The Bookshelf

As part of our Summer Reading program for teens, we encouraged readers to create their own video reviews for books they read. Vikram Shah stepped up to the challenge, and sent us this fantastic review of Greg Iles’ Black Cross:

Summer Reading may be over, but we’re still accepting video reviews. Contact us at askrs at skokielibrary dot info if you’re interested, or pay us a visit at the Digital Media Lab to borrow a camera.

We’re unveiling a new occasional feature here on the Skokie Public Library blogs today called Community Voices. Every few weeks, we hope to highlight user experiences at the Library, here and all of the Library blogs. We’re extending the invitation to all readers of this site to send in their Library stories as well. Just send us an email if you’d like to get involved.

In this first installment, longtime patron Seth Arkin shares his thoughts on a few recent releases. You can read more of Seth’s reviews (on movies, theater, and more) over at his personal blog.

The Man From Beijing
by Henning Mankell
@@1/2

Although Henning Mankell has been writing best-selling crime novels for nearly 15 years, I hadn’t heard of him until this past February, when Entertainment Weekly gave his new book–The Man From Beijing–a short but glowing review, in which the reviewer states, “This is hands down the best thriller I’ve read in five years.”

So I put it on reserve with the Skokie Public Library, and when my turn came, I was very excited to read it.

But as it turns out, it wasn’t even the best thriller I’ve read this month.

Despite the title, the book mostly takes place in Mankell’s native Sweden, where a brutal massacre has wiped out a small village.

Over the past year, I’ve read and enjoyed all three books in the Millennium series (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, etc.), by the late Stieg Larsson, another Swedish crime fiction writer whose works weave throughout his homeland. This was another reason I was optimistic about the new book by Mankell, who in the past has centered his novel around an inspector named Kurt Wallander, but wrote The Man From Beijing as a stand-alone novel.

But whereas Larsson’s books constantly made me want to read the next page, discover the conclusion and tackle another of his thrillers, 50 pages into The Man From Beijing, I realized I was reading only to reach the end, not because I was anxious to learn what would happen next. The small-village massacre becomes linked to happenings in the American West from over 130 years prior, leads to dozens of non-thrilling pages about modern China and is ultimately relegated to the background of a story that meanders a whole lot.

And while it seems that Mankell was aiming for a book with considerably more consequence than your average page-turner, it didn’t ever approach great literature or enlighten like a non-fiction take on some of the same matters might have. So basically I was left with a thriller that didn’t thrill.

Though Mankell appears to be a well-regarded author, the Amazon reader reviews more closely approximate my take on The Man From Beijing than Entertainment Weekly’s. Almost a third of the Amazon reviews give it 1 or 2 stars out of 5, so perhaps my @@1/2 is a bit generous if anything.

I’m sorry I wasted a full two weeks getting through it, especially because a few days in, the Skokie Public Library let me know that another thriller I had on reserve was ready for me. Fortunately, after finishing The Man From Beijing, I was able to read the book below in just 4 days, and liked it much better.

–

Caught
by Harlan Coben
@@@@

I have now read all 17 of Coben’s books currently in print (his first two novels no longer are) and each has taken me about a week or less to finish.

While his books–split between his Myron Bolitar mysteries and stand-alone thrillers–are not works of high art, they are stay-up-all-night page turners, filled with more than a bit of humor and shrewd societal insight.

His latest hardcover, Caught, is no exception. While probably not his best book, not quite meriting the 5 stars that 96 of 151 reviewers on Amazon have bestowed and without nearly the complexity of The Man From Beijing, it is a whiz-bang thriller that is extremely enjoyable to read.

Far more so than the Mankell book.

Although I had pegged some of the surprises in Caught before I got to them, I won’t reveal much here. But it starts with a man getting caught, as part of a TV show sting, in the home of a teenage girl he had contacted over the internet. Not all is as it seems and the newswoman from the show becomes the central character in a proverbial roller coaster ride across all 388 fast-moving pages.

Although Caught is a stand-alone novel, not a caper involving the Myron Bolitar character, Coben does utilize characters from past books, which adds to the fun for those of us who know his North Jersey oeuvre.

But even as your first foray into Coben, you should find Caught quite satisfying, although you also wouldn’t go wrong starting with his earlier stand-alones like Tell No One and Gone For Good.

Along with Lee Child, whose works all revolve around a character named Jack Reacher, Coben is my favorite thriller writer, and I’ve yet to be disappointed.

If you likewise love a good page-turner, perhaps it’s about time you ‘Caught’ on.

–

Don’t forget, you can drop us a line if you’d like to contribute to the Library blog space.

No time to read a long book review?  Then, you are in luck, One Minute Reviews tell you all you need to know about a book in just one minute. Take a look!

The weekend is almost here, so we know what that means…more time for reading!  This weekend, I am looking forward to finishing up 2 books and starting a third (and maybe a fourth one also).

I hope to finish Blacklands by Belinda Bauer, a creepy mystery that I have been reading on my lunch hour all week. Young Steven has been writing to the serial killer who killed his uncle 18 years ago, hoping to find a clue to where his uncle’s body is buried.  I am at the thrilling part where the pedophile serial killer, having realized that Steven is a young boy,…well, I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s really good and exciting.

I am also hoping to finish Poor Little Bitch Girl by Jackie Collins.  My trashy book club is reading this book and,well, it is quite trashy.  But, it is also a lot of fun!

I hope to start There once lived a woman who tried to kill her neighbor’s baby : scary fairy tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.  I love modern takes on classic fairy tales, so I cannot wait to see how this author twists the fairy tale conventions.  I also love short shorties.  I find them perfect for bedtime reading, so I don’t stay up too late trying to finish just one more chapter.

Since the above is a lot of reading to do in just 2 days, I might not get to that fourth book after all.

(Editor’s Note: every year at the Library staff are asked to submit a list of their favorite books, DVDs, and albums. These can be materials that came out before 2009, as long as they came to discover them in the past year. We’ve invited everyone to elaborate on their choices. Look for additional blog pieces in the weeks to come. -TG)

• Rebecca Cantrell’s A Trace of Smoke is an excellent first novel with a tremendous sense of place…pre-WWII Berlin. Strong writing and an engaging plot make this one a must!
• Beginner’s Greek by James Collins is a fun novel that unfolds slowly to reveal the richness of all the characters. Thoroughly enjoyable reading!
• Nothing too deep in Peter Mayle’s The Vintage Caper (audiobook)…just a lot of fun as the author (who also did A Year in Provence) does his take on a light mystery. A truly entertaining read set in France.
• Tom Schreck’s On the Ropes is a funny, dry new mystery…with a basset hound in one of the lead roles. Witty and droll, the writing is sharp and quick with an edge. Well done!
• Saving Paulo is a standalone thriller from David J. Walker, who has written the Mal Foley series of mysteries, among others. Here, he combines intense action with a tender, captivating story.

What were your favorite titles for the year? Let us know in the comments.

Our annual staff picks have just been posted; it’s always fun to see what’s on everyone’s best-of list and get more ideas for my endless to-read pile.

My own staff picks for the year are all books that were uniquely entertaining and kept me hooked until the final page:

• Some might be tempted to call Sarah Dunn’s Secrets to Happiness fluff, but this funny, flinty story of a recently single New Yorker trying to find meaning in her life is intelligent, surprising and wonderfully observed.

• Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey is a wickedly clever satire set in a dystopian future where human social classes are classified by color perception. It’s aptly been described as Monty Python meets George Orwell, and if that sounds like your sort of thing, you’ll love it.

• Readers of both literary fiction and suspense might enjoy Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places, a tale of a bitter young woman investigating the long-ago murder of her mother and sisters. Her testimony helped convict her brother for the crime, but now she’s not so sure that she can trust her memories. The murky subject matter is leavened by engaging characters, delicious suspense and quite a bit of dark humor.

• Chuck Klosterman makes an appearance on my staff picks for the second consecutive year. In 2008 I raved about the novel Downtown Owl. In 2009 it’s Eating the Dinosaur, his engaging essay collection that covers everything from ABBA to the Unabomber to football’s 3-4 defense–its quirky connections between disparate subjects is kind of like a Freakonomics for Gen-X pop culture and sports geeks.

• Finally, there’s Steig Larsson’s Swedish thriller The Girl Who Played With Fire, the sequel to his international blockbuster The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Beware that the first 150 pages are quite slow. But just when you think you can’t take it anymore, a double murder occurs and the plot starts moving like a runaway freight train … the final three-fourths is completely un-put-downable. I’m eagerly awating the final installment in Larsson’s trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, which is released in the U.S. in the spring.

Read any of these yourself? What did you think? And what were your favorite books read in the past year?

Jessica’s Guide to Dating on the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey

(and on audio)

Teen romance with a twist: 17- year-old Jessica is learning that she has a different life than she thought. Jessica is really a vampire princess and she is the head of her clan, expected to marry the hunky leader of a rival vampire family – thus ensure peace… Yeah, this was a lot of fun to read. It’s not serious stuff, which is why I liked it so much. Jessica is experiencing a lot of “typical” coming of age transitional/identity realizations, etc. There is much humor in the novel mixed with truthful themes and on-target observations about teens. I can see why copies of this book are always checked out from the Library. It is not a Twilight wannabe. However, it is a good one to recommend to those that have read all the Stephenie Meyer books and need something else. I look forward to more from author Beth Fantaskey.

To publish anything – a book, an album, even a blog post – requires you to develop a pretty thick skin. Even a book as widely acclaimed as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (probably the closest thing we’ve had to a Great American Novel in quite some time, and loved by Oprah and the Pulitzer committee alike) has its detractors. Over 1600 people on Goodreads have given the book 1 measly star.

So if a work as widely acclaimed as The Road isn’t safe from this kind of vitriol, where does that leave everyone else?

Mystery author Brad Meltzer has one approach. His most recent title, The Book of Lies, was just released in paperback. To celebrate, he’s compiled some of the choicest nuggets from his harshest reviews – but presents them in a way that makes you laugh rather than cringe:

Great stuff, and proof positive that when life gives you critics, you make … critic-ade. What about you? Are there any universally-loved books that you can’t stand? How about “awful” books that you love?

Shelf Awareness, an e-newsletter for booksellers and librarians, has a regular author interview called Book Brahmin (kinda like the questionnaire on Inside the Actors Studio, but less snooty). One of my favorite questions is “Book You’ve Faked Reading.” Author Susan Wiggs copped to lying about reading Proust’s Swann’s Way in French, while librarian Vicki Myron (writer of Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World) admitted that she faked reading Shakespeare.

One recent survey in Britain found that two out of three people lied about reading (Orwell’s 1984 was fibbed about most often). The book I faked reading was Nausea by John-Paul Sartre. I was taking a 20th-century European Lit class in college and trying to impress the graduate assistant (it didn’t work). So what are the books you’ve faked reading?

Like many book lovers, I sometimes despair at the size of my “to-be-read” book pile (so much so, in fact, that I’ve moved the stack from my nightstand to the attic, in a vain attempt to lessen my guilt). However, I don’t let the flood of new or recommended books get in the way of re-reading old favorites a few times a year. It’s the literary equivalent of tucking into comfort food, and is especially reassuring in times like these, when holiday stress, bad weather and the dire economy tend to have us all a bit on edge.

One of my favorite books to re-read is the gentle memoir A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell. It chronicles five seasons on Hubbell’s Ozark farm, where she keeps bees and keenly observes the surrounding natural world. Among the book’s warm, plain-spoken vignettes are descriptions of animal life from the common (dogs, deer, rabbits) to the creepy (wood cockroaches, moth ear mites), as well as fascinating details on the art of beekeeping and Hubbell’s reflections regarding her own life and humanity’s place in the wild. Hubbell’s contemplative prose is reminiscent of Annie Dillard; reading her lovely, peaceful narrative is uncommonly soothing.

What are some books that you find yourself returning to again and again?