An Embarrassment of Riches

An Embarrassment of Riches is a blog about the best the library has to offer. From audio books to movies, from novels to zines, library staff and guest bloggers will tell you about their latest library discoveries. Read. Watch. Listen. Chat.


Every year, around this time, we compose a poem, which sometimes rhymes,
about ghoulies and ghosties and long legged beasties
who'll come to your door demanding a feastie 

This year is no different, and we think that you'll find,
some blood-curdling tales will focus your mind;

And keep you awake for those folks who'll come calling...
What can we say? Our poem is appalling!

Stories of vampires and unwanted guestscomic book horrorsbrain-eating pests
Of gruesome tales we have no lack, you just provide the pumpkin named Jack. 

Happy Halloween!

Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell

I thought it was a sarcastic title. That the guy who wrote it must have a cracked sense of dark humor. Why would anyone want to visit Chernobyl? See deforestation as it happens in the Amazon? Visit the most polluted river in India? Blackwell asked himself the same questions. Did he have a thing for industrial waste? Was he some kind of environmental rubbernecker?  What exactly was the point in going to some of the world's worst man-made, human caused devastation?

Some chapters really stick with me. The one on Port Arthur, Texas, for example, where the brown breeze has a rancid aftertaste; where the community is among the poorest and most polluted in the nation, yet is surrounded by multi-billion dollar companies. Back in the day, a huge oil gusher erupted from the ground near Port Arthur. The dirt-covered men who were witness looked at each other and asked "what is it?" Can you even imagine that? As Andrew Blackwell (irony of his last name is duly noted) traveled and researched this chapter, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded and sank, the start of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

In other chapters he travels to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch where he can't keep himself from channeling Hornblower's "Where away?"; the oil sands mining of Northern Alberta, Canada; Chernobyl of course (my favorite chapter)--did you know that, unbelievably, Chernobyl has become possibly the largest nature preserve in eastern Europe?. And there's plenty more environmental disaster where those came from, a little something for everyone.

And there is humor, and lots of it--I promise. It is wry and sweet, his use of language precise, sharp. I want to have a drink or two with Andrew Blackwell and ask about a thousand questions. He wrote the best armchair travel book I've read in a long, long time. There's no crumbling ruin, restored by wealthy retirees, true. Yet I find myself cruising the website chernobylwel.com with its jaunty black gas mask logo, just out of curiosity mostly, but you never know.

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway is the story of an exceedingly careful man with the euphonious name of Joe Spork. His father was the king of criminal London. His grandfather was a genius with clockwork. Joe runs a modest clockwork shop and tries to make amends for his father’s sins.

But when he is asked to repair a particularly ornate and clever device he finds himself drawn into the flotsam of super spies, religious zealots, and vengeful despots that his family left behind. Whole worlds live inside this book, each with its own rich history, and together weaving the background for strong characters and their fantastic capers.

Next Best Thing is a wonderful story about Ruth Saunders and her grandmother Rachel, who move from Boston to Hollywood. Ruth wants to make it as a sitcom writer. Her grandmother wants to have fun and finds work as a an extra for tv right away. Ruth is twenty-three and a bit broken. Grandma Rachel is tough as nails and elegant. She totally supports Ruth in finding herself and her career. Their loving relationship is what moves the story.

Weiner certainly knows how to write a grandmother character (take a look at In Her Shoes). There’s a reason she is a bestselling author, and much of it is due to her fully formed characters and her great story-telling. This is a lively and moving story about two women finding their way in the challenging place that is Hollywood, California. I think you will find yourself rooting for them if you decide to read The Next Best Thing.

I'll try pretty much any science fiction or fantasy book that falls into my hands... at least for the first 50 pages. That's the window an author has to hook me. Superheroes aren't quite my thing. I'll go to the summer blockbusters, sometimes, if the reviews are good. I didn't read that many comic books growing up so I probably missed the golden window to really learn to love superhero stories. So when I was lent a copy of Prepare to Die! by Paul Tobin, a Portland comic book writer, I wasn't sure it was going to pass my 50 page test. The news is that it passed with such flying colors that I immediately set aside the other books I was reading in favor of this one.

Partially set in a fictional Oregon town, the crux of the story boils down to what happens when a super villain says "Prepare to die!" and the hero asks "How long?"

Steve Clarke, aka Reaver, was a small-town boy when an accident caused him to become super-powered. The book is funny and frequently tragic: consider the post-traumatic-stress resulting from being a very young superhero who is trying to defeat super-villains who slaughter passers-by just for fun. Often crude, the tone fits the character and story perfectly.

I really hope this Portland comic book writer has another novel or three in him because I'm really eager to read him again. I'm glad I wasn't too picky to try it because, out of the last 100 or so novels I've read, I'd put this very character-driven novel in the top 5.

While my reading taste is pretty eclectic, until recently I hadn't read very much historical fiction.  Perhaps it is thanks to those engaging YA historical novels I've listened to in the past few years that I'm dipping into this genre a little more.

It also helps if I find an author I like who bounces around genres.  A couple of years ago my book group read The Sparrow.  At the time, I said it was hard to believe this was Mary Doria Russell's first novel, and that the book was like Ursula LeGuin, only deeper.  I know, hard to believe, deeper than Ursula?  In this SF masterpiece, Jesuits make First Contact, because, well, Catholics go on missions.  And you know how missionaries can get into trouble due to deep cultural misunderstandings?  The sole survivor who returns to Earth must reveal his story that includes a brothel and a dead child, as well as recover from unimaginable trauma.

Since I loved this author's style, I'll happily read her other books. In Doc, Russell daringly covers a subject that has entered our cultural consciousness through many movies: Dr. John Henry Holliday, dentist.  IMDB tells me there are 43 instances of the character Doc Holliday in movies and television since 1937. Along with Doc Holliday, in this book we get close to the Earp brothers, Wyatt, Morgan, and James, during their short time in Dodge City, before the famous OK Corral incident.

Despite all those occasions to encounter Doc as a character, I was surprised to learn there was a lot I did not know. John Holliday was born with a cleft palate, treated with surgery. He was a southern gentleman, and a search for relief from consumption drove him west. The tale is told as if from the view of a compassionate historian. The man was an alcoholic, but it was alcohol rather than laudanum that helped him relieve his consumptive cough without losing his sharp mental faculties he needed as a gambler. Faro was his game, not poker, usually.  We're given the myth that was spread in the papers, like say how Doc shot and killed a man, and the often innocuous story (in which no one was shot) that spawned the myth. The author clearly is fond of Doc, and now I too have a soft spot for the man.

For the purpose of the gorgeous and astounding book, Relics: Travels in Nature's Time Machine by Piotr Maskrecki, the author defines a relic in this way: 

Relic: a creature or habitat that, while acted upon by evolution, remains remarkably similar to its earliest manifestations in the fossil record.

Do we have relics here in the U.S. of A.? Bunches. Among them, the Atlantic horseshoe crab.  It lives on the eastern North American Coast and has been doing a mass spawning every Spring, like clockwork, for 440 million years.

Relics not found in the U.S. : Emerald and black mottled treerunnner: Its cache of eggs is normally stashed in elevated piles of leaves in the geographical area of Africa called the Guiana Shield. If the nest is disturbed by a predator near the end of the eggs' development, all the eggs will hatch at once, within seconds of each other, the infant lizards scattering in all directions.

The Atewa dinospider from West Africa is from an ancient group of arachnids that go back all the way to the Carboniferous period. When was that? Three-hundred million years ago. What's a dinospider look like? Think brown pipe cleaners--those fuzzy things you used in third grade art class.

And New Guinea....my goodness. You're amazing. A giant, newly discovered and as yet unnamed gliding frog (think flying squirrel) and an equally astonishing and also as yet unnamed tiny frog of the species Choerophryne, smaller than a human fingernail.

I'd go further into the spider arena but I know it's gonna freak out some of you. But I can't leave without mentioning the Goliath tarantula that weighs in over 150 grams--about a third of a pound--that the author of this book thought at first was a small mammal when he saw it scurrying across the forest floor. I'm not an arachnophobe but the picture of this bad boy was all it took for me to close the book.

A former boyfriend of mine was a great cook, and I was only allowed in the kitchen when it was time to do the dishes. This worked well for me, as I like to eat tasty food without putting in a lot of effort, and I don't mind plunging my hands in warm, sudsy water. I was finally eating some meals that had more than five ingredients! So after we broke up, I went back to my standard  fare of spinach salads and heat and eat entrees. To say I had no interest in spending hours cooking something that would take only minutes to consume would be a vast understatement. I had better things to do with my life.

Giulia Melucci's dating experience, chronicled in I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti was the exact opposite of mine: she loves to cook and prepared some pretty yummy dishes for the parade of boyfriends that began when she was in her early twenties. Yummy things (recipes are included) like "Risotto with Intricately Layered Hearts", "Pear Cake for Friends with Benefits", "Salmon with Lemon-Tarragon Butter", "Morning After Pumpkin Bread" and the one that I'm going to try out on my boyfriend:  "Lachlan's Rigatoni with Eggplant".

Because, you see, I'm now with someone who actually enjoys it when I prepare meals (he helps, too, and also recently fixed the best grilled cheese sandwich I have ever eaten), and I've discovered how much fun it is to cook for someone besides myself. Guilia got that from the beginning and, with the exception of one guy who was lukewarm on the whole food thing, her boyfriends all seemed happy with her culinary skills. Never happy enough, alas, to give her the one thing she craved: a marriage proposal. We meet Ethan who, after three years, was given an ultimatum and declined to offer a lifetime together; Mitch Smith who, not very many years after they broke up ("I didn't want a girlfriend or whatever."); ended up marrying someone else, and Lachlan, a Scotsman who was passionate…about food. As we leave Giulia, she's still unwed but doesn't seem too downhearted. Optimism, like cooking, seems to come easy to her.

"In our era, more than some others, writers must buck up and take care of themselves" says Susan Bell in The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself. If you are writing the Great American Novel or just want to improve your style, study this book. Full of examples, graceful writing and thoughts from published authors, The Artful Edit is entertaining. 

Bell illustrates her points by studying the well-known masterpiece, The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald, and illustrating Fitzgerald's collaboration with the marvelous editor, Max Perkins.  More about Max in a moment.

She says, "Fitzgerald, too, was a master of the squared-off paragraph. He began and ended many with a startling mix of style, philosophy, and itch -- the itch that can only be scratched by moving to the next paragraph..." 

That "itch" has just the right touch, as does 'free-fiddle" in the following observation of the author Luc Sante,  "At the end of a work, he allows himself free-fiddle with words but not structure."  I like Bell's way with words: "If you've written a bird's nest, then, untangle your ideas. Separate them into a few sentences. One small sentence, written well, can tell more than an expansive one that's gangly."

And again: "When you edit, determine what is mystery and what is muddle; the first to be respected and left alone, the second to be respected and cleaned up." 

There are many ways to edit and the book is filled with examples of how different authors approach the process. For example, Michael Ondaatje says, "Having a concept of what the book is exactly about before you begin it is a tremendous limitation, because no idea is going to be as intricate and complicated as what you will discover in that process of writing it." Continuing he says, "I always write the beginning at the end. It's the last thing I write because then I know what the book is about."  

I was so taken with the collaboration between Max Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald that I was inspired to read more about the famous editor. I found a lovely book of family letters collected by Max's five daughters and published as The Family Letters of Maxwell Perkins complete with his clever illustrations; also a biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg.

Berg says of Perkins, "Beginning with Fitzgerald and continuing with each new writer he took on, he slowly altered the traditional notion of the editor's role. He sought out authors who were not just "safe," conventional in style and bland in content, but who spoke in a new voice about the new values of the postwar world. In this way, as an editor he did more than reflect the standards of his age; he consciously influenced and changed them by the new talents he published."

Max not only edited Fitzgerald, but also Ernest Hemingway and Tom Wolfe among others. He even conjured up new plots or offered ideas for his authors to develop.Max's greatest gift was summed up by his longtime friend, Elizabeth Lemmon, in a letter to Max's wife after his death, "I have known people who were considered pillars of strength and loved to be leaned on, but Max poured strength into people and made them stand on their own feet."

After reading the story of Max and Tom Wolfe, I must now read Wolfe's autobiographical novels. Isn't it great when one book leads to another? So many books, so little time.

 

Who likes the post-apocalypse? How about when it happens right here in Multnomah County? Etiquette for an Apocalypse by Anne Mendel is the funniest book you’ll ever hear described as “a mystery-thriller set in northwest Portland after environmental disasters cause the collapse of of civilization as we know it.”

No, there aren’t any zombies for Sophie (the heroine) to battle, and who needs ‘em? Shady characters may be aiming to take over what’s left of the world, while an even shadier character may be engaged in serial killings. (Or is it the other way around?)

This is a perfect summer read if you want to 1) laugh, 2) turn pages one after the other not able to put the book down, and 3) get inspired to stockpile toilet paper, duct tape and big black garbage bags.

Dystopia has never been so much fun.

It's summer - regress a little! Have a Popsicle (root beer and white licorice were the best flavors). Swing on the monkey bars. Revisit some of the books you loved as a child. The best ones will be just as good as you remembered, and offer fresh pleasures to an adult perspective.

George Bernard Shaw famously said that youth is wasted on the young; maybe some great kids' books are wasted on young readers. Two classics, The Yearling and National Velvet, were originally written for adults - but since their main characters are children, they were marketed, unimaginatively, as books for children. How many kids tossed them aside after a chapter or two? Years or even decades later, though, they're worth a second look.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Enid Bagnold both loved their home landscapes, the scrub woods of central Florida and the chalk cliffs of the English coast, which they evoke with such detailed vitality that the land itself becomes a vivid character in their books. Both stories are superficially about animals: The Yearling's title refers to an orphaned fawn adopted as a pet by a poor farming family, and National Velvet follows a horse-crazy village girl as she trains up a runaway piebald to be a steeplechaser.

While the animals and gorgeous settings are appealing, what's so moving and worthwhile in both books is their true common theme, which is how the deep, wordless bonds of community and family guide, ground, and sometimes confound us. These poignant books will reward and satisfy parents of sensitive misfit children, adults who were themselves those children, and everyone who's felt the ties which bind us so fiercely to people who don't always understand us very well.

Which children's books do you still like to read? Tell us in the comments!

Three bookworms and a dog person took a shared place at the Oregon coast for a long weekend. Unsurprisingly it was a little damp, leaving plenty of time for books. And a vacation, however short and close to home, isn't the place for deep reading but for enjoying oneself!  So, without further ado, here are the titles that were the best of the weekend.

One person was reading Redshirts by John Scalzi. Based on their reaction this is absolutely hilarious if you've watched the first Star Trek series.  If, like me, you haven't but are familiar with the genre, it's still an amusing story riffing on the foibles of bad science fiction television - I'm pretty sure I missed many of the jokes but I liked it quite a bit anyway.

I read Casket of Souls by Lynn Flewelling. This is the sixth book about a pair of spies and thieves in a nicely detailed fantasy setting--think roughly halfway between medieval barbarism and the Renaissance and you should have a fairly good idea of the setting. The author has an earlier series set in a more standard medieval fantasy world called the Tamir Triad. Flewelling writes beautifully detailed settings and sympathetic, likable characters; these are the lightweight beach novels of the epic fantasy genre.

The last thing I read was Shadow Ops. Control Point by Myke Cole.  I'd noticed this debut novel had a very solidly positive set of reviews so I decided I'd give it a try. I had the oddest love/hate reaction to this book. I didn't like the plot. I didn't like many of the characters. I didn't like the setting. It was well written though, and so I'd have to say it just wasn't to my tastes, despite being quite good. A quick summary: magic has popped back into the world and America has reacted by cracking down HARD on the unfortunates who have magic. Our hero is a good soldier and a decent man who has the bad luck to turn up with a prohibited  magic power right after having a really hard time morally with the last target he was sent to take down. It's a page turner. I finished it in a single sitting and it was entertaining and deserved the good reviews. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes military science fiction/fantasy. I really liked this one in spite of myself. 

I just finished listening to Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir Blood, Bones and Butter, and I feel like my best friend moved away. She narrated it herself. Hamilton’s the real deal, a chef and a writer, not a chef who writes or a writer who cooks.

Contemporary chef memoirs bug me. In 1999, when I graduated from cooking school, famous chefs were just that: chefs, only famous. Now many are full-blown media superstars, more concerned with scoring merchandising deals than actually cooking. So I eschewed Hamilton’s book (the Anthony Bourdain blurb on the cover wasn’t doing it any favors.) But I prefer the immediacy of recorded books read by the author, and hers fit the bill.

Lucky me. I love Hamilton’s voice, how unadorned her own words are coming from her own mouth, her wryness and lack of tolerance for B.S. It’s right there on the page, but when she speaks, it’s right there.

Hamilton’s mastery of culinary and literary arts shows in how seamlessly she weaves her narrative in and out of the kitchen. She nails the details we expect in such a book--the grating din of a ventilation hood whirring 18 hours a day, the punishing pleasure of surviving yet another brunch with one cook down--then one-ups genre conventions by making the non-industry parts of her life equally compelling, and often more so.

Yes, she spent Julys in Puglia at the seaside villa of her Italian husband’s family, but these sunny escapes have a turgid darkness lurking under the lusty Mediterranean idyll we Americans can’t seem to get enough of: the villa is crumbling, as is her marriage, as is her faith in her ability to maintain her composure, to just settle the hell down. Cooking, as it turns out, isn’t a magic bullet to bring about a blissful storybook ending. Like all worthwhile pursuits in life, it’s challenging and trying and immensely satisfying.

(Also indispensable for 'Read by the Author' fans: E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. You have not fully taken in this book until you have heard White’s Yankee intonations of “Fehn” and “Wilbaah.”)

I am not a fan of the heat. I have a few tried and true cool-down tactics: frozen berries, lots of fans, the occasional coupe colonel. And for a chilling of the mind, books and movies that are ‘cold’. Even penguins huddled together in a blizzard (as in March of the Penguins) are an object of envy to me when the temperature is above 90.

Right now I am reading a very cold book: The Terror by Dan Simmons. It is a nautical adventure where the ships never move. They are trapped in the arctic, frozen in place in their search for the Northwest Passage. And there is something on the ice with them, a malevolent creature shaped like a polar bear but much larger and much more intelligent.

I’m a fan of Dan Simmons’ Hugo-winning Hyperion and of Patrick O’Brian’s tales of the Royal Navy, so The Terror appeals to me on many fronts. But on a hot day, its greatest appeal is the ice that is groaning around the ships. Brrrrr!

Naturally, the color scheme of Commando, Johnny Ramone’s posthumous autobiography, is red, white, and blue. Johnny drove American cars and drank American beer, though it’s worth pointing out he capped himself at two bottles; his post-concert routine for most of his career was to hit up 7-11 for milk and cookies, then retreat to his hotel room.

In a band of dudes who are hard to love, Johnny was the hardest. His sourpuss face is synonymous with the band’s sulky collective persona. Spying multiple photos of Johnny smiling in Commando was shocking enough, but when I saw a picture of Johnny and his wife on Disney World’s dinosaur ride, I thought my face was going to melt off.

Don’t worry, Commando still teems with frowny Johnny photos. Hostility was his internal engine, his Bizzarro World Zen. Instead of denying his anger, he used it as a medium, the way a sculptor chisels a marble slab. Punk is the music of rebels, and Johnny was a rebel among punks. He stashed his earnings into a retirement account. His favorite president was Regan.

There are a lot of books by and about The Ramones. Direct and dynamic, Commando is easily the best. Johnny didn’t exactly exude compassion during his interview segments in the well-made 2005 documentary End of the Century: Story of the Ramones, so it’s refreshing to discover he had a human side.

Another enlightening look at the inner workings of the band is the unfortunately titled I Slept with Joey Ramone, by Joey’s brother, Mickey Leigh. While not a great read, it’s a worthwhile skim, and it offers many insights to Joey’s sickly constitution and obsessive-compulsive disorder (giving songs like “I Wanna Be Well” and “Go Mental” a bittersweet new dimension).

But for the best instant Ramones immersion, just watch Rock’n’Roll High School. Yes, it’s a schlocky teen b-movie, but it captures the spirit of the Ramones in the most buoyant fashion possible, and the concert scene at the end exudes a blissfully straightforward musical purity. Look out for Johnny’s solitary line: “We’re not students, we’re the Ramones.” 

I fail as a genre book geek. I confess that I finally caught up on the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin. I read books one and two years ago and really liked them but never quite got around to book three. I re-read book one just before season one aired last spring. I decided it was time to catch up with books two through five in a marathon session - given the thickness of these tomes calling it a marathon session is quite appropriate.
If you like epic fantasy, but have missed reading this series so far, it really is very good even though very grim and bloody. I will add one caveat: if you get attached to the characters you like... you should remember that old saying about life being nasty, brutish and short.

There are a lot of characters. Even just tallying up the important ones is quite the undertaking. Morality in this universe is a thousand shades of gray (mostly dark) and the only characters that are completely innocent are some very young children and a mentally handicapped giant of a man. The plot - well - please keep in mind I'm trying to summarize well over 4000 pages into a single paragraph.

So, with that in mind: The king is dead! Long live the (insert quite a bit of horrific war, machinations and assassinations to seize the throne here) king? And while we're at it... The seasons are different than ours, winter might last a decade. So, winter is coming and everyone really should be trying to put away the harvest to prevent starvation instead of burning it down in war... But at least with the country-wide war there are far fewer people left alive to feed... Oh, and instead of spending all of the kingdom's strength and resources on fighting each other, perhaps focusing on the barbarians invading from the north (the barbarians fleeing from a nightmare of undead and the killing long winter in their turn...) instead might not be such a bad idea?  Not to mention the surviving daughter of the previously deposed king kicking up her heels just across the sea... Plus, just to add to the general chaos, magic went away a long time ago and now it seems to be trickling back into the world. And it's not generally happy, helpful magic.  It's more of the creepy, icky, run in blind terror for your life sort of magic. That's going to mess with the balance of things too. And now it's started to snow...

There are characters I hope live to get happy endings. Some of the other characters... may they get the endings they deserve. I did warn you not to get too attached to the characters...  

For those of us who struggled with high school chemistry at the hands of a sadistic middle aged teacher having an affair with the trigonometry instructor (and I know you’re out there) we can now make another attempt at understanding the periodic table, and thank God, I say. Writer Sam Kean, in The Disappearing Spoon, makes the subject matter so wonderfully approachable--he welcomes you in, pours you a cold one, and just starts telling great stories about the elements.

There’s neon rain, gas warfare, ruthless scientists, passion, betrayal, adventure and obsession. What cool prank can you pull with gallium and a cup of tea? Why was cadmium the Godzilla killer? And did you hear about Marie Curie’s sullied reputation? There are some black and white illustrations and photos, and one of them is of an old ceramic urn-like device called a Revigator, a pottery crock lined with nuclear radium. Users, back in the day, filled it with water which turned radioactive overnight. The manual suggested drinking six or more refreshing glasses a day. Yum. Maybe there’s a chance for me to love chemistry after all.

(Originally published on Nov. 16, 2010.)

Have you heard about this great period British T.V. series? It’s about class divisions and war, and there’s romance, too. I got so caught up in it one night I watched the final episode instead of reading the last ten pages of Mockingjay. And...it’s not Downtown Abbey.

Danger UXB aired on British T.V. in 1979, then later in America on Masterpiece Theatre. It takes place in Blitz-era England, where the inexperienced Lieutenant Brian Ash leads his ragtag company of Royal Engineers as they disarm unexploded German bombs (the titular UXBs.) It’s a nail-bitingly inexact science of hunches and luck. Likable, established characters blow up.

Ash’s men do the dirty work, digging and hauling, but Ash, as an officer, does the dirtiest work of all; it’s up to him to tap and prod the UXB’s fuse just so, often while in mud up to his knees or dangling from ladders propped against burning buildings. A tiny misjudgement of pressure or time could obliterate him. After the satisfaction of not dying, the men head back to their dreary barracks, while Ash kicks back some gentlemanly tipple in the relative comfort of the officer’s club and alternately broods over and delights in his affair with a married woman.

As with many British television series, Danger UXB had an intentionally short run (just one season), and while it takes its time establishing very human dramas, it also doesn’t namby-pamby about: thirteen episodes and boom, it’s over. Anthony Andrews’ Ash is hapless, cocksure, capable, and adorable all at once (you may recognize him from his pitch-perfect Sebastian in the 1981 television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited). Alas, just as in the conclusion of the Hunger Games trilogy (yes, I finished it), even surviving the gory losses of war brings no truly happy endings for Ash and the men in his section. The damage is done. And there’s something very immediate to see an English-speaking country that’s the front of a war. This didn’t happen so long ago, really. This could be us again.

OK so I've finally read The Hunger Games (previously reviewed by Jen). I avoided it because I wasn't in the mood for a dystopian novel, and it sounded like reality TV (which I hate) gone amuck. They didn't tell me I would fall in love with Katniss! She's a tough girl who has kept her family alive since the age of twelve, is coming of age with a pure lack of self-involvement, and is unaware of her effect on others. At its core this book is about loyalty, courage, honor, love. That book I would have read long ago.

It makes me think of other tough girls who I have loved.

Terrier by Tamora Pierce

You could pick up any series by Tamora Pierce and you'd find a tough girl that worms her way into your heart. The first one I picked up was Terrier, about Beka Cooper. She's a rookie cop...in Pierce's parlance, a dog, or I should say a puppy, in the Provost's Guard. She chose the tough beat where she grew up, but despite her beginnings, she has some advantages, including consultations with ghosts, dust spinners that spit out hidden conversations, and a very special cat. I'm currently listening to the third, Mastiff, and still loving her no-nonsense voice, strong with loyalty, duty, and astute investigation.

Plain Kate by Erin Bow

Plain Kate has a few things working against her.  She lost her father and must support herself with her woodcarving skills. She lives in a world where magic is sinister, and the townspeople accuse her of being the witch who caused their bad luck. Then she makes a deal with a real witch, and she escapes the town accompanied by, wait for this, her very special cat. (Come to think of it, there's a special cat in Hunger Games too...hmmmm.)

Graceling by Kristin Cashore

Katsa may be the most feared assassin in all the seven kingdoms.  Born with the Grace to kill, she is the property of the king.  She doesn't like being the thug that her Grace makes her, and she's behind the secret Council that would change the way things work.  Then she meets Po, from another kingdom where people with these special abilities are free to make their own choices.

Oh, and all of these books...quite well written...with complexity, flowing prose, and no extra or missing plot points.

Reading poetry is often an introspective activity, but sometimes it's enjoyable to share and discuss a poem that is particularly moving. If you feel this to be true, we'd love to have you join us 'virtually' this Monday, May 21st from 12 to 1 p.m. to read and discuss poetry. Our guest will be Mary Szybist, who will be answering your questions about her poem "Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle."

Mary's first book, Granted, (Alice James Books, 2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Iowa Review, Best American Poetry 2008, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. She teaches at Lewis & Clark College.

To participate, just make sure to 'like' Multnomah County Library on Facebook, and then log in at 12 to add to the conversation. You'll find the complete text of the poem below, just in case you'd like to be prepared.

Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle

Are you sure this blue is the same as the
blue over there? This wall's like the
bottom of a pool, its
color I mean. I need a
darker two-piece this summer, the kind with
elastic at the waist so it actually
fits. I can't
find her hands. Where does this gold
go? It's like the angel's giving
her a little piece of honeycomb to eat.
I don't see why God doesn't
just come down and
kiss her himself. This is the red of that
lipstick we saw at the
mall. This piece of her
neck could fit into the light part
of the sky. I think this is a
piece of water. What kind of
queen? You mean
right here? And are we supposed to believe
she can suddenly
talk angel? Who thought this stuff
up? I wish I had a
velvet bikini. That flower's the color of the
veins in my grandmother's hands. I
wish we could
walk into that garden and pick an
X-ray to float on.
Yeah. I do too. I'd say a
zillion yeses to anyone for that. 

 - Mary Szybist

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