 All right, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is information's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We will not be offended. We do this show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but all of these sessions are recorded. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go to our website and see all our recordings and watch them there. The show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so feel free to share with your friends and colleagues what we're doing here. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, sometimes on many training sessions, book reviews, which we're doing today. We have commission staff that do sessions, and we bring in guest speakers this morning. We have all commission staff with us, actually. Lots of times when I have mixed multiple people, it's a mismatch, but we've got a whole bunch of commission people here from different areas of the commission. So, Laura Johnson, Michael Sowers, Debra Dregos, I'm not sure whose idea this session was. Oh, Laura and I were talking. And then one day they came in and said, you read and do this. So I'm just going to hand it over to you guys. We're going to talk to us about, give us some hot title of your cold month. If it is cold where you are, it's varying. I'm not sure who's up first or what you guys are doing, but they'll explain what this is all about and what they're doing and get us some good ideas for reading. Well, as Debra said, this is Laura. She and I were talking about books. Debra is astonishing in her reading. And we thought, well, you know, it would be fun to kind of share this, see if we could get some dialogue going about books. We're all librarians, for heaven's sakes. And I think we do talk an awful lot about technology and libraries. And so we sort of like to balance that out by talking about the books and libraries some of the time. So we thought this might be fun. This is a little bit of an experiment for us. So we really be interested to hear what y'all had to say about it and so we just put together some books. The three of us got together. We put together a list of some books that we've read that we thought we might like to share. And we thought maybe some of you might not be aware of these books or your library might have them, but you haven't read them yourself and maybe we could help you book talk them to your patrons. Yeah. So let's get some. And, you know, it's January. It's a great time to curl up with a good book. If you're stuck in an ice storm or... So shall we? Yeah. All right. Oh dear, I'm up first. And she just gulped. Okay. We start with Mary Roche's gulp, Adventures on the Elementary Canal. Mary Roche, author of Stiff, Spook, Bunk, and Packing for Mars, this time explores the elementary canal from saliva to, well, the end of the elementary canal. She sort of enjoys the grossness. Some of it's gross and she sort of enjoys that. It's not culture gross. She does proceed with scientific gusto. She really gets into it as she describes the digestive processes and she stops with stories of historic research on how people discovered some of the facts about our digestion, which is remarkably complex. And, you know, she ends up with whether, the big question, whether constipation really killed Elvis or not. What? Evidently, there is a disease that prevents the peristaltic waves in the colon from working properly. And people whose peristaltic waves don't work properly get clogged up. Well, if you get clogged up enough. So anyway. We put this book first. Get out of the way. You know, Laura wanted to do nonfiction first and she was up first. Has anybody longed off yet? No? Okay. You know, it's a nonfiction book that I would think some YA would be very interested in because of the gross factor. It's also, it really does provide a real insight into some bodily processes that maybe it would be good for us all to understand. And she writes it in a very popular, very easy to understand manner. It's a quick read, really. But it was a lot of fun. So, Gulp by Mary Roche. All right. Oh, and I'm up next. Okay. Well, the boys in the boat. Nine Americans in their epic quest for gold at the 1936 for Olympics was written by Daniel James Brown. And this was my absolute favorite book that I read last year. I like nonfiction anyway in history, but this story just really grabbed me. I had a hard time putting the book down and I actually sat one Saturday just several hours finishing it. Even though I had other things to do. But the title sort of tells you this is about the University of Washington rowing team that won the gold in the 1936 Olympics. The author actually met one of the gentlemen who was a rower in this boat, Joe Rantz, a few months before he died. And started interviewing him. At that point, there was only one other rower who was still alive. So, Brown did have to do interviews with other family members for the other rowers. But the story does have the majority. It focuses a lot on Joe Rantz because he had most access to his story. And, you know, it was a real hardship story. He had a lot of challenges and diversity to overcome in his growing up years. And then 1936, this is the depression. Most of these men, young men who are in this boat are sons of fishermen and loggers and, you know, farmers who are working their way through college. They are not the rich elite young men who are the rowers in the Ivy League colleges back on the East Coast. But these guys beat all of those teams. You know, they beat them in the national Olympics. They beat them in the Olympic trials. But throughout the story, he also talks about the coaches for the team. He talks about the British gentleman who has made most of the racing shells for the college teams around the country. This gentleman actually had his boat building business in the upper story of the University of Washington Boathouse. So he includes some of the propaganda work that Hitler did preparing for the Olympic Games. But overall, it was, for me, it was just a really fascinating story. The narrative was really well done. And he talks about, and I've never been into rowing, but he talks about how the coach worked really hard switching boys in and out of the boats, trying to find the perfect team. And this was the team of nine young men who found the swing. They call it the swing when all eight rowers, plus the coxswain, where all eight rowers stroke, dip their oars in, an exact synchronization. And because they could do that, they could row at a lower speed than the other teams because with every stroke, they were moving farther. Their strokes were more powerful. So they could go at 32 or 33 strokes a minute and beat out teams who were trying to do 39 to pass them or to keep ahead of them. But it's sort of the, oh my gosh, are they going to win? All the way up to the last minute, even at the Olympics because they had to defeat all these teams to get to the Olympics and they discovered they had to raise the money themselves to get to Berlin. And then they get to Berlin and they go through the time trials and they're ahead. Well, the Germans changed the rules a little bit so that in the final race, they were actually out in the roughest, worst lane, which was not where they should have been. They had a rowing member who was ill. They couldn't hear the coxswain because of the crowd noise. In the lane that they were in, they got a late start because they couldn't see the starter. All these things, all these adversities, challenges that they had to overcome and they still won. So it's all about teamwork. It's all about, you know, just perseverance and determination. And I thought it was a wonderful story and I took up more than my time for this one. All right. Well, actually, I don't think I'm next here. Oh, the story of the human body. Rather unfairly say that we could summarize this book by saying sugar band exercise. Good. But basically leave a man who is a professor talks about the idea that people, evolution takes such a long time. 10,000 years is not a long time in evolutionary terms, but it is in cultural terms. So we're still, our little bodies are still paleolithic. And we're not living in paleolithic times anymore. And this has created some problems for us. He believes, some people believe that evolution has really stopped. He does not believe that. He believes that we still have evolution going on. For instance, in the last 10,000 years since farming began, the lactose intolerance gene has spread almost all the way across, Europe. So he believes that we are still evolving. But meanwhile, if we wanted to be physically healthy, we need to pay a little bit more attention to our paleolithic selves. And sugar is really pretty bad for us. Chewing gum, for instance, if it's sugarless gum, is good for you because we don't gnaw on bones much anymore. Really? So the book is over long for its message. But it does have something important to say to us. And it's kind of interesting to hear about how evolution works because as he points out, evolution isn't, it's not goal oriented. It doesn't have any, it has actually no principles in terms of it wants us to be better or anything. It's just evolution is in terms of what works. And he does say that by treating diseases the way we do and treating, say that the symptoms of diseases, ameliorating diseases rather than getting to their root causes and fixing them, will probably dis-evolving a little bit that way. Because we're not, generally those diseases we would evolve out of them if we let evolution take its course, but we're kind of interfering with it. Anyway, kind of interesting. And it has a message that's worth hearing. All right, so my first pick here is hyperbole and a half. I guess I'm going to define this as the lighter side of depression in some cases. Ellie Broche is a blogger and pretty much the content of this book are blog posts that she has done over the years on her blog titled hyperbole and a half. She has a definite cartoon style as you can see here from the cover and this book is heavily, heavily, heavily illustrated. On some pages it's just cartoon panels going along with the story. It's her life in dealing with things like depression and her dogs. There's Simple Dog which is pictured on the cover there and Helper Dog. And if you have dogs, trust me, you are going to be laughing out loud at the stories of these dogs, especially Simple Dog. I kind of feel bad for Simple Dog sometimes. The first story in the book is her finding a note from, I believe, her five-year-old self or eight-year-old self, asking questions of her future self and she's now her future self. So she goes and proceeds to answer those questions in a very humorous way. And she actually gave a talk at Google recently where she reads that one out loud and shows the pictures. And you will be in tears laughing through this book. It almost could be filed as a graphic novel. It's so heavily illustrated but there is a significant amount of text to it. It's about 400 pages and I think I read the whole thing in about an hour because of the illustrations. But I'm definitely now subscribing to her blog. I want to continue reading what's going on with her and her coping mechanisms. The other story I definitely remember out of this one is when she was young and her mom was trying to keep her from eating a cake. That's what she went through to get a hold of said cake, which included things like climbing through windows and whatnot. So it's a hilarious book and definitely worth the read. And like I said, you can find her talk on Google also. I think that's what convinced me to buy this book. Alright, next up, Debra. Back to me. You can see I sort of have a theme here. I love history. And my next book is The Hidden White House, Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America's Most Famous Residents by Robert Clara. How many of you knew that the White House was actually collapsing in the 1940s? Okay. We have a few people around the table. American history major. Well, this book tells stories like when Truman's 300 pound butler would walk across the floor of the second story, the chandeliers on the first floor would just sway back and forth. And there were creaks and knocks and groans and doors closing and people thought the White House was haunted. But actually, it was just settling and collapsing in on itself, which was causing all these noises and things. But what really pushed them to the point of, okay, we have to do something is when one of Margaret Truman's pianos, the leg crashed through the second floor and down through the first floor ceiling. And they decided, okay, it's really too dangerous to live in this place anymore. So they had to decide what to do with the house. Do they fix it? Do they tear it down and build a new one? Do they sort of fix it and make it into a museum and move the president someplace else? This is the story about all the politics, you know, all of the finagling going on behind the scenes. And of course, everybody knows they did actually fix it because the White House is still there and the president still lives in it. But if you're interested in the history of the White House, if you're interested in U.S. history, if you're interested in politics or project management or architecture, this book is for you. It's just a really interesting story of the whole process of, okay, how did this place crumble? How did they figure out how to fix it? How did it actually get done? How did they spend the money? Where at the end, you know, they had so little to furnish it that it was just sort of a disaster. But, you know, it came down to the Truman one. It was wanted back in by a certain date and they had to finish. But also along the way, hmm, okay, there was sort of this secret building going on, you know, they did something underneath. So what did they build under there? Very interesting. Besides the bowling alley. There's some secret rooms and things. Secure stuff. Laura? Okay, the most of Nora Ephron is a collection of Ephron's works that came out shortly after her death. Most people know Nora Ephron, I think, mostly as the writer of the movie when Harry met Sally. But she was a journalist from the 60s through her death. She wrote a lot of profiles of people, interviews with people that were appeared in magazines. She covered a lot of things, everything from the National Women's Political Caucus to the Pillsbury Bake Off. And she wrote about them. And she's very, really a wonderful writer, interesting person. So this book includes nearly 80 essays as well as her novel, Heartburn, which is the story of her divorce from Carl Bernstein. The screenplay for when Harry met Sally and her play Lucky Guy. One of her famous pieces are lists because she died of a blood disease and knew for some time that she was ill. One of her famous pieces are lists of what I won't miss and what I will miss. And I thought I'd just read just a couple of things here to give you a flavor. What I won't miss, dry skin, email, washing my hair, funerals, box TV, dead flowers, the sound of the vacuum cleaner, email. I know I already said it, but I want to emphasize it. And she says, what I will miss, my kids, waffles, bacon, a walk in the park, Shakespeare in the park, reading in bed, fireworks, twinkle lights, butter, coming over the bridge to Manhattan, pie. So this is Nora Ephron, a foodie, a social critic, a wonderful writer. It's a fun book to read and not one that you have to feel you read the whole thing. You can dip into it, but really an interesting view of the times and of a great writer. Oh, and I'm up again. Oh, yes, now we're on to fiction. We finished our nonfiction. The first fiction book is Fingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor by Patrick Taylor. And this is actually a part of a series. This is number eight in the series, the Irish Doctor series. I actually listened to this book and it was narrated by John Keating. And he does a really good job with, of course, as you can imagine, Irish accents, because in this particular book, Fingal O'Reilly is the main character. He's a GP who works now in Bally Bucklebow in Northern Ireland. This particular book, most of the series takes place in the 1960s before the Troubles. But in this particular one, it alternates between the present 1960s and the 1930s, when he had just completed his medical degree and was working in basically the slums of Dublin. You get the flavor of both the slums and the small village quirky characters, life's tribulations, the medical conditions, how they diagnosed things then and how they treated them both in the 1930s and 1960s, and some of which are rather really horrifying. You know, just the conditions of Ireland at that time, I find the characters really entertaining. I find the storytelling really entertaining. Some people have said it's the human version of all creatures, right and small. It's sort of along those lines. You meet the different patients and follow their diagnoses and treatment and et cetera. Also, people who are really into Call of Midwife might find this entertaining. It's a very gentle read, so some people have suggested people who really like Jan Caron would enjoy these just entertaining stories. Me. Alright, so we're going to illustrate it again, but we're going kids book this time. I am a big fan of Neil Gaiman, and anybody who isn't should be. And this is his latest. It's a kids book, more in the shape of like a standard hardcover as opposed to a larger picture book, but also heavily black and white illustrated. And this one is the story of how two kids one day discovered they were out of milk, so they sent dad out for milk. And dad took a while to get back, so they asked dad what happened. Well, let's just say hot air balloons, dinosaurs, aliens, and various other and sundry happened during this. And by the end of the story, the kids are pretty skeptical, but dad is able to prove that it actually happened. So all I'm saying, or he's got his evidence anyway, so that's pretty much all I want to say for this book. It's great for adults, great for kids. I think it would be a great one to read to slightly older children out loud, especially with all the illustrations and everything. It's a great book and highly recommended in this field game, and so you really can't go all that wrong. It's cute. It's a tall tale. Yeah, it is a tall tale. Oh yes, and there's dad with the milk. Fortunately, the milk survived is basically out of it. Laura. Okay, this is Fanny Blake, the old girl filling the station's last reunion, which turns out to be the story of Mrs. Suki Pool of Point Clear, Alabama. And you keep thinking, well, how does this relate to the gas station which is in Wisconsin? Well, it does. I was wondering how Route 66 was in Alabama. Suki Pool, a 60-year-old housewife in Alabama has just married off her third daughter and is hoping to just take it easy for a while. She still has to take care of her mother, who is one of those larger-than-life characters. Suki gets her mother's mail because her mother doesn't pay her bills. And so one day, in the mail, she gets a letter from the Texas Department of Health, which she doesn't figure, and it turns out that she's adopted. Well, Suki didn't know this, and this really leads her into quite a tizzy about, well, who is she, and I mean, and she eventually discovers, and I don't want to say too much and spoil it, that she is related to the people from the all-girl filling station, which was started by a Polish immigrant to America, who had a number of daughters who ran into a barnstorm at one time and learned to fly. And when World War II came along, these girls joined the wasps. There was a group of young women and an auxiliary, a military auxiliary, and they ferried planes back and forth, which then freed up male pilots to fight. Many of these girls died doing this. This was not easy work. And in fact, there's one here in Nebraska. Eveline Sharp. Eveline Sharp, the airport in Oregon, Nebraska, which is where she's from, is named after her. And Suki sort of discovers a lot about herself, and we hear a lot about the wasps and their history. It's Fanny Flag. I did, I listened to this one, which was read by Fanny herself. And I've always enjoyed Fanny Flag's books, and I thought this was another very interesting, both from the way she tells the story, the characters in the story, and the historic interest about the wasps. It's really interesting. How was the author doing the reading? Sometimes that works really well, and sometimes that goes horribly wrong. I think she was quite good. She's an actress. I didn't know that. Yes, sometimes the readers. But she's very good. She's pretty good. Deborah. Okay, The Lost Testament by James Becker. Okay, it's another series one. And we were talking a little bit earlier, and Michael referred to a series as Candy. Well, that's sort of what this one is. It's sort of action-adventure thriller. If you have a patron who likes Dan Brown or some of the other authors like that and they need a new book to read, you might suggest this one to them. This is number six in the series about a British policeman named Chris Bronson and his ex-wife Angela, who is a ceramics conservator at the British Museum. For this particular one, actually, Angela takes a bigger role at the very beginning. A colleague from a museum in Cairo contacts her with help to get help in bringing up the writing on a faded document that someone has brought to him, which was actually stolen, it turns out, from the Vatican several decades earlier. And it's one of those ancient texts where they don't want it to be made public. And so the hunt is on to get it back. And of course, people who have had contact with it start dying. So there's a chase across, you know, Africa and Europe and et cetera. And that's basically the formula for the other books in this series. Some of them, you know, do have religious events like this one. The one previous to this actually involved a Nazi weapon that was under development when World War II came to an end. And the descendants of the Nazis have perfected this weapon. And now we're going to set it off at the Olympics in 2012 in London, you know, so. And now that one is echoes of the Reich. But anyway, people who want, you know, just adventures sort of can suspend or disbelieve might find this so uninteresting. Conspiracy oriented. Okay. Okay. So I've got to admit, I've been a Doctor Who fan since the early 70s. Well, no, I can't say early 70s. I take that back late 70s. I have to be of a certain age to go to just watch television. But and it's obviously gone through quite the renaissance of late with the new series that started back in 2005. But what I found out is a lot of libraries don't generally carry the books that have come out. And a lot of the books in the past have either been novelizations of the episodes, which very significantly in quality. And or the last couple of years, the books that have been coming out have been more like a young adults, not necessarily read by adults. Unless you're, you know, somebody like me who reads anything, Doctor Who, they can get their hands on. What has been happening, though, lately is some what people I call full blown adult science fiction novels written by famous authors have been coming out. And this is the latest one, Harvest of Time by Alistair Reynolds, who is a very popular British science fiction author. And these are full length novels written at the adult level. This one happens to take place in the 1970s with Doctor Number 3, John Hurtley and the master. I'm probably losing people as we speak talking about this. But these novels, there's several of them. This one is a trade paperback. Others have come out in hard cover. So they'll hold up a little better in your collection. And I think it would be great. You've probably got some Doctor Who fans in your library looking for some good science fiction and by some good authors. So I highly recommend this one. The story at this point I won't get too much into. But that's the other thing I want to say. These do pretty much stand on their own. As long as you're familiar with the concept of Doctor Who and the time travel involved, you can read these novels and you don't have to read them in order or in series or anything like that. They do all pretty much stand on their own. So this latest one here, Harvest of Time by Alistair Reynolds. Okay. Next, J.D. Robb's Thankless in Death. This is, perhaps you know that J.D. Robb is Nora Roberts, one of the more popular writers and more prolific writers. This is number 37 in the series about Eve Dallas, a detective with the New York Police and Security Department in near future New York in the years 2060. Lieutenant Dallas is married to billionaire industrialist, incredibly handsome and pretty naturally understanding husband, Rourke. I mean, you know, if you're going to make up a hero, why not make up a good one? Dallas is driven. She's a driven homicide detective, tends to have kind of a, well, maybe rough on other people. She's tough. She's very tough. So at this point, this particular one, Rourke's Irish, because of course they're Irish, relatives are coming for Thanksgiving. But meanwhile, Eve is trying to find a killer who starts out by murdering his parents and then discovers he likes it. So he's killing people. We know in this one, and this isn't generally the case with Robb, we know in this case who the killer is, but we have to find him and stop him before he kills some more. At this point, the Eve Dallas books, one reads them to visit with old friends. There's a huge cast of characters and really some of them are great fun. I wouldn't recommend this as being the first one to read if you're going to read this series, but people who like the series are going to want to read this. I think this brings up the question, and we have talked about this and not come up with any good answers, should you have all the books in the series? Because of course, as I said, this is number 37 and number 38 is going to be out, I think it's next month. Do you need all those things on your shelf? I don't know. We differ in opinion, that's why we're not having this conversation right now. I think it would be lovely to have them all, but I understand that there are constraints. I also really recommend this in audio. If you want to do that, the actor who reads them, Susan Erickson, really does a very good job with all the different voices. She's really a good voice of Eve Dallas. So they're not deep, but they move right along. The villains are usually very villainous. There is bad language in sex. You said hot reads. Yeah. Deborah. Well, this one's not quite so hot that way. This one's a cozy mystery, no sex, sorry, and no bad language either. It's actually historical to an extent. It takes place in 1952. I guess that's going to be historical. So you do get the people being affected by the Korean War as well as carryover from World War II. Death Rides a Zephyr by Janet Dawson. I included this one because it wasn't a good cozy, but also because it's by a small press. There are a lot of authors who are having to go to small presses to get published who are good. As I said, it takes place in 1952. It takes place on the California Zephyr on a trip from the San Francisco area to Chicago at Christmastime. How many of you knew that at that time that there were such things as Zephyretes? Really? Thanks, stewardess. In addition to the porters and the conductors, they would have a female Zephyretes who helped take care of the people. She made dinner reservations. She would make sure that kids got more babysat while their parents went to dinner. On a cruise line, the entertainment director type thing. Julie. I love that. But anyway, it sort of has a nod to Agatha Christie, too. The train is chugging along and a murder happens and the train gets stopped by a rock slide. They have to figure out what happens. It was just a fun, cozy mystery. You're into nostalgia for that time period. If you're interested in train travel, she gave a lot of historical information about the trains. It was fun. The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith, who is actually J.K. Rowland. This is her second adult book, but this is definitely a mystery. It's about a detective called Cormoran Strike. Strike is a former military man who lost his leg to a landmine in Afghanistan. So he has come back to London and started a business as a private detective. He's a barely scraping guy. He's had a terrible fight with his long standing girlfriend and she's thrown him out. So he's now living in his office. His creditors are after him. And one day, a man walks in and asks Cormoran to investigate the death of the man's sister who was a famous, who was a supermodel. Strike does and he takes detecting very seriously. He's actually a pretty straight arrow guy. And through the whole high fashion club scene, he does figure out what happened to the model. Who was called the Cuckoo by her friends. Interesting character. I think there's a lot of room for development. I think Rowling paces things really well. It's interesting just to see what she's done after the phenomenon of Harry Potter. And I'm kind of glad to see that she wants to keep on. And this is her second non-nice Harry Potter one. And I think I liked this one better than the other one. Which title I can't remember right off the top of my head at the moment. Casual vacancy. Anyway, I think that a lot of people might want to read it just because it was J.K. Rowling. But I thought it was a pretty good book. And I'll look forward to, I hope, one series about this detective. Well, somebody said this one is now being marketed as number one in this series. We'll hope so. Deborah. Oh, The Rosie Project by Graham Simpsonsian. I'm not quite sure how his last name is pronounced. Laura also read this one so she can chime in. This was recommended to me actually by staff over at Lincoln City Libraries. And she talked about, she made a comparison to Sheldon Cooper on the Big Bang Theory. And even though I haven't really watched it, you know, between a colleague trying to get me to watch it, describing, you know, different episodes, I am sort of familiar with characters. So the name Sheldon Cooper was familiar to me. But in this particular book, Don Tillman, a genetics professor, is in search for a wife. But he's having problems finding the right woman. A big part of the problem is that Don has Asperger's syndrome. Although he never acknowledges throughout the book that he has this. He, in fact, when the book opens up, he's lecturing to a group of Asperger people with Asperger's syndrome and their parents. And he can't apply what he's talking about to himself. He has definite social issues. But after several failures at dating, he decides to come up with a scientific method for finding a wife, because that's his next, that's his project. So he creates a survey to eliminate those women that won't meet his criteria, won't meet his standards, and therefore why bother wasting time dating them. But while he's waiting for the perfect response to his survey to come back, he meets Rosie. And at first he thinks that she is part of his wife project because a colleague sent her along to him. But actually she is searching for her biological father and she's come to him for his help because he's a geneticist. So he starts working on the Rosie project while he's waiting for his wife project to take over. Needless to say, Don becomes interested in Rosie, but because she obviously fails several of his questions on the questionnaire. She's not really a candidate, but I laughed so hard through this book. I don't know, how to get across the comedy, the zany characters. It reminded me of a Mad Cat 1940s romance movie, where there's all these misunderstandings, but witty dialogue, the prat falls, but there's always this added twist of Don not really getting what's going on. But he does grow over the progress of the book. The journey is not just to find Rosie's father, but it's also Don journeying to find more about himself and to adapt himself. Don learns a lot about getting along in the world. I think it's interesting to say that the book is set in Australia. On one point, he and Rosie fly to New York. He has been to the states before for conferences. When he and Rosie go to the airport, even though they're flying economy, they get whisked right through security and off to the first class lounge. As Don tells Rosie, this is his special benefit, because he's given them so many suggestions and recommendations on how to improve the system. It's his special benefit. He doesn't get it that they're trying to shuffle them off so he quits talking to them and telling them other things that they should change. But he's brilliant in his way. He's probably right. He's just irritating. Sounds like Sheldon Cooper. Very entertaining book. Back to me. Hey, surprise, surprise, Michael's picking a Stephen King book. I read a lot of, in the horror genre, this is not really a horror novel. This takes place in the 1970s with a college student who takes a summer job at a carnival and an amusement park called Joyland. And, of course, discovers that many a year ago there was a murder and trying to, there's kind of a coming of age aspect to it. There's the figuring it out, who did it and how it happened. There's a little bit of horror in that the fun house may be haunted by the murdered person, but we're not completely sure about that. And so it's Stephen King. It's almost, I want to say, classic Stephen King, but it's not typical Stephen King. It is very different, very much a period piece. What I also want to talk about in this, though, is the publisher involved here, Hard Case Crime. He did one other novel for them a while back called The Colorado Kid, which has kind of been turned into the TV series Haven. But what Hard Case Crime is doing is they're republishing classic pulp crime novels and getting new ones written. So I just want to pull up here. Some of the authors, they're republishing Lawrence Block, Roger Zalazny, Howard Hunt, classic stuff from the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, even into the 60s. In the 70s, they've just republished a whole series of Michael Crichton novels that were written under a pseudonym John Lang, I believe was that. A lot of them are out in paperback. This one and a few others, the new Michael Crichton ones are out in trade paperback and they have done some hard covers also. And I've kind of skipped this whole genre. I never really read the pulp novels. I knew who Lawrence Block was. I knew who Donald Leslich was, but I hadn't ever read them. And I have just been devouring all of these Hard Case Crime books and figuring out which ones come through. So, you know, some of them are very violent. Some of them are, most of them are extremely sexist because of the time they were written in, not the Stephen King one. This one's not super violent and sexist. Other ones are they have sex and bad language in them, but it's sex written in the 1940s and 50s. It's not exactly explicit. It's almost kind of reading through, you know, going through a time tunnel and reading these classic crime novels. And I'm thoroughly enjoying them. And I think, especially if you want to beef up your paperback collection, you'll definitely have fans of these novels flocking to read them and read all of them. So, right. Scalsy. John Scalsy. The Human Division, which is really kind of part of his The Old Man's War series. But this is, this kind of stands alone. It's a collection really of 13 linked stories. It's not really so much a novel. It's about two people from the diplomatic corps who encounter other species and try to solve the problems. They encounter along the way. I don't know. I think I'm dating myself badly by saying that this reminded me of the reddit stories by Keith Laumer from the 60s and 70s. They tend to be fairly humorous. And, you know, our heroes, Harry Wilson and Hart Schmidt are probably smarter than most of the folks around them. Scalsy's a lot of fun. He writes a well-known blog. He just won the Hugo Award last year for red shirts. Brilliant. And this is kind of, I don't know, is it fair to call it old-style science fiction? Yeah, The Old Man's War stuff is kind of space opera-y, military SF kind of combination. But with his humor stuck in it. Yeah, I think his favorite book of mine is Essays on Writing. And it's called You're Not Fooling Anyone by Bringing Your Laptop to the Coffee Shop. So if that gives you any idea of his humor. Yeah, so a lot of fun, a good introduction to science fiction that doesn't contain a lot of what I would characterize as weirdness. It's human people dealing with situations that are caused by, in many ways, scientific discoveries and breakthroughs. He's very strong in character as opposed to the science of it, you know, in the spaceships and whatnot. I mean, there is science in spaceships, but it's really character. The science and spaceships are really the setting, but the story, the characters are important. So anyway, a lot of fun, light reading. Good, camera. Wild Justice by Kelly Armstrong. This was actually number three in a trilogy, but I read it first. So it just happened. I, you know, this came out here last month and I happened to pick it up. Nadia Stafford is a Canadian ex-police woman, owner of a lodge outside of Toronto. Who is also a part-time assassin for hire, but she has morals. Oh, okay. Only the bad guys, but sometimes she's pushing the line between right and wrong. And sometimes she gets pulled into jobs with a group of other assassins, you know, trying to, you know, fix things. Okay. But she has reasons for her career progression, shall we say, including the murder of her cousin a few years earlier. And it turns out that that killer was a serial killer. And Nadia faces him down and finds out that there were other things that happened that she sort of repressed. But if you want suspense thriller that has a really strong female protagonist, I found this series really interesting. Okay. Parasite. Yeah, no, this is, Mirror Grant is wonderful. Mirror Grant is one of the fewest authors I've ever discovered in an airport bookstore. I used to travel way more than I do now. I'm going through the airport bookstore. And I see this paperback book with the RSS icon on it, but it's dripping blood. And I'm like, okay, this looks interesting. And so I pull that out and then it says, with zombies. And I'm like, huh? Okay, now I'm definitely going to read this. And that book, the first one is called Feed. And I don't remember the title of the other two. And it was a trilogy about the near future. Zombies have pretty much overrun the country. And the news as we know it has been pretty much taken over by bloggers. I mean, it was, there's political intrigue and everybody's giving me funny looks, but trust me, it works. Okay, so that she had that trilogy. This parasite is the first book of her new trilogy. And in this case, not zombies, but it's medical thriller. In that near future, a bio company has come up with the ultimate parasite that actually pretty much can cure you of everything and become, and cure you, keep you healthy, things like that. But eventually it turns out that the parasites basically become sentient and want to take over. So there's kind of a zombie-ish section in the middle. But it's, I just, I devoured this first one in like two days. It's a pretty thick book, but they're pretty big reads. This one's almost 500 pages. I can't wait for the next two. The other thing I will say is very strong female protagonists. And usually on the younger end of the spectrum, late teens, early 20s. So if you've got, would work very well for teen readers also, I think, at least in relating to the characters and that. And so I love really large, thick books that I can just plow through and I don't want to put down and don't end up in, in Tim, although I do read other large books. These you can still read in a couple of days. So I highly recommend this and looking forward to the next two. Okay. Jeans and the Wedding Bells. Sebastian Fox, who I don't know. He seems to be kind of almost a shapeshifter here because Sebastian Fox wrote a book about James Bond a couple of years ago. Devil May Care. And now he is writing what he calls a knowledge to PG Woodhouse. Woodhouse, of course, a great humorist, wrote Broadway plays, wrote some of Cold Porter's lyrics. I mean, the man, and he wrote a lot of stories and a number of books about Bertie Wooster and his, a gentleman's gentleman, his valedict, Jeans. Now you may be familiar with the Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, TV adaptations of these. And Bertie is, well, not the sharpest pencil in the box, but he is very good-hearted. He's very good-hearted. He's a well-to-do young English gentleman. Woodhouse first started Bertie and Jeans. They first appeared in 1915. And his last book about them came out in 1974. When Woodhouse died, you know, it's been 20, 30 years now. We haven't had anything from Bertie and Jeans. And the Woodhouse estate did ask Fox to write a book. He did it pretty well. Woodhouse was a complete master of using language, and they're just really funny. I myself would say that the Code of the Woosters, one of the books about Bertie and Jeans, is probably the funniest book ever written. Really. They're intricately plotted, silly as can be, and yet, sublime. He's writing souffle. In this book, Bertie has met a young woman, Georgiana Meadows, when he's on the Riviera, comes back to England and is a little bit bummed because she's now engaged to somebody else. So he goes to help an old friend. This is usually how these things go with Bertie. Woody Beeching, whose romance is floundering, but they get to the country house where they're staying. And somehow Jeans ends up impersonating Lord Etringham, while Bertie then plays his servant. And it all happens, you know. And if we didn't have Bertie shinning down a drainpipe at some point, what kind of book would it be? So they're silly, but the language is fabulous. And they're written in the first person. Bertie writes them himself. And what can I say? If you've never read PG Woodhouse, it's really a treat. I thought Fox did a pretty good job of coming near Woodhouse, but I would recommend that you get some of the old books by Woodhouse himself, too. These are perennials. They will never grow stale. Woodhouse himself said that he thought that writing books was, you had to do it either really delve into reality, or just pretty much ignore it all together and write a book that was kind of like a musical comedy. These are definitely musical comedy, and they're wonderful. So I really recommend it. They're a lot of fun. I'm going to interject here. We filled our hour, but do you think we can sneak in one more? Okay, well, I'm not sure how many more we have left, so I was just wanting to make sure. I think I've only got one more. I have two more left, but okay. Just so that everyone on the line gets to normally officially go 10 to 11 a.m. But when we go long, we go long. I didn't know where everybody was watching the clock or not. If you need to leave, that's fine. It's all being recorded. You can catch everything at the end later on recording. If you want to breathe, just stick around with us. Alright. I'll probably be brief over the next couple. Heirs of the Body by Karola Dunn. This is another long-running cozy. It's actually number 21 in the series. I was surprised when I looked that up. I didn't realize there were that many, although I've read all of them. This series takes place in the 1920s with the main character, Daisy Dahlrymple. And I just love that name. She was the daughter of an Earl. She's now married to a Scotland yard inspector, Alec Fletcher. And she's always getting into becoming involved in murder mysteries and that her husband gets dragged into and his superintendent always gets really upset because your wife is involved yet. But anyway, they're just fun. For this particular book, it sticks more with Daisy's family and family history. Her brother was killed in World War I. And her father died shortly after. And so her cousin Edgar inherited the title and the estate. She was the daughter, as I said, of an Earl. Edgar is now turning 50 and he and his wife don't have any children and there are no other closely related male heirs that they're aware of. So their family lawyers start searching for the heir so that this person can be brought in and learn how to run the estate when Edgar has passed away. Several possible heirs are found. They're invited to the estate for Edgar's birthday celebration. Gee, somebody seems somebody is starting to try to kill off the other various heirs. Possible heirs, I should say. So mystery, mystery. They're just like fun. All right. The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Wiffle, The Dark of the Deep Below. This is another children's book. I read a lot of books from small presses, small independent presses, which can be somewhat hard for libraries to get ahold of. In this case, this one is still readily available, at least through Amazon and directly from the publisher. So I'm throwing it in here. Patrick Rothfuss is a fantasy author. Name of the Wind is a series, or that's the first book in a series. He's written this quite popular by fantasy readers. This one is an illustrated children's book. A little longer than your average black and white illustrations. You get a pretty good idea of the artist Nate Taylor there on the cover. This is actually book two, but it does stand on its own in book one. I've looked online. You can only get like paying super premium prices on the used market. In this case, the princess now has a little brother. Mr. Wiffle is the bear, by the way there. She's having to deal with now having a little princess, her brother, and how he eats the books. Eventually he gets lost and she needs to go find him in the deep below in a cave. Now, I will admit, especially the first one, maybe not appropriate for all children. Patrick Rothfuss has a bit of a dark streak in him. In the first book, I'll say that she encounters monsters and let's just say the monsters lose. I'll leave it at that, but not in the way you expect. I actually read that book to my wife one evening and she kind of, you know, but if you have one of those kids who's a little older and kind of likes the creepy stuff, this is pretty good. This book is not as creepy, but the other style is you kind of get to the end of the story and that's the first ending of the story and then he has the second ending of the story and the third. I think this one even has a fourth ending to the story and it's really cute. I recommend it, especially if you've got the situation with like older daughter now has a little brother and is trying to deal with that. I think that works really well. But just kind of putting that sometimes it is kind of dark, which I have no problem. I think kids can handle that stuff, but some parents maybe might not like it. So I just want to kind of keep that warning in there. Maybe for older kids who still like a good story, but it is a kid's book. I mean, you know, heavily illustrated small number of words per page, that sort of thing. You could definitely do it as kind of read out loud things like that. So that's the Princess and Mr. Wethel and I hope there's more. I love the, I don't read a lot of kids books, but these are good. I really enjoy them. Okay, Spirits Depot. Walt Longmire, our favorite sheriff of Ansaroka County in Wyoming. I think most of you are probably aware of Craig Johnson, the writer from Wyoming who's written the Longmire books. This is actually a novella. It's not really a pulling novel and it's like the 10th or so book about Walt Longmire. What is there to say? Longmire is a widower, near retirement, gets into situations in Ansaroka County, Wyoming, very rural, very western. His best friend is Henry Standing Bear, who owns the Red Pony Saloon in town. He's a lot of fun, modern day cowboy, people who like westerns I think would enjoy him. It has many of the hallmarks of the western, but also a modern day detective I think people would enjoy it. One thing I would recommend is that I don't think it's good to read. You know, sometimes when you get a series, you get real enthused about them and you just read them all. This might not, they kind of begin to run together if you do that. Spread them out. Spread them out in other words. This one is a little bit different in some ways. It's the story of a bad, bad accident on Christmas Eve and Walt's predecessor in office, Lucian Connolly, is still sheriff. And they really have to fly a young girl who's badly hurt in this accident to Denver for medical treatment or she's going to die. And yet they're flying a decommissioned World War II plane through a terrible storm. And the whole book is told actually in flashback. It's later the girl comes back as an adult and to talk to them about this. So, the series is great. I think there'd be a lot of interest in it. It is, of course, A&E now has a TV series. I was going to say, these are on my list, but after meeting Craig Johnson at ARSL, Mary and I watched both seasons of that show in like two weeks. I really enjoyed it. So now I want to start reading the books. I think the Longmire and TV and the Longmire and the books are really kind of different. Are they? Well, they expect some difference anyways, obviously. Well, look at Temperance Brennan, Kathy Reich's books as opposed to the TV series Bones. Definite difference there, too. My last one, Home of the Brazed by Julie Heisey. This is a cozy sort of a cutesy. All of the titles are puns, which some people don't like. You know, there's the State of the Onion and Fine Doing Fathers and things like that. Yeah. But there, okay. This one I threw in just because of the other fun one. It is number seven in the series. Olivia, or Ollie, Paris is the executive chef at the Lighthouse. And by this time in the series, she's engaged with Secret Service Agent Leonard Gavin. But someone, they're preparing for a state dinner with representatives from a made-up country of Durasi. But someone is trying to disrupt the peace initiatives that are underway. Several people are gassed, the Secretary of Defense is killed, and Ollie is right back in there trying to figure out what's going on. So. Okay. Oh, I forgot I had these in here. I've only read the first one of this trilogy, and mainly because the second two aren't out yet, but they are coming. But they've already been published because these were originally published in Sweden, I believe. So kind of the Scandinavian novelists are becoming very popular in the United States. I read the first one here as an advanced copy, Buzz. And it, or excuse me, Game is the first one, Buzz is the second, Bubble is the third. It's kind of the, and this one does take place in Sweden. It's kind of the, there was a movie out with Michael Douglas 20 years ago, we would call The Game. And in this case, the game is you sign up and it's all done via your cell phone and you're sent instructions to go do something. And you can earn points, but the something may be anything from cause a little vandalism to maybe kill somebody eventually. But then there's a website where people can watch and vote on your progress and everything's videotapes. So there's all this conspiracy going on, and it was kind of just an updated tech take on this sort of, there's a grand conspiracy causing people to do things, but trading it all as a game sort of story. And I blew through the first one in just a couple of days and looking forward to these actually coming out in the States, which I think is almost any day now to take a look at. I thought when I first saw it, it was going to be kind of the more YA novels, but no, these are written for adults, although teens could easily read these, not too much violence in that. But anybody who kind of, I think teens would get a lot more in that living on the cell phone and giving the text messages and communicating that way. This is how it's all centered on how the game works. So I thought that's a great books to look forward to. Definitely something I think would be popular in your collection. Okay. And our last is W is for Wasted Sue Grafton. I think everybody by now kind of knows the Kinsey Millholm series started with A is for Alibi in 1982. Grafton says the final novel is going to coincide with Kinsey's 40th birthday. In the first book is 1982, Kinsey's 32. The last book is going to be in 1990. So these books are actually kind of historical at this point. Kinsey doesn't have a lot of the technology we take for granted. She's still rolling invoice forms into her typewriter. Does she have a pager? No. But Kinsey, we've been through a lot with Kinsey because of course this is number 23. In the series. But I think she's developed a bit as a character. She's kind of a female hard boiled detective. Another tough broad. Yeah. It's in Santa Teresa, which is a thinly veiled substitute for Santa Barbara, California. This one is interesting in that a homeless man on the beach leaves her a whole bunch of noise. And trying to figure out why the homeless man had a whole bunch of money. And why he left it to her. And then there's another sort of sleazy private detective who was killed. And you have to figure out why he was killed. And the two things do come together eventually. So it's a good mystery. It's a detective that many of us have known love for a long time. This one also, and in fact the picture here is a audio book. And I think they're good for audio books because they're written in first person. So they're read by Judy Kay. It does a very nice job. You know, I, and again, you know, do you own them all or not? I don't know. Depends on what your people read. That's a different presentation. But I think that's everything I hope. Oh, well. Coming up. I just, I was going through my list of, okay, what have I read? What's coming up? So these are, these are titles that are going to be coming out over the next couple of three months that I plan to read. So. And I had a few things because where do you find out about these books and what are we reading? Well, Buzzfeed now has a books page, which is really very interesting. And you can subscribe to get sort of notices of what's going on in Buzzfeed in your email. So it's very easy to keep up with books that way. As is this library reads. Library reads is very interesting. It's the 10 books for the month. And they updated every month that librarians have chosen that are going to be printed that month. You get the pre-publication copies of it from Adelweiss and you sign up to do this. Any librarian can sign up to do this. Read the books and then vote. So this is a great way to find books too because these are things librarians have chosen that they think are going to be worthwhile. And while throwing, you mentioned Adelweiss, which is one of the places you can get advanced copies of books digitally. Although I found Adelweiss, it's quite the process to get books from that. I get a lot of advanced electronic copies and that's how I got the Buzz book from NetGalley. And it's a much easier process to get access to the advanced stuff. Now a lot of smaller publishers, not necessarily the big names, which is where Adelweiss has random house and things like that. NetGalley, excuse me, has smaller publishers, but I'm getting access to one or two galleys a week electronically through them. You're supposed to post reviews and I do when I can, but I've got too many books I want to read that I can get to. But they're a lot easier to get content from, I think, than Adelweiss. Well, I still think this library reads is cool. Oh yeah, no, that's great. Book 5 is a thing you can sign up for and it will send you a notice of the people you follow on Twitter, any books that they have mentioned in the book. So if you're following people on Twitter who talk about books, you hear about the books. You have a Twitter account? I'm a thoroughly modern... Okay, no, I didn't know. I would agree you should. Would you call you Milly? But anyway, so those are our book reviews. I think, wow, I feel like we all talked fast. No, that was good. We'll have to do a shorter list one next time. I hope you all enjoyed it. I hope you all heard about some titles that you'd like to read or that you'd like to buy for your library. If you have some titles you'd like to share with us, we'd really love to hear about it. And let us know what you think about book talking. Would you like to hear more book talking? So anyway, goodbye and thank you. All right, that will wrap it up for this morning then. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you, Laura, Michael, and Deborah for sharing your titles, your recent reads with us. These were all recently published books, correct? So that will wrap it up for today. This show was recorded, so you will be able to watch it again later if you want to. I hope you join us next week when our topic is passive programming for tweens and teens. Rachelle McPhilips, who's from the Columbus Public Library here in Nebraska, has ideas for doing programs that run themselves. So pretty easy to get your teens and those age of kids coming into the library. So join us next week for that, sign up for that. And if you are on Facebook and Columbus Live is on Facebook, please do like us there. You'll get announcements about when new sessions are coming up and recordings are ready. Reminders that, hey, today's session is starting, come and join us on the fly. So like us there if you are a big Facebook user. Other than that, thank you very much. And that will wrap it up for this morning. Thanks and bye-bye.