The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke

This week we’re featuring some of our favorite Audio Books, just in time for planning your summer road trips. You can also click the Audio Books tag at the bottom of this post or at the top of the tag cloud on the right hand side of our blog’s home page for more great audio book suggestions!

Are you intrigued by the magical city of Venice? Did you love Peter Pan as a child? If so, then the juvenile novel, The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke, is a book you’re sure to enjoy this summer, either reading the book to yourself on the beach, or listening to the audio in the car with the entire family. The winner of several European Children’s Book Awards, it is a captivating read both for its story and its immersion into the mysterious and beautiful city of Venice which is, in its own way, another character in this story.

The book follows the story of two brothers, Bo and Prosper, who run away to Venice after their mother dies and they are put in the care of their cruel aunt and uncle who only want to keep Bo, the younger boy. In Venice they are befriended by a group of orphans who are supported by an enigmatic young man who calls himself the Thief Lord. The Thief Lord keeps them sheltered in an old movie theatre and fed by stealing goods from the wealthy homes in Venice and selling them to an unscrupulous shopkeeper. The Thief Lord is soon commissioned to steal an unusual article that leads the story into many twists and turns. Finally, it comes to a magical/fantastical climax on the Isola Segreta where a relic is enshrined that will change their lives forever. I first listened to the book driving back and forth to work and then reread it for a children’s book club selection, totally enjoying it both times. All the children and adults I know who have read it have also felt the same way about this exceptional book – an enjoyable escape.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Deep Down True by Juliette Fay

This week we’re featuring some of our favorite Audio Books, just in time for planning your summer road trips. You can also click the Audio Books tag at the bottom of this post or at the top of the tag cloud on the right hand side of our blog’s home page for more great audio book suggestions!

I actually listened to this book as a downloadable audio book, and I was afraid that the narration, which I didn’t like initially, was going to keep me from enjoying it. But, as it turned out, the narrator positively influenced my perception of the protagonist. I ended up loving it, and I think those of you who like good women’s literature will also fall in love with it. Juliette Fay is also the author of Shelter Me.

Dana, a recently divorced mom, job-challenged, with a wayward and slightly goth niece having shown up on her doorstep, struggles to figure out who she’s going to be now and how to be true to herself when everyone else needs a piece of her. She’s uncertain of what she wants, and at the same time, afraid of finding out what that is. It’s my favorite kind of book that can make me feel like I’m right there, feeling everything the main character feeling. I think I especially liked that she was a bit afraid, like she was never sure she was doing the right thing. Ultimately you have to be true to who you are beyond the surface, and if you are, whatever you do is the right thing.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

This week we’re featuring some of our favorite Audio Books, just in time for planning your summer road trips. You can also click the Audio Books tag at the bottom of this post or at the top of the tag cloud on the right hand side of our blog’s home page for more great audio book suggestions!

There’s nothing like a good traveling story to accompany a long summer road trip. And, if that story has fantastic literary merit, well, that’s an added bonus. One book that fits the bill is Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver. It follows the journeys of four main characters, Taylor Greer, her mother Alice Greer, Annawake Fourkiller, and Cash Stillwater. The stories of these characters and their friends, relations, and people they pick up along the way, are woven together in a far-reaching, close-touching story about family and home.

Taylor and her adopted daughter, Turtle, begin the novel on a road trip through the Grand Canyon. While visiting the Hoover Dam, Turtle sees a man fall off the edge into one of the drain pipes. After they finally convince local authorities to send a rescue team and the man is saved, Turtle and Taylor become overnight heroes. They even appear on Oprah and tell the world about Turtle’s unique beginnings. Several years earlier, Turtle was left with Taylor by an elderly woman, while Taylor was parked at a truck stop in the Cherokee Nation. Turtle had evidently suffered sexual abuse and would not speak even though she was about three years old. Enter Annawake Fourkiller, recently graduated attorney and member of the Cherokee Nation.

Annawake sees Taylor and Turtle on Oprah and questions Taylor about the legality of Turtle’s adoption, since Cherokee children cannot be adopted without the permission of the tribe. Feeling pressured by Annawake, Taylor runs away with Turtle and they are eventually accompanied by her mother, Alice, who has left her television-obsessed husband. They journey across the country, with no purpose other than keeping their family together. Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated subplot, Cash Stillwater’s boss at a touristy jewelry store in Wyoming commits suicide. This gives Cash a good enough reason to head home to the Cherokee Nation, where his mournful life just might find some meaning again.

I enjoyed this novel because it is wide-sweeping in its scope, but still manages to capture the very intimate meaning of family and belonging. Kingsolver’s characteristically powerful writing plus hearing the audio version, gave me a strong sense of truly knowing all of the characters, even secondary ones. As the plot lines thickened and the characters developed, I was entranced by the story and would sit a little longer in my car once I got where I was going, just so I could listen for a few more minutes. If you enjoy novels that explore the depths of character and weave lots of seemingly loose ends together into a satisfying conclusion, Pigs in Heaven will be a great read for you.

Pigs in Heaven is a sequel to The Bean Trees, a novel that tells the story Turtle’s extraordinary adoption and Taylor’s crash course in parenting.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork and Corkscrew by Peter Mayle

This week we’re featuring some of our favorite Audio Books, just in time for planning your summer road trips. You can also click the Audio tag at the bottom of this post or at the top of the tag cloud on the right hand side of our blog’s home page for more great audio book suggestions!

Eat your way across France and then write about it? That’s right. Peter Mayle took the challenge and ran with it, and the result is a literary delight that will leave you laughing at the wonder (and at times horror) of the French culinary world. From frog leg festivals to the blessing of the sublime truffle, Mayle’s
year-long journey will captivate you.

This book is especially engaging as an audio edition — narrated by Simon Jones — as you can truly appreciate the French pronunciation of their foodstuffs (something they take very seriously as evidenced by the amount of time and money the French are willing to spend in pursuit of gastronomic enjoyment). In addition, narrator Simon Jones’ droll humor truly brings to life Mayle’s descriptions of life in France.

And never fear, Mayle does not simply drag you along from food item to food item. There are also delightful forays into kitchens, restaurants, and local festivals all interspersed with informative, and yet often hilarious, historical background on the subject.

For anyone who has yet to give nonfiction a try, this is your book. Put it in your car, listen as you clean or organize your closets, or just get inspired to try some of those French recipes you have gathering dust in the corner of your kitchen. You’ll feel as if you have spent a year in France!

If you enjoy this audio book, try Mayle’s first book A Year In Provence on audio, or try any of his wonderful nonfiction writings (my personal favorites) or his novels.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Travels with Charley; in Search of America by John Steinbeck

This week we’re featuring some of our favorite Audio Books, just in time for planning your summer road trips. You can also click the Audio Books tag at the bottom of this post or at the top of the tag cloud on the right hand side of our blog’s home page for more great audio book suggestions!

What better book to consider taking on a road trip than this one? (Okay, besides  Kerouac’s On the Road.) I’ve enjoyed Steinbeck’s writing ever since I read Of Mice and Men back in High School. Last year, the classics book club that I was in read what many consider to be his greatest work, The Grapes of Wrath. A nonfiction book club at another library had read Travels with Charley and almost everyone — including two friends — loved it, so I knew I’d have to read it. Not long ago I was able to listen to Ron McLarty’s wonderful narration of Steinbeck’s journey. I hadn’t heard McLarty before, but to me, his voice seemed to truly capture John Steinbeck.

Steinbeck and his French poodle, Charley, pack up a camper on the back of a truck and leave Steinbeck’s New York home just after Labor Day to head out to re-discover our country. His goals are to travel incognito, to only use his first name whenever possible, and to stick to the smaller roads and avoid the major highways as much as possible. He starts out heading East through New England and up into Maine before heading West across the Northern part of the country. He eventually makes a loop around the country, including the West coast and the deep South before venturing back up to his home in New York several months later. The National Steinbeck Center in his hometown of Salinas, California has a large map of his travels on display.

There has been a bit of controversy in recent years since people have discovered that Steinbeck did not write a completely accurate diary of his travels. He fudged the timeline about when he was in each location and how long  the various parts of the trip took. He mentions his wife meeting him in a hotel at a couple points along the journey, when she was with him much more of the trip than he indicated. Some of the people he meets (waitresses, policemen, mechanics) are composites of people he met and his own imagination.  But, in recent years we have also heard of many other somewhat fictionalized memoirs, see: James Frey, Augusten Burroughs, and  David Sedaris.

Personally, it doesn’t bother me that a great American novelist like John Steinbeck probably fictionalized large parts of his travel memoir about America. He’s a story teller, and he’s telling us a fantastic story of a man and his dog meeting the everyday people throughout our country at a time in our history which is both nostalgic and embarrassing to look back upon.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when the author laments the disappearance of the city or town in favor of sprawl, as well as the homogenization of the country. Imagine how much more sprawl has occurred and how much more homogenous America is now, fifty years later.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

The Rook by Daniel O’Malley

This debut novel opens with a woman standing in a park in the rain at night surrounded by dead bodies wearing latex gloves — and she has no memory of who she is. She finds a letter in her pocket which begins “The body you are wearing used to be mine.” How can you resist an opening scene like that one? I certainly couldn’t when I discovered this book just after it came out earlier this year. I’ve since recommended it to several co-workers and friends and now I’m passing this great book on to you.

The woman with amnesia in the park is Myfanwy Thomas (pronounced like Tiffany), and it turns out that she is an agent for Her Majesty’s Supernatural Secret Service. The operative words there are ‘supernatural’ and ‘secret’ because the stuff this agency deals with is way out there beyond just vampires and werewolves — and it is very, very secret. Her position is called a Rook, and it turns out the agency, called the Checquy, is based on the pieces in the game of chess (yeah, it’s as complicated as it sounds).

The letter Myfanwy found directs her to an apartment where there is a warm shower, clean clothes and a comfy bed. Further letters explain who she is, more about her super secret job, and the fact that someone within the Checquy is a traitor and trying to kill her. One of the letters also lets her know that she has a choice, she can try to resume her dangerous life in a secret government organization, or she can simply walk away and flee the country with a vast sum of money in a secret bank account.

Myfanwy decides to stay and try to determine who the traitor is. But, she must do this while re-learning everything about herself and the Checquy. She doesn’t even remember how she takes her tea, let alone all of the inner workings of this very strange agency. She also soon discovers that many of the agents working for the Checquy, including herself, have special abilities (think of the mutants from the X-Men). Her work-mates include one person with four bodies, an aristocratic woman who can enter anyone’s dreams, a man whose skin oozes toxins depending on his mood, and the most attractive vampire one can imagine.  So, yeah, dealing with a house full of sentient purple slime is all in a day’s work for Rook Thomas.

Daniel O’Malley has written one heck of a debut novel that is full of wit as well as suspense and fantastic supernatural action. There’s so much more to this novel than I was able to describe in this blog post! Even if you’re not normally a “Fantasy reader” but you enjoy a good suspense and espionage story, give this one a try. And, if you are a Fantasy reader, what are you waiting for? Click that link below and get reading! It’s also available as an audio book, read by Susan Duerden.

Find and reserve this new book in our catalog.

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Is The Hunger Games too disturbing and violent for your taste? Try Lois Lowry’s classic Newbery Award-winning book, The Giver. This Community, which is never named, is a polar opposite of Panem. There is no war, no starvation, and no strife of any kind. The lives of the residents are completely structured. A group of Elders looks out for the welfare of each of the citizens in the Community. A Community in which each married couple if approved will raise two children, a boy and a girl. Unlike the conflict torn world of Panem, Lowry has created a utopian society, where conflict and confrontation are avoided at all costs.

At an annual ceremony every eleven year old is given their assignment for their adult responsibilities. We meet eleven year old Jonah, who is a bit apprehensive at the thought of his adult assignment. Jonah does not know what job he would want in the community. His father is a Nurturer, who cares for infants from birth until they get placed with their families at age one. His mother works in the Justice Center, where she is a judge. Neither of these occupations seem very exciting to Jonah. He also knows the Committee works very hard to ensure the proper match for each person. When Jonah is chosen for the most prestigious job in the community, The Receiver, his world begins to be altered. Will Jonah be able to survive in the Community as he learns of the truth about it?

This book is also as an audio book on CD and a downloadable audio book narrated by Ron Rifkin.

Find and reserve this book in our online catalog.

Somewhere in Heaven: the Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve by Christopher Andersen

I am a big Superman fan. I’ve seen all the movies, read a ton of comics and graphic novels, and own several action figures and tee shirts, too. Naturally, I became a fan of Christopher Reeve, who starred in the four movies in the late seventies and eighties. While Reeve will forever be linked to his role as the Man of Steel, his career continued — with varying degrees of success — in such films as Somewhere in Time and The Remains of the Day. Of course, I was shocked and saddened along with the rest of the world to learn of Chris’ paralyzing horse riding accident in 1995. But, I was also impressed with his efforts to recover and spread the word about spinal cord injuries, paralysis, and new research opportunities. Equally impressive is that he continued his acting career in a remake of the Hitchcock classic Rear Window and with a role on the television show Smallville. I also read, loved, and highly recommend Reeve’s autobiography, written while recovering from the accident, Still Me.

These roles and events may be what we know and admire Chris for, but they barely scratch the surface of who he really was. Andersen’s book does a marvelous job telling the reader about Christopher and Dana Reeve’s lives away from the cameras, as well as in front of them. How Christopher, a graduate of Julliard and a huge star after Superman, returned to Williamstown, MA  each summer for the annual theater festival to continue working on his craft. It was there that he met Dana, a singer and actress, who turned out to be the love of his life. Their courtship is a touching tale, especially considering the complications of Chris’s celebrity, his children from a previous relationship, and his deep-seated fear of marriage.

No great love story is as simple as falling in love and living happily ever after. In addition to Chris’s fear of marriage, their individual careers, the complications of a blended family, and the horrible accident that robbed Reeve of his ability to move below his neck were some of the bigger challenges they faced. Friends, family, and even Dana herself said that what happened to Chris took them way beyond the vows of “in sickness and in health.” She was a tireless caregiver to Chris, while also raising their son, Will, helping with Christopher’s charity work, especially the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, and pursuing her own career. Their love story had a doubly tragic end. Not only did Chris die of cardiac arrest in October of 2004, but just a year later Dana, a non-smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 2006.

What made this true story even better than Andersen’s talent as a biographer is the fact that the audio book is narrated by actor, and close friend of the Reeve’s, Edward Herrmann. Whether or not you are a fan of Superman, if you want to read (or listen to) a great American love story, try the aptly named Somewhere in Heaven.

Find a reserve your copy of this remarkable love story in our catalog.

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee by Sarah Silverman

Recently, I’ve found myself listening to memoirs of Jewish women from New York, read by the authors themselves. That’s how The Bedwetter  ended up in my CD player. It was kind of an accident. Now, I’ve seen the Sarah Silverman Show a few times, but just a few. I love black humor, but blue humor bores me pretty quickly. So that’s why I was never hooked by Sarah. However, I listened to this audiobook twice … once during the daily commute, and once with company. As a reader, she is enchanting.

Sarah Silverman was taught by her father to swear. She had her first public performance in a market when she was three years old. There she stood and, at her father’s signal, let loose every swear word she knew. Her audience was shocked, but they laughed. From that moment, little Sarah became aware of  the low investment/high reward ratio of naughty humor. And she loved the rush.

In her early life, Sarah dealt with the kinds of traumas we all do: wetting the bed regularly until the teen years, being hung out a twelfth-story window by a drug-addled dude, being prescribed 16 Xanax a day to help with depression.

Through the stories of growing up and finding her way as a comedienne – from standup in New York to television in LA – Sarah Silverman shows what she’s made of. And the listener begins to understand that beyond the fart jokes and blasphemy, beyond the persona of a clueless and arrogant ignoramus, is a pretty smart woman at work. And she is cute.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove

All fiction asks “what if?” (What if a boy named Huck Finn ran away with a slave named Jim and sailed the Mississippi?)  Science Fiction and Fantasy do this to an even greater extent (What if a scientist was able to re-animate a human corpse using lightning?) Within Sci-Fi & Fantasy the sub-genre of Alternative History takes actual events from History and asks what if they had happened differently (What if Hitler’s Germany had won World War II?) Harry Turtledove is considered the master of Alternative History and in this novel he asks: “What if The North rises again – in the stunning saga of the Second Civil War?”

It’s been a generation since the South defeated the North in the Civil War, and a disgraced Abraham Lincoln now roams the United States preaching the gospel of socialism. Meanwhile, the Confederate States have purchased territories from the Empire of Mexico. This would extend the CSA’s rule from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the United States decides that they should not be allowed to expand, and thus begins the Second Civil War. Many familiar names appear as the story unfolds: George Armstrong Custer patrols the frontier of Kansas using the new fangled Gatling guns against the Indians; General Stonewall Jackson is the supreme military commander of the Confederate forces and directs the Battle of St. Louis; Frederick Douglas is a journalist from Rochester, New York who travels to the dangerous border covering the war; J.E.B. Stuart leads the CSA forces in the newly annexed south-west territories; and Samuel Langhorne Clemens is the editor of a newspaper in San Francisco with a loving wife and two children. The characters are all as vivid as one could hope for and the action of the war – both on and off the battlefield – moves the story along keeping the reader wondering what “happened” next.

I’m a huge Sci-Fi & Fantasy reader, but have never been much into Alternative History for some reason. Also, I must admit that I have been reluctant to try Mr. Turtledove due to my own preconceived notions. You see, being from the North, I was never very interested in a story in which the South won the Civil War. I now freely admit how wrong I was – this novel was thoroughly enjoyable! If you like Historical Fiction, then chances are good that you’ll enjoy Harry Turtledove’s exploration of “what if” there were a second Civil War in the 1880s. I listened to this book on audio, and while it took me a while to finish it (21 CDs), I enjoyed listening to the talented and prolific George Guidall. (As of this writing, there’s even an excerpt from this audio book on George’s website!)

One of the hallmarks of great fiction (speculative, or otherwise) is that it makes you stop and think – and maybe even reconsider what you thought – about the given subject. How Few Remain certainly made me reconsider my views of the historical figures and events surrounding the Civil War.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.