 And it is my pleasure to welcome you to this first public program of the fall season. And we are trying an experiment today where you're doing what we're calling rapid reviews. And there are a couple of people in the audience who are actual librarians or retired librarians who may have been to rapid review sessions at the Vermont Library Association. And the idea is that our esteemed colleagues here will very quickly review each of them or review ten of their favorite books. Some old, mostly new. And did you all get a bibliography? No. No? But don't worry, Michelle will pass it up. Because I do whatever it is to do. So, as you study each of your bibliography and then you can make notes on it, there's something that you really like. Michelle, Virginia's one. So, before I introduce our speakers, I would just like to make sure that many of you are regular Oli attendees. Some of you I think might even be your first time. But we do have a program every Wednesday at 1.30 here at the Mark Healyer Senior Center. And if you do not have a program, those beautiful orange brochures right over there will tell you everything that you need to know. Well, not about life, but about all. Next week, without the fact, she's... Next week, I believe it's an Amy program. This is Amy Ehrlich. Next week, we're having representatives of search. Oh my God, that was a spider. That's George. You always get to think, do you man do like this? Well, why wouldn't you? So, next week we're having representatives of search, which stands for showing up for racial justice. And the topic is white people and racial justice, how the fight against racism is our issue too. So that should be a very interesting presentation and discussion. And we have all sorts of other programs after that. We have history, we have politics, we have the environment and art, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm hoping that you can come to a lot of them. As you probably know, it's $40 for the whole session or $5 for each one if you come in. If you don't come in, you don't have to pay a thing. Yeah, so we try to make it easier for people. So we have two booksellers and two librarians and some of you will say, but wait, but wait, what person is both? And yes, that would be George Spaulding, who works full-time at the library and quite a lot at the bookstore. We don't know how he does it all, but I noticed that almost every single person that came in said, hello George, because they know. Now, Steve Paggio, you've seen him at the library. He's ahead of circulation. He is quieter than George. Oh, what a surprise. But also, my great guy. And then we have our two booksellers, Cora Kelly and Claire Benedict. And I hope you are also patrons of Bear Pond, as well as the Kelly Cumberd Library. Now, the bibliography is, of course, an alphabetical order by an author, because guess what? I'm a librarian and there's no other possible way that I could have done this list. So it's going to be popping up. So for instance, George, you see the first entry as George's initials after GS. And so if you have any questions about any of the books that they're talking about, you can't remember afterwards who mentioned them. You would do have the initials to refer to. So they're going to be popping up doing the books in order that they appear on here. There is no relationship between one book and the next, other than the fact that each book is liked by somebody here. We have a PowerPoint that is the covers of the books that they're talking about, so if you don't want to stare at them, you may also stare at this. Are there any questions before we start? Everybody ready? Are you excited? Okay, guess who's first? I'm talking about the first book, which is Real Queer America. The author of the book is a reporter who was formerly a fairly conservative, straight reporter who discovered she was a woman. And she made it a point to travel the United States for a couple years after the recent much-nomented election to go to different areas that voted red in 2016. Places like Utah, Salt Lake City, Indiana, Bloomington, Fort Wayne, Texas, the Rio Grande Valley, to talk with people that were there, that were queer in various ways. She saw a ton of drag shows because drag apparently translates everywhere. She also talked with a bunch of people who were immigrants, who were living in the Rio Grande Valley and that chapter great and also heartbreaking. I would really recommend it. It's well-ridden. She doesn't lament too much, and the people she meets are fascinating. This book is The Mothers by Rick Bennett. The Mothers is set in modern-day California and it revolves around a church community complete with a meddling set of church elders, which are some of the mothers of the title. It's mostly about a teenage girl who's reeling from the recent suicide of her own mother. She's heartbroken and damaged, but she's also a very strong character. She takes up with the pastor's son in one fateful summer. The mistakes that she and the young boy make that summer, they kind of stay with them throughout their lives and reverberate for many years hence. There's lots of themes about motherless children and the mother-child relationship throughout the story. Bennett's characters are beautifully written, nuanced, and very real. One of the things I loved about this book is that it takes place around an African-American religious community that the focus is neither on religion nor race. It's just facts that just happen to be and you can tell these incredible stories without it being a racial story or a religious story. And I highly recommend it. So of all the books that I recommended, this was the one I was most excited about. I was counting down the days until it was actually released. The author has been a television writer for some time, and this is his first work of literature. So it's a collection of short stories and what I particularly like about it is the way that it... What I particularly find compelling about this book is the way that it can shift homes really quickly. It can go from dark to funny and back to dark again, from bizarre to funny and back to bizarre again. It's really kind of whip whirling you around emotionally. But what minds all the stories together is that they're all grounded in stories about relationships that are very relatable so that he has this great talent of writing a story in a world that doesn't really exist but you understand the relationships between these characters. It's a great book if you like short stories. They're incredibly well crafted. He combines both the character development and the plot development together so that the stories really move quickly and you come to the end of the story and you have this big revelation like, oh, now I get what this was all about and it's a lot of fun. So it is dark, it is odd, but it's also very funny and it's also very sort of exciting and new. So, yes, Roger. So, as the publisher knew, this book was published in 1942. Twenty seconds of history. Anthony Boucher is the greatest history critic of all time. He's also a writer. He also co-founded Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine back in the 1450s, something like that. This book is based on a collection of his friends that had a writing group in California. Oh, boy, this toilet was okay. In California in the 1930s and 40s, the characters in the book are based on people like Robert Heinlein, John W. Campbell, the greatest editor in science fiction ever, and also Oran Hubbard, who created Dianetics but wasn't always that crazy. He, so to speak. The book is a lot through mystery. The characters in the book have a great time. At one point, one of the characters who's based on my mind actually proposes a fourth dimension from which the killer could have phased and committed the murder and then phased back and does it with a straight face. The detective is actually a police detective named Terrence, I forget his last name, but the main detective is done by a nun named Sister Ursula who was delightful. Boucher had a series of books featuring hers, the detective, and they're all terrific. I'm particularly fond of this one because of the science fiction connotations. The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne. This is a wonderfully epic story set in Dublin that follows a young boy, Cyril Avery, who's an orphan, from womb to old age. I mean, he's not an orphan yet when he's in the womb, but soon. The rest of the time, he's an orphan. Starting in the late 1940s, it's a beautiful book, look at identity, both Cyrils and Ireland's, and a study on belonging and love in a world where those things can be so elusive to so many. This book has warmth and humor, as well as poignancy and tragedy, but the author walks this great line of hope and yearning very skillfully. Your heart is warmed throughout this book. I gobbled it up quickly, and everybody I've recommended to has loved it, and by the end of it, you're just like, Cyril, my heart! You just don't want it to end. I love other young adult books on this list, and this, I'm having to say, is one of them. Once in Future, it's by Amy Rose Caffetta and Cory McCarthy, who are a couple who live in town. They're both VCFA grads. It's a science fiction retelling of King Arthur set, obviously, in the future. The main character's named Auri Helix. She actually is a stowaway on a ship who meets, eventually, when the deer falls in love with her. And Merlin, who has been aging backwards due to a really unfortunate spell, appears in the book as a teenager, about 14, maybe maybe 15, something like that, desperate to find a king or a critical to actually break the curse before he reverts back any further in age. The book's super funny. Super, super funny. I love it to pieces. There's a love story between Auri and Muinevere. A story of sorts between Merlin and the Nightingale. And I read it entirely. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi. This book starts out ostensibly as a novel about a teenage drama at a performing arts high school. But it turns into a very dramatic story of how our past ripples through our lives in ways we don't even realize. I felt like I was reading this book. I was reading a master class in creative writing. It's got a very original and unexpected storytelling style that I can't really explain to you. You just have to experience it for yourself. It's not weird. It's not out there. It's just original. There are twists and turns in this book that will stop your cold because of the change in story but also for the creative manner in which they are presented. I was very engrossed in this at all times. Choi creates a precise sense of place and characters whose every raw is the emotion that is felt by the reader. I've always been a big fan of Susan Choi so this is by far my favorite of her novels. Okay. The Last Pirate of New York. This is a great book if you are interested in history and also it falls into true crime and biography as well. So it's about a man named Albert Hicks who was the last person to be convicted of piracy and it tells his story and the various horrible things that he did. But what's so exciting for me as a fan of history is that it gives this amazingly complete view of New York City on the cusp of the Civil War. The tenements and the docks where people were Shanghai and just the Irish immigrants coming and conflicting with the affluent people living uptown and all this stuff. It's a really complex view of what America was like and just the point where it was about to explode and it's really fun to read for that reason. I get to talk. Mine were all further in the alphabet. So this is Game of Kings by Dorothy Dennett which was written in the 60s and is one of my favorite swashbuckling adventure stories. It's 1547 in Scotland and the outlaw and rebel Francis Crawford of Lyman to secretly return to his homeland. In the first 30 pages of the book he swims across a river in the middle of the night housed by the pigsty. Floods Edinburgh as well as with Claret breaks into his own ancestral castle and steals the jewelry belonging to a large group of women visiting his mother and then sets fire to the castle on his way out all with great flair and many quotations of romantic poetry. Crawford may seem morally dubious but his ultimate motivation is his loyalty to his family and his country and he forms a mercenary army risking his life to protect Scotland and its very young queen from the English troops heading north. Crawford always reminds me of a cross between Robin Hood, Lord Peter Wimsy and the Scarlet Pimpernel. Dorothy Dennett's grasp of the history and literature of the 16th century along with her sense of humor make this a rich reading experience and there are five sequels. Next book. Wine Lovers' Daughter. Clifton Fadiman was born in Brooklyn to Ukrainian Jewish parents. As a boy he shared a bed with his two brothers and worked at his father's unsuccessful drug store. When he was four he learned to read and thereafter supplemented his school education with books he chose himself. Falling in love with words in the process. He graduated from high school at 15 and enrolled at Columbia thereafter and proceeded to distance himself as far as possible from his humble beginnings. At 28 he was editor-in-chief at Simon & Chuster. At 29 he was the book critic at the New Yorker magazine and he called Gertrude Stein a master in the art of making nothing happen very slowly. At 34 he was the emcee of an NBC radio quiz show with 15 million listeners. He had tenaciously become as cultured as he could and the wine that he drank, collected and wrote about was a big part of that. And Fadiman gives us an affectionate and moving picture for father that is clear eyed, not denying his flaws and insecurities but written with warmth and understanding and love. Hello. I'm super delighted to talk about this book. It is called Yes, I'm Hot In This. It's actually this big. And it is a collection of cartoons that started out online and it's now been published in book forms. It's by Ann Goulding who was born in the very foreign country of Michigan. And sort of the questions she gets from mostly well-meaning people who know nothing about her background but assume because her skin is of a different color and she wears the hijab that she's obviously from some far away place like Iran or Iraq or some Arab country somewhere nobody really knows. It's hysterically funny. It is super pointed and it's really worth reading at least twice, which I have. So I went home last night thinking there was going to be notes on the books but I ended up doing reading, writing, and all of them like Craig Ferguson instead. So Ferguson was on the late show for 10 years. I don't know if you say that that way but I did every night. He's brilliant. He's scoffed. He's very funny. He is incredibly profane, especially in print. It's delightful. And I have a message that I'm going to read to you, so don't worry Grace. And I'm not going to muck it. I found a knot. This is about the first time he ever flew on his own. I found a small, non-powered airstrip nearby and contacted a flight instructor in Minneapolis. After jetting to the big airport as a customer I crossed in the main tournament up to the general aviation buildings on the opposite side. This was before he yelled so there's nothing really to recommend Bob to me other than I like the sound of his voice on the phone. He was satisfyingly piloting he was big and the statue grumpy Wilfred Bradley Republican who smelled like a wet dog. I felt safe getting into the plane with him and indeed he knew the terrain like the back of his hand. Like most pilots he was a much nicer and happier person once we were airborne. The Underneath Melanie Flynn is a Vermont author who you've probably never heard of but extremely talented so I suggest you find out about her book The Underneath. This is a gripping story that takes place in the Northeast Kingdom when Kay a British investigative journalist who's traveled all over some dangerous places in Africa and all over the world she rides with her husband and two children to spend the summer in the bucolic Northeast Kingdom town and unplug and reconnect and do all that good stuff people have come to Vermont for. Shortly thereafter her husband leaves on assignment and she's left alone and she's wrangling around this old house and natural curious curiosity leads her to wonder where the owners of her rental cottage have disappeared to as there are various clues about the house that lead her to suspect that something went wrong. Soon Kay is immersed in this gritty and sometimes sinister world of poor rural Vermont. Interspersed with background from Kay's domestic work in Africa. This is a stunning examination of violence both personal and political and a thrilling look at the dark side of family, salvation, and the choices people make. Finn is a recent transplant to the Northeast Kingdom person. Okay, we go a lot. This is a very short and sweet book. It's colorful, it's bright, it's uplifting it's a familiar story in a lot of ways a story of love lost and love regained later in life as people who fell in love as teenagers get separated by forces beyond their control and then find themselves again as adults. But what makes it a little different from other telling of stories like this is that it's a graphic novel, so it's comic book style and it's also a lesbian couple, so it has a bit more of a modern take in that way. But it's a great, if you have don't read graphic novels this is kind of a fun way to get into it, like I said it's short and sweet the art isn't distracting in a way the characters are well developed and they seem very real, and it's just an uplifting and nice story. So, Good Night Stranger Makaya Bay Gold. Makaya is a DCSA 3CFA you may know where she works up there. This is her first novel, it is a fabulous, fabulous novel, this is probably the best writing book I've read this year, and I read it for a month. It's second kid cod the main character is a woman named Uzi, who is part of a set of triplets, one of whom has died at a very young age she also takes care of her brother a person reporting to be the lost triplet shows up on the island and he comes involved with the two of them because there are people on the island as well so it's about family it's about how much can we believe that someone actually exists are we willing to go there for it to believe they exist it's suspenseful, it's gloriously well written, and it's one of my favorite books of the year. Okay, The Law of the Hills A Judicial History of Vermont If that title doesn't stir excitement into it I'm very happy to report that it's much more interesting than it seems. So, I love to read about Vermont history and I love this book for two reasons first, it gives these great stories of all the lawyers and judges who have had an impact on Vermont's history and they're all surprisingly colorful characters and there's cantankerous ones who nobody liked and there's the ones who everybody fond over and thought this was my great mentor and all these great stories like that it's also a really interesting way to understand Vermont history the author is specifically looking at the judicial history but he's tying the whole history of the state through that and that's something I've never considered before, not knowing anything about judicial history, so it's a totally different way to understand the state and yeah, strong recommend He's Drives by Byla Goldberg Byla Goldberg has written a deliciously evocative story about Lily Creston who is a sally man like fictional New York City photographer in the 50s and 60s Lily was a single woman in New York trying to break into the art world and became a single mother both of these things were big stars against her the story is told through catalog notes written by her daughter for a posthumous moment exhibit of her work in the present day Amazingly, Goldberg manages to bring along the genius of Lily's photographs for the reader without ever showing us a single picture of her testimony to her creative writing The characters of Lily and her daughter Samantha feel almost like a gift from the author, they're too strong yet flawed female characters whose tight mother-daughter bond is tested throughout their lives This is absolutely one of my favorite books of the year, I've been trying to get everybody to read it I got my book group to read it, everybody loved it and the writing is just brilliant, it's just really what she's done is amazing I definitely recommend it Okay Gods with a little G I'll fully admit that I'm generally skeptical of books that have a teenager as a protagonist I usually find teenagers protagonists either annoying or not very believably written but this character, her name is Helen she is believably written and she is incredibly likable so we need for that The story is about this girl who lost her mother as a child and she's growing up with her deeply depressed father in a town that is fundamentally religious, so they've kicked out anybody who doesn't adhere with their beliefs and naturally she's a teenager so she's rebelling against this in her own kind of quiet ways and she's trying to figure out the usual thing that teenagers are trying to figure out love and relationships and she's also just trying to figure out the world as beyond her that she can't reach because she's in this very restrictive town It's fast paced It's funny, it's very sad at times but it's always uplifting Very good Woman at a thousand degrees by Halpernore Huggison Here's how this book begins I live here alone in a garage together with a laptop computer and an old hand grenade It's pretty cozy So begins this dark comedy narrated by Hera an 80 year old Icelandic woman who has lived a very fall, almost two fall life that spanned much of the 20th century Her story flashes back to tell us how she came separated from her parents on the European continent during World War II and spent most of the war wandering around by herself and about her post-war years as a socialite and the granddaughter of Iceland's first president and what finally brought her to this garage in suburban Reykjavik where she's so cozy Hera has a very unique perspective a sharp tongue worst of grace and and she has a very original story to tell and it was thoroughly entertaining funny and she's just got this acerbic wit She's the kind of character you'd love to have a drink with but you didn't really want her in your family or anything like like a blazing world by Ciri Busset this is again a book about a female artist this is just a coincidence that I only read books about a female artist but also in New York City she's a middle-aged woman more current day and it's very different than the last book I recommended it's about Harriet Bergen who is trying to make it as an artist in New York as well and she feels that she's consistently being ignored by the critics who favor younger, hipper, and usually male artists and she's kind of pissed about it and she's set up and she decides to try an experiment she hires three different men younger for the most part to present her work as their own and see what happens and what unfolds is not what she expected at all the story is told from many different perspectives her daughter, the men different people in her world and where the truth lies is always in question Harriet is strong an angry character but she's also needy and sympathetic and very memorable I found this thought-provoking and definitely it's a good book group recommendation because there's a lot to discuss and it's just a good needy book by Laurie R. King Harris Stuyvesant is an agent working for the United States Bureau of Investigation in 1926 so this is before the FBI he has come to London following clues to a series of mysterious bombings that have happened on US soil Harris is introduced to Captain Bennett Gray a veteran who came back from the Great War with shell shock and uncanny ability to sense people's hidden motivations Bennett takes Harris along to a weekend house party hosted by a wealthy family with eccentric ideas a party that seems to have so political undercurrents that may just tie into Harris's investigation adding two charismatic and intelligent women, a sadistic, manipulative government man who hopes to use Bennett's abilities for his own ends slowly mounting tension and lots of gin and you have a recipe for a grower I couldn't put down the other Americans by Leila Lalami Driss is a Moroccan immigrant living in California and on his way home from work one night he's killed by a hit and run driver the book is told from the perspective of his daughter Nora and after his death when the family is grieving and it examines the repercussions of his death that it has on his family as well as others in his community, a witness to the accident who is reluctant to come forward a detective investigating the case a neighbor and more all these characters come from different races, religions and economic classes and they all tell a very American story this is a that of the struggles of a Muslim American since 9-11 and a universal family dynamics it's very interesting insight into a slice of American life and these people represent the other Americans the ones that populate our whole country and they don't necessarily hear about all the time in their very heartfelt stories so I think if you know me at all you know I'm a fan of mysteries and I think the big test of mysteries is if you want to reread them and I'm happy to report that Kristen LeBianca's books I have now reread Once in Peace there are three books in the series the newest one is called The Stories You Tell and it's about a private eye in Columbus, Ohio named Roxanne Reere and it's a great private eye name and this one she's called Michael Broder because her brother is in trouble which is not the first time he's been in trouble he's a minor, he's popular a vaguely unemployed post college grad you know, restored and the woman who's come to visit him and has then vanished from there she starts investigating she actually goes into online identities a lot there's a lot of online stuff in here because that's certainly comical but the thing is that she's a terrific writer and a very good plotter the industry itself is very good and I was completely fanbosalistic who had actually done it I recommend the series really enthusiastically This is America by Joe LaCour if anybody tackled Joe LaCour's seventh or plus page history of America last year called These Trues this is the perfect follow-up so in this one she's focusing on political history and how the act of writing history is entailing the history of the nation plays into that and for anybody who appreciates Joe LaCour's writing in New Yorker this is an excellent venue for that she's a fantastic writer, she keeps things very short and precise and she this one is probably her most politically privileged book which is very exciting she's looking at the landscape of politics right now as we speak and she's saying why is there nationalism rising in this country and she's putting together a really fascinating argument that we're telling our history wrong and that people are being misled into nationalism because of that and it's a very exciting book in sort of the strength of her argument against it I think one of the best writers okay the Queen by Jemez Webin so this is a book about a woman named Linda Taylor who was done at the welfare queen by politicians in the press who discovered that she was cheating welfare and living rather maturely off of that and it tells her actual true story her full story and her full story is way wilder she was much more criminal than that she was involved in much more serious things than welfare scams but it also this book while telling her story also looks at sort of her legacy as a press figure as somebody who politicians pointed to as a reason for welfare reform and that sort of thing so it's equal parts true crime and American history Barbara Rebecca Mackay Rebecca Mackay is really well known right now for her big best solid The Great Believers this is her first novel which is kind of my favorite it's about a children's librarian so Grace approved named Lucy who has a favorite young patron who is a 10 year old boy named Ian and she kind of takes to Ian because she wants to save him from his overbearing mother who is very religious and won't let him choose his own books she likes to censor what he reads and she sends him to anti-gay classes and you know Lucy's just her heart's gone out to this boy and one day something happens and all of a sudden they decide to go on a road trip together but she hasn't told his parents this so it's kind of like kidnapping and a lot like kidnapping but you know with the best of intents and there's a lot of children's literature references woven into the storytelling which is just a light fall and it's a lot of fun and it's just a very engaging and funny and sweet story and worth checking out so we cheated twice on this we're supposed to do one book at a time under YouTube books we're not supposed to do best sellers both on the way in the service but Grace did notice so I agree these are both classic mysteries they're both century young adults but that does not mean they're not accessible to people who like to read the first book actually is a closed-circle suspect's mystery set in a detention hall in high school about a kid who gets poisoned it has to be one in five people who are in detention with him because there's a teacher there and the entire rest of the book follows from that the investigation, the suspects the town sort of torn apart is it the bad kid from the other side of the tracks that is in detention of course it probably is because it's always a bad kid the ending is completely unexpected the characters are what he will come back for because the characters are fabulous in the book Anthony Boucher published another book in 1942 could have written this if he had gone to high school in the early 2000s it's remarkably good the second book actually is set in Vermont it's called Two of Us can keep a secret thank you for it and it's about a set of twins who come back to stay with their grandma at a town that it's just outside the old amusement park where converters happened one twenty years ago one five years ago they become involved in the investigation for that again there's a lot of great characterization there's a lot of really good planning and I was completely fooled by the end and I'm very happy to say that hopefully we're getting her to come up to visit Bearpont sometime so this is one of George's favorites too told me I had to do it right red light and royal blue Alex Claremont Diaz is the 20 year old son of the first female president of the United States and he is a media darling handsome and ambitious with the aim of becoming the youngest person ever elected to congress he has had a long standing unspoken rivalry with England's younger Prince Henry and at the wedding of Henry's older brother the Prince of Wales they cause a scandal by ruining the wedding which cost seventy five thousand dollars during an altercation as a consequence and in order to avoid destabilizing the relationship between the two countries on the eve of his mother's free election campaign they are required to pretend they have been close personal friends for several years they are made to attend charity events together and do TV interviews where they have been lots of smiling through gritted teeth but as they get to know each other they discover that not only are they more compatible than they thought but that they might even be falling in love this is a very sweet and heartfelt fairytale romance with a healthy dose of real world problems okay, it was our romance by Robert Wittinger Eddie Campbell so, Robert Wittinger wrote a major bestseller with the time Trevor's wife a number of years ago and since then she's gone more and more into the graphic novels which is really interesting and Eddie Campbell happens to be her husband who is an illustrator so they work together on this book it's thirteen stories above love and at times they're very bizarre if you are if you're not familiar with any graphic novels and you're interested in sort of the comic style panel by panel this might be more interesting because the art style is all over the place the way that Eddie Campbell incorporates art into these stories is very creative and very different story to story and in addition to that there's just a lot of prose there's just actual paragraphs in this too so that's nice and this book is very surprising it's unlike anything I've ever read before and I don't really want to give too much away The Rook this is a wacky book Miffity Thomas wakes up in a London park surrounded by a ring of dead people wearing latex gloves she has no memory of who she is or how she got there in her pocket she finds a letter from herself informing her that she is in danger and needs to get to a safe place immediately she eventually discovers that she works in the upper echelons of an organization called the Cheeky Group kind of a secret service of the supernatural thanks to a binder full of information she had thoughtfully left to herself she slowly finds her footing in her job getting to know her co-workers including one whose mind occupies four nearly identical bodies feeling out the limits of her own supernatural abilities and gradually uncovering the vast conspiracy threatening to take down the entire organization from within this is one of the weirdest and funniest books I have ever read so Dementia Reimagined by Tia Powell is neither weird nor funny it kind of broke my heart eventually it's a survey of dementia which was around back in merman times I read this from the bookstore shortly after my goodness died both of whom had dementia um, yeah, you know it's a fascinating history I found on so much stuff I hadn't known before it's also a really moving personal story of her relationships with her grandmother and mother who both had dementia it's also and this is the uplifting part that will make your heart break in a different way the last couple of chapters she writes about what she will be like if she gets dementia and how best we can help her have it and carry on it's lovely, it talks about music it talks about companionship it talks about love in a lot of ways it's a really wonderful book the world as it is by Ben Rhodes this is one of my husband's favorite books as well as one of mine he helped me with this review I have read a lot of Obama related memoirs pretty much everyone I can count if I had to choose only one to tell you to read this is it at least until Obama writes his own Ben Rhodes served first as a speech writer then as deputy national security advisor and was in the road for so many pivotal moments and he not only understood the implications of everything that happened but he helped us to understand them as well in clear and measured prose that acts as a great antidote to today's rhetoric he gives us an intimate picture of Obama and all his fierce intelligence and responsibility words that can be used to describe Rhodes as well it is reassuring to know that there were and hopefully are people like that working for the best interests of the country and for democracy globally and reading this book gave me hope for the future okay, read People in Vermont the paradox of development in the 20th century by Paul Searles so Paul Searles is a history professor at London State and about 15 years ago he wrote a book called Two Vermont's which delved deeply into 19th century Vermont politics and this book is a follow-up to that and rather than look at what was happening at the State House he goes to Landgrove, Vermont and he looks specifically at two families from the 19th century who lived there and how their lives were impacted by the policies that were set at the state level and Landgrove being one of the very tiny towns in Vermont these were people who were impacted by efforts to revitalize the rural Vermont efforts to make the economy come back to life, efforts to keep people in rural Vermont since that has been a problem for a long time now it's a really fascinating story and it's because he uses these actual people and their stories to look at policy makes the policy a lot more interesting to understand and it also paints you know we're still having these conversations today and it paints them in a totally different light now that you know after I read it I realized how long these conversations have been going on for the driver's seat is a very short novel, a very quick pace so you can get through it probably in one sitting if you want to it's set in London in the 70s and it's the story of Lise a downward woman who's sick of her life and is heading to Italy on holiday you see from the start that this is kind of an odd character and you know something bad is going to happen they let you know that right up front but what does happen take some the story takes some unexpected dark turns that kind of keep you guessing right all the way through it's an older book but I think everybody should read Mary on Spark at least one time in their life and this is such a masterpiece in a small package that this is a great place to start George Dickey's book they call this anime which I don't remember it's also a dramatic memoir and I'm really tickled that we've done so many books on graphics with this thing that's great this is a memoir of his time in the internment camp in World War II with his mom and dad and his brother it also talks about his experiences growing up it talks about as well what it was like to be a kid living in a place where he didn't actually know that he was essentially the level which he was in 2017 on the 75th anniversary of FDR's signing the act that called for internment Dickey was invited to speak at the FDR library about his experiences and that's how the book concludes is just him talking about that and what it was like there are many people in the book that are wonderful that were completely involved in the community that had a reason to be hoping they felt what was happening was wrong and one of the obvious things that you can take from this is how well that this still is today Rat Barar by Josemite Josemite is not as well known as Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers but along with those two I think they're the top three writers of the golden age of detective fiction this book is one of her best when the Ashby children were young and their parents were both killed in an accident and shortly afterwards the oldest boy Patrick who was 13 disappeared leaving what might have been a suicide note or just an apology for running away it's unclear 8 years later a young man named Rat Barar an orphan recently returned to England from the states is stopped on the street by an old friend of the Ashby's and is drawn into a scheme to pretend to be Patrick surviving twin who is about to inherit the Ashby estate he has been well approached and the family seems to accept him after some initial shock the more Brad learns about the boy that he's impersonating the more he feels kinship with him and even some protectiveness towards him he also begins to suspect that all is not as it seems within the family and a sense of tension and eventually even menace gradually permeates the story do you find yourself reading the last 50 pages in a great rush like falling down a hill a semi-colon so this is a history of the semi-colon what I really loved about this book is that someone who has attempted over the years to read English grammar books and try to figure out how to become a good writer and that sort of thing I could never really, it always seemed arbitrary at some point who's making up these ideas and this book it follows the history of the semi-colon and in the process it goes through all these different grammar rules that people have made over the years and it shows just how arbitrary it really is so this is really well rated not surprisingly for someone who wanted to write a punctuation and it's fun and it's fast and it's totally fascinating co-neverity this is ostensibly a young notebook but there really is no reason to develop it other than anyone there are so many novels about World War II but this is my personal favorite it's about two young British women who are best friends one of them, Maddie, is a pilot who flies for the air transport auxiliary so she ferries planes from one air base to another or takes them to the pilots who are going to fly missions the other woman is Julie who is recruited by the Special Operations Executive to work as a spy in France because of her facility with French and German she's captured shortly after landing in France she looks the wrong way across the road which actually apparently really happened to somebody and the first half of the book is told from her perspective as she writes reports on her mission for the Germans who've captured her eventually you realize that she is stringing them along she's subtly changing and inventing information to mislead them the second half of the book is told by Maddie who in a moment of crisis ends up flying to France and crashing her plane and has to pose as the cousin of a local farm family as she gets drawn into helping to resistance while she searches for Julie I've read this book three or four times now and it still makes me cry like a baby every single time Connie Willis is my favorite author of fancy science fiction to say nothing of the dog is her funniest book Henry desperately needs a rest he's been shuttling back and forth between 2057 and the 1940s on a search mission assigned by Lady Shrepnel a wealthy and eccentric Oxford university patron trying to find something called the Bishop's Bird Stump which was lost in the Nazi air raid on Coventry Cathedral Ned has developed time lag from too many trips back and forth symptoms include modeling sentimentality difficulty in distinguishing sounds irritability and susceptibility to falling in love to hide from the relentless Lady Shrepnel and to recover from the time lag he is sent to the summer of 1889 in the Oxford countryside which is supposed to be restful but where he encounters a mystery related to the Bishop's Bird Stump along with eccentric Oxford dawns seances with a fraudulent medium named Madame Iratotsky a butler who is hiding something and a bulldog named Cyril is completely chaotic and absolutely hilarious and last but definitely not least this quote came out yesterday I've been grabbing people by the lapels telling them they have to read it um frankly is a Korean American high school senior in Southern California who struggles with his place in the world he feels like he isn't Korean enough for his parents or American enough for everyone else he and his best friend Q African American are smart and nerdy kids they're doing well in school and trying to get a perfect score on the SATs they like to play video games and they talk to each other like old fashioned British gentlemen say pip pip old chap my good man Frank's parents expect him to end up with a nice Korean girl but he has fallen for a girl named Brent who is white Frank makes a plan with his friend Joy Song who is also Korean American Joy is secretly dating a Chinese boy against her parents wishes and she and Frank decide to pretend to date each other so that they can get their parents off their backs of course things don't go quite as they planned and Frank starts to realize that there may be things he didn't know about his own life and his family and his parents his father in particular this book is so honest and engaging and moving and is the best that I've read so far this year I take questions but there were two this many things that I forgot to say before and the first one is that this the idea for this program actually came from Nancy Graff who was sitting over there yay Nancy and if we get good feedback we may do it every year and we'll see if you know something that you really enjoy and the other thing is that all of the books on the list are either available at the bookstore or in the library or both or George is our new interlibrary loan librarian at the library it's something that you can't get George will be happy to get it for you so I'm sorry to have cut off questions earlier on but if you may notes please ask any of the four or all go ahead ask I'll make it really delicious again what's more more reading or dishes the question I had for you before is rock to the board you said voucher what cover shows a different man the Anthony voucher book Anthony voucher was his pseudonym his name is actually William Anthony Parker Boyd or something like that but it's some tired old library where was it it would be under voucher as soon as we buy it what was the question that I cut off earlier on does it that was George that was relevant we have a question not a question but just a sincere thank you this is just the one thank you all very very much we can be willing we do one of the favorite books we've read in our life like with the kids and all that kind of stuff we can do like that show those books well not necessarily just books like the Ginsky's biography and Frank's diary was something that you read at some point in life usually older maybe younger I mean they made a big difference at some difference you know what I would love to do is get you would highlight a couple books of peace maybe that were really good books a couple of you said that as you were going along but I'm going to have my screen I take notes here first of all scissors something that is really good discussion yes can I answer your question first I don't know what are your parameters do they need to be on paperback yes okay out of the paperback something that got a lot to discuss about it a couple that I talked about that I would think would be good book club books or the Ben Rhodes book the world as it is and maybe the Ann Thadiman book about her father yes I'd say well I feel like any of mine but the Feast Your Eyes by Mila Goldberg Hearts and Visible Furies by John Boyne maybe Underneath by Melanie Thin particularly and all the others that I know the others talk about justice and they know whatever it was yeah and the Paul Searle's Repeatling Vermont it's simultaneously a fascinating picture of 19th century Vermont and it also because it tells these two family stories it's it's not just a little history in that sense when it comes out in paperback dementia reimagined by Tia Powell and that'll be a while it'll be a year from now probably and the by a big old model good night stranger I read that love this too still in the heart of it though okay okay other questions sorry yes if someone wants to address this whole idea about young adults becoming more popular with us old adults and the difference in terms of reading them or how do they feel differently I don't think I've ever read anything that was called young adult and I just wondered what the parameters are I think really the only difference is that they're written with young people in mind and told from a perspective of young people other than that there's no reason those of us who are older can't read them I think the main thing is the protagonist for young adult literature is usually a young adult okay a young adult and frankly a young adult literature okay notice the pretty high percentage of graphic and fantasy it's fine with me is it a hard or easy sound with your buyers easy yeah but we can't get Mr. Club to do it what was that to do with that oh we can't get Mr. Club to do graphic arts okay anything else that was fun thank you