NEW BOOKS IN THE DEERING LIBRARY

First, a small harangue Our little library works on the honor system. You take a book, you write your name and the date you took the book on the card, and you slip the card into the box on the little pedestal or whatever it is. This works... up to a point. I think some people forget to go through the process, judging by some books that I know are missing.  Probably if you are reading this, you are not one of the forgetters. Please pass the word! We are missing the Lotte Jaobi book as well as a recent title, Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Here are new books for our library. There is some fiction, some biography and something for  younger kids.

 Flappers: Six women of a dangerous generation by Judith Mackerell, 2015

This book was recommended to me by a Deering resident who lived through the period covered by this book. Patty and I both greatly enjoyed reading it. Here is what Goodreads wrote about it:

Glamorized, mythologized and demonized - the women of the 1920s prefigured the 1960s in their determination to reinvent the way they lived. Flappers is in part a biography of that restless generation: starting with its first fashionable acts of rebellion just before the Great War, and continuing through to the end of the decade when the Wall Street crash signal led another cataclysmic world change. It focuses on six women who between them exemplified the range and daring of that generation’s spirit.

Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka were far from typical flappers. Although they danced the Charleston, wore fashionable clothes and partied with the rest of their peers, they made themselves prominent among the artists, icons, and heroines of their age. Talented, reckless and willful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, entertaining and tragic ways. And between them they blazed the trail of the New Woman around the world.

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf, 2015
The 19th Century was an incredibly transformative period in the history of European people. It was a time of 'gentleman scientists' who, at least in England, did not have academic positions. It was a time of empire building and consolidation of empires. It was the time of the beginnings of the move from the land to cities: think George Eliot's Middlemarch and Adam Bede, the before and afters of the invention of the steam engine, railroads... and all the rest. The 19th Century was a time of exploration. Travelers, adventurers,  government servants. missionaries were heading into previoiusly unexplored places and bringing back all sorts of biological specimens (flowers, critters and so on) to the scientific centers in Europe -- think of Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace (travels on the Amazond)  or Charles Babbage, who invented the first computer. Thomas Jefferson sent the famous Lewis and Clark team to explore the vast new holdings that he had acquired from the French. Such treasures and beauty they saw! The first of the really great explorers and all 'round scientists was the German Alexander von Humboldt. You probably know Humboldt from the many geological/geographical places that hold his name (most famously perhaps is the Humboldt Current). This big but very readable book documents Humboldt's exploration in South America, his death defying climb of Mt Chimborazo, his eperiments with  electric eels. Here also is Alexander von Humboldt interacting with contemporary characters such as Thomas Jefferson (Humbolt could not countenance or get his mind around Jefferson as slave owner) and the budding South American Libertador Simon Bolivar. His was a fascinating life and this book was a real pleasure to read. (actually, I have done some exploration in Venezuela in the early 1970's. It was fun for me to read about places I worked in that Humboldt had visited nearly 200 years before!).

Story of the Lost Child. The fourth and final Neapolitan Novel by Elena Ferrante, 2015

This volume completes our library's set of this remarkable story of two Neapolitan women who came of age during the tumult of 1960's  Italy. I have enjoyed reading the series very much. Here is what  Goodreads wrote:


Here is the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults; life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship has remained the gravitational center of their lives.

Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up—a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. In this final book, she has returned to Naples. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable!

Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, the story of a lifelong friendship is told with unmatched honesty and brilliance. The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and every return will bring with it new revelations.

Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffery Gaur, 2015

This book might not appeal to Deering readers, but, then, I do not know what DOES appeal to Deering readers. I had heard an interview with the authors on NHPR about their podcast, Welcome to Night Vale, and from that brief interview the whiff of anarchy and surrealism that came my way intrigued me. Then one day I attended a book thing with Beatrice Hunter at Toadstool in Peterborough, and there was Welcome to Night Vale on the table in front of me. I could not resist. Although I had not planned to put the work in the library, in the end, I thought I knew at least one Deering resident to whom this very odd book would appeal. Following is what Goodreads says about it:

From the creators of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is also a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle to find ourselves...no matter where we live.

Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge.

Nineteen-year-old Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro is given a paper marked "King City" by a mysterious man in a tan jacket holding a deer skin suitcase. Everything about him and his paper unsettles her, especially the fact that she can't seem to get the paper to leave her hand, and that no one who meets this man can remember anything about him. Jackie is determined to uncover the mystery of King City and the man in the tan jacket before she herself unravels.

Night Vale PTA treasurer Diane Crayton's son, Josh, is moody and also a shape shifter. And lately Diane's started to see her son's father everywhere she goes, looking the same as the day he left years earlier, when they were both teenagers. Josh, looking different every time Diane sees him, shows a stronger and stronger interest in his estranged father, leading to a disaster Diane can see coming, even as she is helpless to prevent it.

Diane's search to reconnect with her son and Jackie's search for her former routine life collide as they find themselves coming back to two words: "King City". It is King City that holds the key to both of their mysteries, and their futures...if they can ever find it.

Slade House by David Mitchell, 2015

Slade House is the third in a series of books by David Mitchell that includes Cloud Atlas and Bone Clocks.  Slade House draws on some of the same characters that were found in the other two books and, of course, the main theme of the book is supernatural, but  on this supernatural plane, Slade House is a page-turning mystery. One need not have read the others to become fully engaged in Slade House, and it is a lot shorter (if that is an issue). Here is the summary from Goodreads:

Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door.

Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t. Every nine years, the house’s residents—an odd brother and sister—extend a unique invitation to someone who’s different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it’s already too late. . . .

Spanning five decades, from the last days of the 1970s to the present, leaping genres, and barreling toward an astonishing conclusion, this intricately woven novel will pull you into a reality-warping new vision of the haunted house story—as only David Mitchell could imagine it 

The Eye Stone. The first medieval noir about the birth of Venice by Roberto Tiraboschi, 2015

This is one of the Europa Editions,  as are the Elena Ferranti Neapolitan novels, that I saw in Toadstool one Saturday. I suppose I am a sucker for these well-made paperpacks with their exotic titles and cover work. A noir novel about Medieval Venice? Murder on the mud flats? Magical glass? How could I resist! 

Here is the summary from Goodreads:

In the twelfth century AD, Venice is little more than an agglomeration of small islands snatched from the muddy tides. The magnificent city-lagoon of Venice, the rich and powerful Serene Republic, is yet to be born. Here, in this northern backwater, a group of artisans have proven themselves to be unrivalled in an art form that produces works of such astounding beauty that many consider it mystical in nature and think its practitioners possessed of otherworldly gifts: glassmaking. Presciently aware of the power they wield and the role they will play in the Venice of the future, the Venetian glassmakers inhabit a world of esoteric practices and secret knowledge that they protect at all costs.

Into this world steps Edgardo D’Arduino, a cleric and a professional copyist. Edgardo’s eyesight has begun to waver—a curse for a man who makes his living copying sacred texts. But he has heard stories, perhaps legends, that in Venice, city of glassmakers, there exists a stone, the “lapides ad legendum,” that can restore one’s sight. However, finding men who have knowledge of this wondrous stone proves almost impossible. After much searching, Edgardo meets a mysterious man who offers him a deal: he will lead him to the makers of the lapides ad legendum in exchange for Edgardo’s stealing a secret Arabic scientific text that is kept in the abbey where Edgardo lodges. When a series of horrific crimes shakes the cloistered world of the glassmakers, Edgardo realizes that there is much more at stake that his faltering eyesight.

THREE VOLUMES FOR YOUNG READERS 

Rumpelstitskin and other stories, 1993.
A thin, illustrated compilation of some Grimm Brothers  tales.


Martha Speaks. Story Time Collection by Susan Mcddaugh, 2011  
This volume includes several of the Martha Speaks stories. Martha, the family hound, can speak because when she eats alphabet soup, all the letters go to her brain and, Voila!... you get the idea. The stories and their illustrations are fun. It's a good book to read to and with kids and lots of pictures on the pages to keep their interest.

The Complete Adventures of Curious George. 70th Anniversary edition, by Margaret Rey and H.A. Rey. 2001

 This is a complete collection of the great and classical Curious George stories. The book includes two CD's. Need I say more?