Good Reads & Views

Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden by Diane Ackerman
635 ACK

Spend a year in a poet’s garden. This sensuous exploration of a garden, with side paths past other gardens and gardeners, poets and scientists and philosophers, is a meditation on the intersection between humanity and nature. From spring to the last snowflakes of winter, Ackerman’s garden provides beauty, drama, solace, inspiration, and so much more.

Valley of Dry Bones by Priscilla Royal
FIC Royal, Priscilla

When the queen’s emissaries ride into Tyndal Priory, blackmail and murder ride with them. The rapacious Baron Otes will use anyone and anything to gain some benefit, and finally gets his throat slit for his pains. With Brother Thomas and Brother Andrew among the suspects, Prioress Eleanor must find the killer of a man whose own sins may outweigh those of his murderer. The most recent of a series. If you like this one, try also Cassandra Clark.

The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks
616.855 SAC

The loss of an ability taken for granted—to read, to write, to speak, to recognize faces, to see at all—is terrifying. But many people devise ingenious ways to work around their loss, and in some cases even enrich their lives to the point where they would prefer not to regain the lost ability if it meant losing what they have gained in its place. Neurologist Sacks’ research into the subject became frighteningly personal as his own vision began to fail.  By the author of Musicophilia.

Ooku: The Inner Chambers by Fumi Yoshinaga
741.5 YOS

This series is rated M for Mature. In this alternate-history story set in Edo period Japan, a disease called “the red pox” has killed off 80 percent of the male population. Women must assume roles once held by men. A group of young men is restricted to the Shogun’s Inner Chambers to father a child for the young female Shogun. This multigenerational story is told from the point of view of a few of the courtiers as well as the young Shogun. It was surprising how much the men took on the affectations of courtly women after being asked to assume that role and how the government took pains to hide the fact that so few men remained.
If this time period interests you, you might also like the books of Laura Joh Rowland, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu or Shogun by James Clavell.

On the Edge and Bayou Moon by Ilona Andrews
Pbk. Andrews, Ilona

Between our world (“The Broken”) and the fantasy world called “The Weird” lies The Edge. In Georgia swampland, Edger families struggle to get by trading items from the Broken to those in the Weird. They have their own laws and their own magical defenses.
In the first book, On The Edge, Rose is trying to keep her Edger family together, and Weird-born blueblood Declan Camarine is trying to warn Edgers of a magical threat to their lives but has trouble getting anyone to listen to him. Rose assumes Declan wants her for his bride because of her fearsome magical flash power. The two fall in love as they fight for the Edge.
 In Bayou Moon, a feud between rival families heats up when Cerise’s parents are kidnapped and William (a changeling werewolf also featured in On The Edge) is sworn to kill one of the men responsible. The two fall in love as they unravel the mystery of Cerise’s grandfather and try to save Cerise’s parents.
Both books feature strong characters and explosive fight scenes. I liked the romances but was glad they didn’t overwhelm the complex fantasy story.
If this series interests you, you might also like the author’s Kate Daniels series, beginning with Magic Bites, or Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse books, which are also fantasy stories set in the South.

Jazz By Herman Leonard
779.092 LEO

Marvelous photographs of nearly every major jazz musician in concert and behind the scenes, especially from the 1950s and early 1960s, but also from the 1990s and some as recent as 2002.  Born in 1923, Leonard studied with Youssuf Karsh before he established a portrait studio in Greenwich Village and started hanging out at jazz night clubs.  By giving free prints to musicians and club managers he developed friendships that led to invitations to come to rehearsals and private jam sections, and soon his work appeared in publications such as Life, Esquire, and Playboy.  Includes essays about Leonard and his work.  He lost thousands of prints while living in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, but he recreated much of his archives from negatives, and he is still active in California, where he won the Lucie Award (equivalent to an Oscar) in 2008 for Achievements in Photography.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
FIC Kingsolver, Barbara

Kingsolver provides fascinating glimpses of the lives of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo through the eyes of fictional author Harrison Shepherd.  Taken by his mother as a boy from the States to Isla Pixol in Mexico, Shepherd learns to cook from a servant and delights in diving to observe marine life, during which he discovers a lacuna or underwater channel at the base of a cliff leading inland to an ancient sacrificial site.  By 1930 he was in Mexico City, where a job mixing paints for murals leads to a position as cook in Diego and Frida’s household.  The two artists were fervent supporters of the working class and the democratic communism espoused by Lev Trotsky, whom they took into their household when he fled Stalin’s purges and assassination of rivals.  Shepherd becomes a close observer as cook and typist until Trotsky is assassinated, then accompanies a shipment of Frida’s paintings to the States for an exhibit, and remains there to become a highly acclaimed author whose career is blighted eventually by McCarthyism and the un-American activities of the House Committee by that name.

The Athena Project by Brad Thor
FIC Thor, Brad

Introduced briefly in Thor’s Foreign Influence the Athena Project is an all female elite and secret anti-terrorism unit. In this first of a planned trilogy  the team has been enlisted to stop the use of a deadly machine invented during WWII, newly discovered and refined and about to be used against the U.S. Nonstop  action in a mix of science fiction, thriller, mystery and historical fiction make this a fast read.

 

 

A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton
387.736 DEB

Alain de Botton, author of The Art of Travel, was invited to be a writer in residence at the glossy (and glassy) new Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow Airport. For a solid week, he lived at the airport—sleeping in its hotel, eating in its restaurants, interviewing travelers and staff (including the chief executive, a custodian, and the chaplain), and just plain people-watching. He was accompanied by photographer Richard Baker, whose photos are scattered throughout the book. Because of the freshness of his approach, de Botton’s observations are likely to appeal both to those who love traveling by air and to those for whom air travel is a frequent and undesirable part of business life. A perfect book to take on the plane: paperback and a mere 107 pages in length, yet full of ideas and sentences to savor.

To Save a Life
DVD TO

High school all-star Jake Taylor has it all. Roger, his childhood best-friend, has nothing. Since the two have drifted apart, Roger feels that he has no friends, no hope, and a heart full of nothing but pain. When Roger walks onto campus with a gun, the tragic move he makes will change Jake's idyllic life forever.