, growing empathy for the present as well as the past. Tsukiyama is known for popular, often romantic titles- and this is no exception- but she is a writer of skill and taste who broadens readers’ horizons. Actor Stephen Park’s sensitive but unmushy reading strikes just the right note, and the pronunciation of Japanese names and places is refreshingly correct.

Check the BPl catalog for this title: The Street of a Thousand Blossoms

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

GREAT LINE:

Winston Churchill warned publicly in 1901: “The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings.”

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The Nineteenth Century had been the greatest era of human progress in history: the near-worldwide abolition of slavery and serfdom, the advancement of liberal democracy in Europe and America, the invention of steamships and railways, the beginning of modern medicine. As the Twentieth Century opened, most of the world’s leaders felt sure that progress in the lives of ordinary people could only continue. And for many it did. Yet for others – perhaps for half the world – life descended into unimaginable wars, tyrannies, and mass murders. How that happened, how the Twentieth Century was at once both a fulfillment of moral and material progress for some and an absolute catastrophe for others, is the subject of this book. Martin Gilbert is a professor at Oxford and the world’s greatest student of modern political history. Throughout the book, he tries to select key events that drove progress and failure. Of course, in some sense the question he poses in unanswerable by any single book, but you come away with at least an idea what went right and what went wrong, and what we can do to make the Twenty First Century better. This is a gigantic work, three volumes totaling some 3,000 pages, but since each chapter covers exactly one year, it is easy to choose the parts that interest you the most.

Check the BPL catalog for this title: A History of the Twentieth Century

GREAT LINES:

“Why did you come to Gorazde?”

“Why? Because you are still here, not raped and scattered, not entangled in the limbs of thousands of others at the bottom of a pit. Because Gorazde had lived.”

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Joe Sacco’s explanation for why he came to Gorazde, one of the UN-declared “safe areas” in Bosnia, which I quote above, flutters down the page in small rectangles of text across a two-page drawing of life going on – two men and an elderly woman chop firewood, a group of boys circle a soccer ball, two young women wearing knapsacks amble past tight hay mounds, while above the people small apartment blocks bear pockmarks from shrapnel and bullets. Joe Sacco started doing comics in the 80s, crafting wild tales of indie rock bands. He reinvented himself as a war correspondent, starting with a series on the intifada in Palestine. Sacco’s informants in Gorazde often seem as baffled as anyone as to how their home became a battleground. Many remember strong friendships that crumbled when ethnic lines became sharpened and uncrossable. Visual detail is often striking, from the weary faces to burnt-out cars in the street. On one page Sacco draws a series of ad hoc water wheels tethered beneath a bridge. “They were fashioned out of wood, barrels, parts of cars, bits of washing machines … Electric wire brought a modest current to a small percentage of Gorazde’s homes.” A portrait of war emerges from many stories, some modest, some harrowing, some merely eccentric. Whether the stories add up to an explanation for the killing, it’s tough to say. But there we go, trying to make sense out of it all.

Check the BPL catalog for this title: Safe Area Gorazde

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