New books for August!

New books for summer reading!

Here are several new books that were added recently to the Deering Public Library. I hope you will find something. There is young adult fiction featuring Olympian gods, adult who-done-it, some intriguing short stories, a novel from European WW II, and a couple of histories. Come in to the library and, as they say, check them out!

Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Books 1‑5. By Rick Riordan. 2005-2009

For those of you who don't know, and I was among that number until a young teen clued me in, Percy Jackson is a demigod -- half human and half Greek god. We thought we'd seen the last of the Greek gods, well, a long time ago in school, but they are actually alive and quite well in the 21st Century, still fighting and throwing tantrums along with lightning bolts and having children with mortals. Voilá: Percy Jackson and his friends, demigods and heros for today. In this series Percy and his demigod friends fight mythological monsters and alongside the Olympians they battle the forces of the titan lord Kronos. The thing about Percy is that he is dyslectic and has ADHD: a rare imperfect teenaged hero. Rick Riordan wrote these books for his, then, 9-year-old son who, like Percy, is dyslectic, had ADHD and hated school and reading. It was great for his son to see that a person with these afflictions could be a hero. Percy Jackson and the Olympians have been compared to Harry Potter, and the series has many of the magical elements that enchanted Hogwarts, but this series stands on its own. All the reviews of the series are 5-star great. Patty enjoyed the first one, The lightening thief, very much and I look forward to reading all of them.  But I really hope that the books won't stay on the shelves long enough for me to read them any time soon. It is coming to the end of summer, not many weeks before school starts again. Wouldn't it be great to end the summer by reading these books? 

Seven Wonders: The Colossus Rises by Peter Lerangis, 2013.

I wanted to try another YA fantasy series so here is the first. Let me know what you think. The Colossus Rises is the first in this YA fantasy series, Seven Wonders, and the Seven Wonders refers to the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Three titles have been published so far. This first title refers to the Colossus of Rhodes, the second (Lost in Babylon) to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the third (The Tomb of Shadows) (presumably) to the Mausoleum at Helicarnassus.  The basic concept is that some population of children in the world, represented here by 4 10-yr-olds, have a mutation that will lead to their early death. The mutation arose when Zeus and Co. ruled at least the Mediterranean world. Somehow this mutation was carried down to modern times and the effect is to kill the kids. The kids are kidnapped by a group that is dedicated to kidnapping kids who have the mutation and, oh I was confused, at least these four kids are charged with finding the missing Magic Loculi that, once located, have the power to cure them. In this first of the series the kids are united in a kind of 'LOST' TV set in an unknown but remote location. It turns out that each of them, three guys and a girl, have some kind of power. I was pretty confused about those powers: one of them was a super athlete, one of them - the cowardly kid - had a much better than average sense of direction. I was never sure what power the main protagonist, Jack, or the girl Aly had. Maybe that is revealed in subsequent volumes.  To continue comparison to LOST the compound is impossible to escape from but they do manage to get down into the volcano and battle griffons and then they actually travel to Turkey, or Rhodes and encounter and reinvigorate the Colossus. The book was pretty slow up to the end, when there was a lot of banging and scraping and general mayhem before the first of the loculi was recovered but then -- ah, no plot spoiler here!

I really liked that the author used vocabulary that, to me, was 'hip' and sophisticated, using words such as genome, acoustics, octagonal, petrified and so on (I clearly do not know what a 10-yr-old should know but these words seemed to me to be sophisticated. Patty had to tell me what Simpson's Underwear are).  I want our kids to read this book but I had problems with it. Such as the fact that the author apparently is not a geneticist, so don't try to understand how any of this is possible given that this lethal mutation knocks off the population that carries it before any of its members reach reproductive age, or at least average reproductive age. And this mutation? In the scheme of Death Rays from Outer Space or Rampant Mutant Impossibly Horrible Virus (not to mention international perfidy in Ukraine or out of control religious fanatics almost everywhere): If the mutation is not reversed by locating the missing loculi the world will not come to an end, an evil demonic power will not rule (any more than an Evil -- or at least pretty nasty -- Demonic Power already rules the world, come to think of it). I was also disappointed that parents were nowhere to be seen; there was no sense of family. Maybe some of our Deering kids won't get hung up where I did and I'd be grateful to have some explanations. Take this as a challenge, you guys!

The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike #2) by Robert Galbraith (pseudonym), J.K. Rowling

While we are talking about Harry Potter and, well, J.K. Rowling, here is a mystery from her.

The following from Goodreads:
"When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days—as he has done before—and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home. But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were to be published, it would ruin lives—meaning that there are a lot of people who might want him silenced.
When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before."

Harlan Coben in the New York Times (June 23, 2014) says that The Silkworm is an endlessly entertaining mystery novel.  It is impossible to review this book without acknowledging the author to have written the Harry Potter series, which pretty much changed the landscape for YA fiction. Nonetheless, Robert Gailbraith/J.K. Rowling has written a book that " is a very well-written, wonderfully entertaining take on the traditional British crime novel, but it breaks no new ground, and Rowling seems to know that. Robert Galbraith may proudly join the ranks of English, Scottish and Irish crime writers such as Tana French, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, John Connolly, Kate Atkinson and Peter Robinson, but she wouldn’t overshadow them. Still, to put any author on that list is very high praise.

Mission to Paris by Alan Furst, 2012

The following from Goodreads:

"It is the late summer of 1938, Europe is about to explode, the Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie for Paramount France. The Nazis know he’s coming—a secret bureau within the Reich Foreign Ministry has for years been waging political warfare against France, using bribery, intimidation, and corrupt newspapers to weaken French morale and degrade France’s will to defend herself.

For their purposes, Fredric Stahl is a perfect agent of influence, and they attack him. What they don’t know is that Stahl, horrified by the Nazi war on Jews and intellectuals, has become part of an informal spy service being run out of the American embassy in Paris.

From Alan Furst, the bestselling author, often praised as the best spy novelist ever, comes a novel that’s truly hard to put down. Mission to Paris includes beautifully drawn scenes of romance and intimacy, and the novel is alive with extraordinary characters: the German Baroness von Reschke, a famous hostess deeply involved in Nazi clandestine operations; the assassins Herbert and Lothar; the Russian film actress and spy Olga Orlova; the Hungarian diplomat and spy, Count Janos Polanyi; along with the French cast of Stahl’s movie, German film producers, and the magnetic women in Stahl’s life, the socialite Kiki de Saint-Ange and the émigré Renate Steiner.

But always at the center of the novel is the city of Paris, the heart and soul of Europe—its alleys and bistros, hotels grand and anonymous, and the Parisians, living every night as though it was their last. As always, Alan Furst brings to life both a dark time in history and the passion of the human hearts that fought to survive it."

This is the only Alan Furst novel I have read, and the book IS a New York Times bestseller, so why not start here? Although Alan Furst is described, above, as the best spy novelist ever, if Mission to Paris, is typical, I'd have to disagree. For me Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle was more suspenseful, although it did not match Furst's Mission for period detail. In Furst we feel the coming horror on a grand scale, whereas in Needle the danger is personal and immediate. Furst's protagonist, Frederic Stahl, is incredibly courageous. He does not have to become involved but he senses the 'rightness' of doing what he can, which is exactly what so many more from that 'Best Generation' did. It's a good book.

Ecstatic Cahoots. Fifty short stories by Stuart Dybek, 2014.

Our library doesn't have many, or maybe even any, collections of short stories. So, here is a collection that is a bit of an experiment. According to Slate Stuart Dybek is one of America's most underappreciated authors who has "more various and daring emotional aims" than most contemporary authors of short stories. I like the short story. The author requires special skill to tell a tale, explore an emotion, and engage a reader in relatively few pages. In this case, Ecstatic Cahoots, we have fifty short stories in a about 200 pages. I love them.  Here is the review from Jason Diamond in Flavorwire on 19 June of this year. It sums up my feelings about Ecstatic Cahoots:

"We’re in the middle of a short story renaissance, with writers like George Saunders being granted nobility status, and younger practitioners of the form like Laura van den Berg and Paula Bomer helping to push short fiction into the spotlight — and the future. So it’s only fitting that we pay tribute to Stuart Dybek, who, at 72, has been steadily producing some of the best American short stories since some of his contemporaries were in diapers, and is only rivaled by Lydia Davis in terms of ability to fit so much into so little space.

But he’s too busy for tributes right now; he just released two new books of short stories, Paper Lantern and Ecstatic Cahoots. The echo from the latter rings in your ears just a bit longer, because it contains 50 stories, many of which get the job done in just one page. The sheer effect of that many stories in under 200 pages could be enough to leave any head spinning; that isn’t the case with Dybek, who handles the simplest words, situations, and people with the utmost respect, giving you reason to savor every moment spent with his work.

It almost seems funny to say that it’s the little things that make Dybek’s stories — that are little in word count, but nothing else — truly stand out. A story like “Brisket,” just a hair over three pages long, is a perfect example of how much ground he’s able cover in as little space as possible. The story, about a man who is down on his luck and wants a sandwich, is set inside some old-school deli — the setting is easy to conjure up without Dybek getting into every little detail of its appearance. Instead, he talks about the food: The stacked pastrami was decked out in zooty 1950s colors; blushing pink meat in a carapace of black pepper.

You’re instantly transported to some small, forgotten cousin of Katz’s Deli, with the “kosher franks and kraut, dangling salamis, tukus, house-hickory smoked turkey, trout, sablefish, and two kinds of knishes,” plus just about every other kind of food Eastern Europeans once feasted on. By listing off the menu, Dybek puts you right there. The man’s hard life tale comes next, and you see it all so perfectly because of how effectively Dybek situates the reader in the story.

His hometown of Chicago, its gray skies, forgotten neighborhoods, and working class citizens from all over the globe, usually provide the setting for Dybek’s work. You can see the man waiting to confess to his favorite priest, the one who’s usually drunk, hungover, or passed out, walking into the old church on the South Side. If you’ve ever been to the city during one of its infamous winters, you know Dybek’s observation that the cold is enough for one of his characters “to wear” is an appropriate summation. If you haven’t been there, Dybek makes it all instantly recognizable, and his uncanny ability to provide such filling small bites gives every reader something to savor."

Would anybody like to read these stories in a group…..? To me, it sounds like fun; count me in.

The men who united the states by Simon Winchester, 2013

Two hundred years, give or take, after the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery Expedtion traversed the Lower 48 from coast to coast. This history takes up with that expedition and describes the persons and personalities of the thinkers and innovators who opened communication across the nation. The first stage was physical exploration by the pioneers like Lewis and Clark, the second was exploration for diamonds and gold by engineers and geologists, the third stage began with the building of the transcontinental railroad and culminated in air travel and the interstate highway system. The final stage, beginning early in the 1890's began with the general electrification of the nation, the invention of the telephone, radio and television. The book ends with the beginning internet era, and who knows where that will lead. The sketches are diagrammatic; there are whole books on the geology of the United States and on the building of the transcontinental railroad.  But the vista is broad here. The dreamers are fascinating and here their story is very well told. Some are like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison are well known. Others such as the eccentric geologist Clarence King were well known in their time but are not generally recognized today. Many of these characters are seen in the book's 32 illustrations. What I found fascinating was how our electricity grid developed from Edison's development of the electric light bulb to the massed electric lights at the Chicago World's Fair of 1892 (where shredded wheat and the Ferris Wheel made their debuts along with electric lights: a fascinating book by Eric Larson, The devil in the white city weaves the World's Fair with the life of a serial killer who haunted the fair while describing the lights, the architecture, the performances, the Ferris Wheel and so on), shifting from the highly limited DC current to AC, which permitted transmission of electricity over great distances. This enabled even isolated farms to have electricity, which didn't happen until the mid to late 30's -- and that may well have occurred within the life span of some Deering residents. Not so long ago afterall! The New York Times Book Review said of this book: "History is rarely as charming and entertaining as when it's told by Simon Winchester." If we were to be a nation, united, communication across great distances was critical otherwise our development would tribal, with dispersed and isolated pockets. The Lone Star State may well have remained the Lone Star Country and nobody would have known, or cared.   The men who united the states is easy to read, a highly entertaining book and a great way to read history beyond simple facts. The book is full of tales of our dreamers and their dreams.

All the great prizes. The life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt. By John Taliaferro, 2013.

Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State, wrote a famous memoir entitled Present at the creation: my years at the State Department. It can be fairly said that Acheson, who was the US Secretary of State at the end of WW II, ushered the US into its role of post WW II Super Power. However it could also be said that John Hay guided the first steps taken onto the world stage by the United States at the very end of the 19th and early in the 20th Centuries under presidents Mckinley and T. R. Roosevelt.  When Hay was barely out of his teens, he joined Lincoln in the White House as his private secretary, writing and even signing Lincoln's letters. He was just twenty-six years old when he sat at Lincoln's death bed.

After Lincoln's death, Hay married the daughter of a Cleveland millionaire, which gave him the financial means to live the live he seemed born to live. He was a thinker and talker, a poet, novelist and news paper columnist. He travelled at the end of the 19th Century and served in diplomatic posts in France, Spain, Austria and London. He was friends with Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Staunch Lincoln Republican, he supported James A. Garfield's candidacy and contributed significant cash to the candidacy of William McKinley, as well as political invective against McKinley's populist rival, William Jennings Bryan. He was Secretary of State to McKinley and McKinley's successor, TR Roosevelt. .  Hay carried on an active correspondence with his best friend, the historian and fellow patrician, Henry Adams. The author makes use of all the Washington gossip contained in those letters. That Hay and Adams were both smitten by the unhappy wife of an older Pennsylvania senator, and wrote about it to each other AND to the wife, adds spice to this history. Hay's latter years, in the book, are maybe the most interesting because it was then, in 1898 until Hay's death in 1905 that the US really made its entry onto the world stage as a significant power. In 1898 Hay was instrumental in 'opening' China to trade with the West and also preventing the partition of China along western spheres of interest. As diplomat in London during and after the Spanish American War he could explain to McKinley the English view of our involvement in Cuba and, maybe more significantly, the Philippines and the Pacific region. At that time there was discussion of whether to admit the Philippines as a state, and much criticism of American empire building. But our new position in the Pacific gave the USA leverage vis á vis Russia, Japan and the European powers in China. Hay also brokered the deal that lead to construction of a canal through a part of Colombia that, as a result of the dickering, became a new nation, Panama, and that, at least temporarily, gave the US that canal in perpetuity.

John Hay needed a refuge from politics. He found it in New Hampshire at Lake Sunapee at a place that he called The Fells (a Scottish name for a rocky field). He and his wife Clara initially hoped that Hay's closest friends Henry and Clover Adams (who committed suicide) and the great geologist but failed entrepreneur Clarence King would settle. That never happened, but Hay spent increasing amounts of time at The Fells until his death in 1905, and John and Clara's son Clarence held The Fells until Clarence's death late in the 1970's.

John Hay is quoted as having said of the Spanish-American War, "It has been a splendid little war," a remark that has been interpreted as indicating that John Hay was some sort of war monger. John Taliaferro, a former editor at Newsweek, makes it clear in All  the great prizes that Hay was anything but a war monger, but the damage has been done, and his 'friend' T.R. Roosevelt did not help with disparaging remarks about Hay AFTER Hay's death. Roosevelt would never had made these remarks to the face of a man upon whom he relied for sound judgment. Were it not for these remarks, Hay would 'rank among the most influential American statesmen of the last century.' (The Economist, 2013). The post Civil War era in the USA is most fascinating, politically and socially and John Hay was in the midst of it all. This book gives an excellent taste of both.

Today the gardens and house and national wildlife refuge at The Fells are open to the public. The trustees of the Deering library have daily family passes available, free, to Deering residents. To obtain a pass contact me, Gary Samuels, at 464-3143 or samuelslpatty@gmail.com.