ROAD TRIP THROUGH TIME WITH PARADOX BOUND

As anyone who’s read this blog knows, I’m responsible for buying the new adult fiction at The Field Library.  As such, I buy a lot of books because I know people will want to read them (new books by popular authors, for instance), but sometimes I buy books just because I personally can’t resist them and I want to have them for patrons to read as well.  This explains (partially at least) why there are so many time travel books in our collection.  The newest time travel book The Field Library has acquired is Paradox Bound, by Peter Clines, and it is great fun, a book I’m going to be recommending to patrons for some time (see what I did there?).

Eli Teague is an ordinary guy, living in what seems to him like the most backward small town in Maine, where everything is kind of behind the times and nothing exciting ever happens.  Until something exciting does happen, three times: he meets the same young woman, dressed in Revolutionary War garb (complete with tricorn hat!), and driving a Model A Ford, that happens to run on water rather than gas.  She appears in his life when he’s 8 years old, then when he’s in his teens, and then, when he meets her for the third time when he’s 29, things start getting seriously strange.  There are faceless men chasing this woman, and Eli feels the need to help her or at least warn her, so he heads down to Boston to intercept her, and from there on, he’s caught up in a wild trip with the woman (Harry, short for Harriet), driving across the country and through history, in search of — what else? — the American Dream, which turns out to be an actual thing that has been stolen. The loss of the American Dream is responsible for the strange things happening to the country, and whoever finds it and holds it can shape the future of America.  As you can guess, Harry and Eli aren’t the only people on the road looking for it, with good motives or bad.  

And I’m not going to go into more detail on the plot than that, because it’s the sort of book you’re going to want to discover for yourself.  The faceless men are literally without faces (they wear clear plastic masks which somehow make them even scarier), and they are great villains, implacable because of their certainty and practically indestructible.  Harry and Eli are fun characters as you get to know them, and they interact with a slew of other fascinating people (including John Henry, who has his own special train to travel through history, as opposed to the antique cars many of the other characters use).  There’s even a town called Hourglass where the time travelers meet up at one of three special bars, and since the same person can be there on multiple timelines, there are strict rules about where you can go and with whom you can interact while you’re in Hourglass.  There are, of course, paradoxes, and great plot twists and turns, with some scenes reappearing a couple of times from different perspectives (one of the great pleasures of time travel fiction, in my opinion, is seeing a character in a scene, not knowing who that character is or what he’s doing there, and then later discovering that the mystery character is someone you know, only from a different time; if this sounds confusing, then you haven’t read enough time travel novels).  There’s danger, there’s adventure, and there’s a satisfying ending that you don’t entirely anticipate. It’s wonderful fun, picking you up and taking you on the most amazing road trip through time and space that will make you look at those odd little towns that seem to have been forgotten by time in an entirely different light.

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NEW OCTOBER BESTSELLERS AT THE FIELD LIBRARY — GET ‘EM WHILE THEY’RE HOT!

Every month brings new books from your favorite bestselling authors, whether they’re new entries in longstanding series or stand-alones, and the month of October is especially loaded with hot new books by hot authors.

The last time readers encountered the famous symbologist Robert Langdon, it was in Dan Brown’s book Inferno, which came out seven years ago.  Now he’s back in Origin, once again on the verge of a discovery so vast and amazing that it will upend basic understandings of the world (the way the discoveries in, say, The DaVinci Code would upend Christianity’s entire origin story), and once again on the run from an enemy of seemingly vast power and reach who’s determined to keep this long-secret information secret. In Origin, the questions about to be answered are the most basic and most interesting of all: who are we, where did we come from, and what is our ultimate purpose?  The book starts with Langdon attending a fantastic presentation from a former student in Bilbao, Spain, but then, when the presentation is disrupted, Langdon and Ambra Vidal, the museum director who staged the presentation, have to escape Bilbao and possibly even Spain itself. The clues Langdon must unravel are hidden in the world of modern art, and will take all his ingenuity to figure out.  If you’ve enjoyed Dan Brown’s earlier books in this series, you’re going to love this one.

If you’re in the mood for a different sort of thriller, you can turn to the always reliable John Sandford, who brings us a new Virgil Flowers novel called Deep Freeze.  A few years before the beginning of this book, Virgil investigated what turned out to be a corrupt and murderous local school board of the small town of Trippton, Minnesota. He had hoped he was finished with the town, but now a local woman has been found murdered, her body encased in a block of ice. The murder seems to be connected to a class reunion coming up, from a class that graduated the local high school twenty years before.  In order to find out what happened and how the dead woman might be connected to the class reunion, Virgil is going to have to roll up his sleeves and dig deep into the traumas, dramas and bad blood of the last twenty years, and to discover that high school is, indeed, murder.

Another old favorite character is Harry Bosch, the star of Michael Connelly’s thrillers, and he’s back for two intertwining cases in Two Kinds of Truth, coming out at the end of October. Harry Bosch is volunteering to help out the San Fernando Police Department, mostly looking into cold cases, but you know he’s not going to stay in the background for long. When he’s called out with the three members of the town’s detective squad to investigate a murder of a young pharmacist, that’s the beginning of a case that will pull Harry into the sordid but lucrative world of prescription drug abuse and pill mills.  At the same time, a man Harry put in jail while Harry was still working for the LAPD claims Harry framed him, and says he has proof.  Considering the bad terms on which Harry left the LAPD, he knows his former fellow officers aren’t going to help him defend himself, so he has to take care of himself and protect his reputation as well as protect the community from a very clever and dangerous killer.

John Grisham returns to the world of the law after his brief detour into the theft of expensive books in Camino Island.  His new book, The Rooster Bar, starts with law school itself, a particular law school that seems to be more of a moneymaking scheme for the for profit company that owns it. Three friends, in the middle of their last year of law school, realize that they have gone incredibly deeply into debt to finance an “education” at a school most of whose graduates fail to pass the bar, let alone get decent paying legal jobs. When they dig into the background of the school and the company behind it, which makes most of its money on student loans, they come to the conclusion that they’ve been had, but also that there might be a way for them to get revenge on the power behind the scam, exposing the bank and its financier, and make a little money in the process. They would, of course, have to quit school shortly before graduating, which is crazy in itself.  Or is it?

But maybe you’re not the kind of reader who wants to read thrillers.  Maybe you’re a Danielle Steel fan, and if so, you’re in luck in October, because she’s coming out with a new novel, Fairytale.  Camille, the protagonist, had a wonderful childhood in the Napa Valley of California, with a beautiful home, the family wine business, and parents who were crazy in love with each other. But then Camille’s mother died of cancer, and the evil Countess de Pantin appeared and began making moves on Camille’s father.  Blinded by infatuated love, Camille’s father doesn’t notice the dark side of this sophisticated Parisian woman as Camille does.  Tragedy strikes, and Camille is at the mercy of her stepmother and the woman’s two nasty sons.  Camille first has to fight for her legacy, and then for her life, but she discovers some unexpected allies, as you would hope for in any version of the Cinderella story.  Leave it to Danielle Steel to give a new and modern variation on the classic story.

 

CHRISTMAS IN SEPTEMBER AT THE FIELD LIBRARY

It’s still September, fall’s barely begun (not that you could tell it from the weather the last few days), people are starting to put up Halloween decorations at their houses, so of course you know what books are hitting the shelves: yes, time for Christmas books!  There are three new Christmas-themed books here at The Field Library, with two more coming in the first week of October.  Yes, it may be a little early to get in the right spirit, but it’s good to know they’re here so you can read them first and avoid the rush in late November and December.

A great theme of the season is reconciliation and the power of love, and The Christmas Room by Catherine Anderson provides that in spades, along with a wonderful and (to us in the New York area) somewhat exotic setting in wintry Montana.  Maddie McLendon, a widow, has moved out to Rustler’s Gulch with her son and grandson, hoping to make a new start, but the house she was having built is beset by endless delays and as winter moves in, she and her family are stuck living in trailers and tents.  Meanwhile, her irascible millionaire neighbor, Sam Conacher, has withdrawn in his own grief, keeping a close eye on his 26 year old daughter, until she falls in love with Maddie’s son.  Sam and Maddie butt heads, unable to agree on much of anything, until a near tragedy opens their hearts to each other and, with the first snowflakes of winter, brings them a real Christmas gift.

Another story of grieving people learning to love and live again through the Christmas spirit is Fern Michaels’ Holly and Ivy.  Ivy Mackintosh lost her husband and children in a plane crash eight years before and has been drowning in her sorrow ever since, especially during the holiday season, so she’s dreading another Christmas of loneliness and memory. Then 11 year old Holly Greenwood appears on Ivy’s doorstep, lost and frightened; she was on her way home from her singing teacher’s house, where she’d been getting secret lessons.  Holly just wants to sing in the Christmas play, and her voice is terrific, but her father is vehemently against music of any kind.  As Ivy gets involved in helping Holly achieve her dream, she learns the cause of Holly’s father’s anger, and sees the warmth of his heart, and she begins to move out of her own grief toward the family that may need her as much as she needs them.

Pure romance is under the tree in Linda Lael Miller’s A Snow Country Christmas, also (coincidentally?) set in the wild west, this time in Wyoming.  Raine McCall is a graphic designer, a single mother and a woman who’s happy to live in the slow lane in Mustang Creek, until she receives a Christmas Eve dinner invitation from visiting movie executive Mick Branson.  For his part, though he has no interest, he thinks, in living in such an out of the way place so far from the glitter of Hollywood, he’s drawn to Raine for more than business.  It’s just supposed to be a short Christmas trip, but there are Christmas gifts you just can’t turn down, for both of them.

 

TESTOSTERONE REX, AWARD WINNER

If you’ll recall, a month ago I wrote about the Royal Society Shortlist for the Science Book Prize for 2017( THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE SHORTLIST AT THE FIELD LIBRARY), and about all the nominees we had on the shelves at The Field Library.  You might also recall that I was personally rooting for Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science and Society, by Cordelia Fine, because I had read and loved the book myself.

I’m delighted to announce that the prize has been awarded for 2017, and that my personal favorite is in fact the winner.  Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science and Society, which combines top notch scholarship with a keen sense of humor and humanism, has won some well-deserved recognition for what the Royal Society Judges referred to as its “ cracking critique of the ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ hypothesis.”  

It’s well-written, well-researched, and funny to boot.  See what the experts saw, and take out your own copy today!

DRUGS, ROBOTS AND PIRATES: WELCOME TO AUTONOMOUS

Imagine a future a hundred thirty years or so removed from ours, with certain trends we can already see in the present turning more serious and having more of an impact on our lives, things like corporate influence in people’s lives, the ever increasing gap between the rich and the poor, essential drugs getting more and more expensive, to the point where the majority of people can’t afford them. Then throw in piracy and robots and gender questions, and what do you have?  

You have Autonomous, a debut novel by Annalee Newitz, and even if you’re not big on science fiction in general and “hard” science fiction in particular, there are things that might tempt you into reading this novel.

Let’s start with Jack, the protagonist, who’s a pirate.  She’s a Robin Hood figure living and working in a submarine, reverse engineering the drugs that people need to stay alive, and giving them away to people who can’t afford the “legal” prices.  There’s obviously not a lot of money in that particular enterprise, so in order to make a living, she also reverse engineers other kinds of drugs and sells them.  The submarine is not just because pirates should live in or on the water, but because it keeps her out of the range of people who want to stop her (such as the pharmaceutical industry people).

Naturally something goes wrong.  There wouldn’t be a story if something didn’t go wrong.  In this case, Jack reverse engineers a productivity drug which is supposed to make people better workers. All well and good except for two things: first, it turns out to be incredibly addictive, and second, it turns out to work all too well, to the point where people are compelled to keep working endlessly until they crack or die.  Jack is horrified, as any normal person would be, to see the effects of her drug, and she determines to find a way to cure the problem she’s caused.

Meanwhile, the drug companies she’s taking advantage of want to stop her, and so they’ve hired an unlikely pair of hunters, Eliasz, a human military agent with mood issues, and Paladin, a robot.  Here’s where we get into the gender issues, as Eliasz and Paladin start developing romantic and sexual feelings for each other, except they have to first get past Eliasz’s refusal to allow himself feelings for someone he considers a male.  Paladin, who has never considered itself male or female, has to decide on its gender, which it does in an interesting way.

Action and adventure, thought-provoking ideas about where our society is going, fascinating characters: if you’re in the mood for some good speculative fiction, give Autonomous a read.

 

THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST FOR NONFICTION 2017 — HERE AT THE FIELD LIBRARY

The National Book Foundation has announced the long list of nominees for the Nonfiction Awards for 2017, the books which are, in their judgment, the best nonfiction books published in the last year, and The Field Library has six of the finalists here for you.  If you are interested in the state of nonfiction nowadays, come in and check out what the National Book Foundation has chosen as the best of the best.

The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, by Frances FitzGerald (who already has a Pulitzer Prize under her belt), is the kind of big history book I personally am fascinated to read,  the kind of book that takes on a big subject and follows it through centuries.  In this case, the book traces the rise of the Evangelical religious movement from its birth as a rebellion against the Protestant Establishment in the Great Awakenings in the 18th and 19th centuries through its split between Northern and Southern sections around the time of the Civil War, through the efforts of Billy Graham to bring all the Protestant groups together in one big tent after World War II to the recent use of social issues by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to bring the white evangelicals into the arms of the Republican party.  By putting the movement in its historical context, FitzGerald allows the reader to understand where the movement has been and where it might be going in the future.

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman, Jr., takes a subject many people have been paying attention to in the last few years and gives a new perspective on that.  Forman is not only a Yale Law professor, but he was a former public defender, so he has both practical and academic expertise in the field of crime and punishment and the disproportionate effect certain policies have had on communities of color. Forman reminds us that when the drug policies which now send so many African Americans to jail were instituted, they were often supported by prominent members of the African American communities involved, who were trying to protect their communities from high crime and especially drug crimes, without realizing what the consequences would be.  Locking Up Our Own provides yet another, and valuable, way of looking at the criminal justice system and the people caught in its toils.

I consider myself well versed in American history, but I was startled to learn that in the 1920’s in this country, the richest group of people per capita were members of the Osage Native American tribe, due to the discovery of oil under their lands.  What happened to them is the subject of Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann, a book that reads like a murder mystery, only one that’s actually based on fact. Members of the tribe began dying under mysterious circumstances, and most people who tried to investigate were also killed.  The FBI itself was brought in to solve the cases, and failed ignominiously.  J. Edgar Hoover, the new director of the Bureau, turned in desperation to a former Texas Ranger who put together a group of investigators, including the only Native American in the Bureau, and, using the era’s best technology and techniques of detection, they began to uncover a conspiracy the likes of which would make people like John Grisham and James Patterson salivate.  

Naomi Klein is no stranger to awards or hard-hitting, bestselling nonfiction, so it’s no surprise that her latest book, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, is on the longlist for the National Book Award.  She explains the rise of Trump and his policies as the logical extension of trends that have been bubbling beneath the world’s surface for decades, and connects his policies to worldwide trends in growing militarism, corporatism and nationalism that are dangerous to the world.  Because she’s not just a doomsayer, Klein also outlines a way of turning this situation from a danger to an opportunity to make the world better in what she categorizes as a time of need.  A thought-provoking book, whatever your politics.

While we’re on the subject of current politics, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean, takes a deeper look at the origins of the Radical Right movement and traces how it’s entangled itself with the Republican Party establishment.  The Radical Right, by MacLean’s account, originated with one James McGill Buchanan, a Nobel Prize winning economist and bitter opponent of the Civil Rights movement in the South, who came up with brilliant, if nasty, methods of keeping power away from “undesirables.”  When Charles Koch, a multimillionaire, latched onto Buchanan’s ideas and supported them with vast amounts of money, the warping of our political system started for real. If you want to know how the wealthy manage to turn the system to their advantage against the rest of us, Democracy in Chains is an excellent place to start, as the National Book Foundation recognized by including it in the longlist for this year.

 

THE STRANGE WORLD OF THE BRAIN: OCTOBER’S FIELD NOTES CHOICE, THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT

Thanks again to everybody who came to the September meeting of the Field Notes Book Group and engaged in a lively discussion of Half Broke Horses.  At the end of the meeting, we voted on the book (and the date) for next month’s meeting.

We will be meeting on October 28 this time, which is not the usual third Saturday of the month.  This is because the annual Battle of the Books will be occurring on October 21, the third Saturday, and a couple of people associated with the group will be either attending or volunteering at the Battle of the Books.  

The book we will be reading in October is an oldie but goodie: the late great Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. For those of us who have already read this book, it’s a good opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with the fantastic but very human stories of people caught in the midst of neurological disorders, told with Sacks’ powerful compassion and storytelling abilities.  And for people who have somehow missed this book the first time around, you’ve got a treat coming: fascinating accounts of people whose brains do not work the way normal people’s do, and how they have managed to live with and adapt to their different neurological conditions.  It’s the farthest thing from dry and clinical you could imagine, and we are likely to have another interesting discussion about the people and issues the book raises.

The books will be available at the circulation desk of The Field Library this week (September 18-24), so come in and pick up your copy, and then join us at the Gallery in the library on October 28, from 11 to 12:30, for coffee and refreshments and good discussion.  Hope to see you there!

 

INTRIGUE IN ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND: A COLUMN OF FIRE

In a way, it’s hard to remember that Ken Follett got his start writing thrillers (The Eye of the Needle was his breakthrough book back in 1978, and he won an Edgar Award for that as best novel), since his most recent books, all of which have been bestsellers, have been huge historical novels (most recently the Century Trilogy, following a cast of characters from World War I through World War II and into the 1980’s).  He first broke away from the thriller vein with a wonderful and absorbing book about the building of a cathedral in the middle ages, The Pillars of the Earth.  He followed this up, years later, with World Without End, set in the same English town but two centuries later, with the descendants of some of the characters from the first book.  Now, nine years after World Without End, Ken Follett has returned to that world with his newest book, A Column of Fire.  If you’re the sort of person (as I am) who loves to dive into a different world (whether it’s a real historical place or something created wholly from the author’s imagination) and live there for a while, then set aside some time for A Column of Fire (set aside a fair amount of time, since the book is 916 pages long).

We are back in Knightsbridge, home of the cathedral in Pillars, and scene of the action in World Without End, but now it’s two hundred years after the last book, and Queen Elizabeth I is on the throne of England, though not as securely as she would prefer.  The Reformation in England is still in its early days, and Catholics and Protestants are struggling for power, creating an almost insurmountable divide between people in the two groups. Ned Willard, the protagonist of A Column of Fire, is prevented from marrying the woman he loves because of religious differences, and instead he goes to work as a secret agent for Queen Elizabeth.  As violence erupts through the country and across Europe, Ned finds himself in the middle of endless intrigue and danger, both to himself and to the queen he’s pledged to protect.  Assassination plots, invasion plans and uprisings are common, and Elizabeth, to stay on the throne, needs to stay abreast of all the possible problems that could topple her reign and send England into civil war.  The spy system created by Elizabeth and her people became the basis for the British Secret Service in modern times.

Set in a tumultuous period of English history, with all the attention to detail and fascinating characters, historical and invented, A Column of Fire is the kind of book that draws you right in and makes you forget, for a while at least, what century this is.  If you’re a historical fiction fan, or a Tudor history buff, come in and pick up A Column of Fire.

MURDER AND MAYHEM IN EAST TEXAS: BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD

I’ve long contended that the best mysteries and thrillers are the ones that take you to a place you’re not familiar with and wouldn’t know anything about if you weren’t dropped deep into the area via the book.  Think of the works of Jo Nesbo and his view of Oslo, Norway, or the wonderful series of books involving Dr. Siri Paiboun in Cambodia, written by Colin Cotterill, and how the books take you to a different part of the world and let you absorb the atmosphere, for good and bad.  

Add to that list the new book by Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird, which is set in the exotic (to me, anyway) area of East Texas.

Like many a mystery, this one turns on a troubled investigator who’s gotten in trouble with his law enforcement job and is investigating a complicated and potentially dangerous case more or less on his own, but Darren Matthews, the protagonist of Bluebird, Bluebird, is not your typical noirish hero.

He’s an African American man who’s working as a Texas Ranger, a difficult job made more difficult by his race and his background. He’s been suspended from his job with the Rangers because he went out of his way to help a man whose granddaughter was being harassed by a member of the Texas Aryan Brotherhood, and the harasser was subsequently murdered, making Darren a potential witness in the case.  The last thing he needs is to go home to the small town of Lark, and involve himself in another messy, racially-tinged murder case, but that’s what he finds himself doing.

Two people, an African American lawyer from Chicago, with roots in the Lark area, and a white woman who’s a resident of Lark, are both found murdered in the bayou within days of each other. As Darren tries to find out what really happened and who’s responsible for the murders, he runs up against the power structure of the town, the local chapters of the Texas Aryan Brotherhood, and a lot of people who don’t want him around and especially don’t want him digging into the secrets of the town, and who aren’t afraid to make it clear that bad things could happen to him if he sticks around.  Darren’s sense of duty, his understanding of the way things are done in this town, and his stubborn desire to see justice done propel him through a very dangerous situation.

Atmospheric and filled with local detail, Bluebird, Bluebird is a suspenseful read that might, we hope, turn into the beginning of a series involving this intriguing character and his milieu.

 

MODERN DAY HAUNTED HOUSE: THE GRIP OF IT

To me, the classic, the ur haunted house story is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and if you have a taste for the classics of horror and you haven’t read that one yet, stop reading this and hurry to get your hands on it.  A good haunted house story relies not on stupid people doing things that no sensible person would consider doing (the “don’t go into the basement!” syndrome), but on an atmosphere built up of details, each one slightly off, but together creating a sense of inescapable dread.

The Grip of It, by Jac Jemc, is a haunted house story that’s worthy of being compared to The Haunting of Hill House.  It’s short, as a good horror story should be, and it’s creepy and disturbing and it’s an altogether engrossing read.

The two main characters, Julie and James, are a young married couple moving out of the city to get away from their problems, mostly James’ gambling.  They go, as characters do in horror stories, to a place unfamiliar to them (though Julie’s friend from school, Connie, lives in the town and gets Julie a job with her company, so she’s not totally out on a stringer), in the hopes of making a new start.  They buy a house at the end of a cul de sac, with dark woods encroaching on the edges of their lawn and the sea beyond the woods, and few neighbors.

Almost as soon as they move in, the house starts getting to them.  The book is told in alternating chapters by Julie and James, and you have no trouble telling who is who.  I’m usually not a fan of the alternating viewpoint technique, but it works in this case because you find yourself wondering which one of them is plugged in, if either one of them is, and the house has different effects on both of them, as well as on their relationship (though none of the effects is good).

It’s the little details that get to you: the strange extra spaces of the house itself, the children playing murder games in the woods (but there are no children living in the neighborhood), the strange sensation of someone breathing on the couple as they’re sleeping (an experience shared by Julie’s visiting parents, so this is not just Julie and James losing it), strange writing on the walls, a journal found with writing that nobody can read, and hints of terrible things that may or may not have happened in this house in the past.  Then there are the bigger wrong things with the situation: the bruises that appear and grow on Julie’s body without any cause, the way the woods seem to move closer and closer to the house.  Their nearest neighbor, Rolf, is the stuff of nightmares: he’s unfriendly but is staring at them all the time, things appear from his house in their house and vice versa, James and Julie separately find themselves in Rolf’s house when they think they’re in their own, and Rolf’s disappearance, which brings the skeptical police into the orbit of the main characters.

If you’re the kind of person who wants to have everything explained by the end, this is not a book for you.  There is no easy explanation of what happened to the house, who Rolf was, why Julie and James were affected this way.  There are hints, though, and I personally find the suggestion of something terrible more frightening, more emotionally upsetting, than pages and pages of backstory “explaining” the otherwise inexplicable.

The Grip of It isn’t for everybody, but if you’re in the mood for a nice creepy haunted house story you won’t soon forget, give it a read.  You won’t be disappointed.