The John Lennon Letters

As a lifetime Beatles fan I was delighted to plunge into The John Lennon Letters. This hefty (400 page) volume  was collected, edited and annotated by Hunter Davies, who knows a thing or two about the Beatles (he penned their authorized biography, back in the day). Davies swept up reams of Lennon-abilia from family, friends, musicians, collectors and archives and organized it more or less chronologically, beginning with Lennon’s early school boy notes and ending with one of the last autographs he signed before he was gunned down in front of the Dakota apartment building in New York in December, 1980.

To characterize this collection as “letters,” though, is something of a misnomer. John Lennon appears never to have missed an opportunity to put pen to paper; he was a scribbler, a doodler, a poet, an author of liner notes, a writer of post cards and a maker of lists, and bits and pieces of everything made their way into this book. Davies provides facsimiles of the original documents and then offers a text version, mostly by way of translation -- Lennon’s handwriting was messy at best and frequently illegible. He was also given to writing in dialect (Scots, German, Shakespearean), and he made up words when it suited him. Davies makes sense of it all, and anchors his material with biographical data to provide context for the documents. 

Part chapbook and part indexed biography, this book is a revealing look at the personal life of a most enigmatic artist, and a great read for Beatles fans. 


--Helene

The Secret History of Your House

After many years as renters, my husband and I recently decided that we’re finally ready to buy our first place, and I have houses on the brain. Now that a mind-boggling number of variables suddenly demand consideration (do we really need a separate dining room?), I find myself wondering—what makes a structure a home?

This is a highly subjective question with a different answer for every person, especially since the meaning of “home” has changed quite a bit over time. The social and cultural histories of home life give a fascinating glimpse into our own past through the evolution of domestic comforts. In At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Bill Bryson uses his own dwelling, a creaky old Victorian parsonage, as a lens to examine these hidden histories as they happened in Britain and the United States.

As the author points out, “the history of household life isn’t just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything that has ever happened”. Real history is in the details, in the things we touch and eat and keep in our closets, and Bryson leads the reader on a hilarious and revealing room-by-room ride through those details.

If you like smart, funny nonfiction that explains the mysteries of the mundane in a refreshing way, or if you like the idea of rummaging through the bathroom cabinets of history, I think you will enjoy this book as much as I did.

Pima County Public Library Ultimate Staff Picks 2012

Library folk love to read, they read terrific books, and they  love to talk about the books they think are terrific. So the Ravenous Readers got to thinking: wouldn't it make a great reading list if we asked library staff from all over the Pima County Public Library system to tell us the name of the single most terrific book they read in 2012?

So that's what we did --  and we gathered the results into the First Annual Pima County Public Library Ultimate Staff Picks List, which we present here, to help you find a good title to start the new year right. Happy New Year, and Happy Reading!

Children's

When Charlie McButton Lost Power
Suzanne Collins (author of The Hunger Games), illustrated by Mike Lester (Children’s Picture Book) A great rhyming story with fantastic illustrations about a boy suffering from electronic toy withdrawal during a power outage. After an episode spent in time-out (tackling his sister’s toys for their batteries), Charlie realizes how much fun he can have--without electricity.  
Elizabeth, Collection Development Office

Fiction
                         

The Age of Miracles 

Karen Thompson Walker

An apocalyptic coming-of-age story: when the earth's rotation slows, day and night are thrown off track and crops start to fail...

Cindy, Nanini Library

Resolutions, Revisited

About this time last year, I blogged about some books that might help you with your New Year's resolutions. This year, how about something a little different: here are some books by authors and journalists who spent a year (or some other set amount of time) doing something different from their normal lives, with wildly varied results. Perhaps they will inspire you to try an experiment in your life, or maybe they'll just make you grateful to escape their lists of arduous, arbitrary restrictions in 2013.

Drop Dead Healthy : one man's humble quest for bodily perfection by A. J. Jacobs is this intrepid stunt journalist's attempt to be as healthy as possible, based on information from a number of more or less reputable sources. Its humor is balanced by a lot of thoughtful reflection on what health really is, and how to integrate health recommendations in a way that's actually helpful and realistic.

Read on for more stunts (or are they more than just stunts?):

Fortune Is Flea-Ting

Author Maureen Stanton met Curt Avery in college. Fast forward twenty years to the bottle that brought them together again in Killer Stuff and Tons of Money:  Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market. With $4000 in his pocket, Avery had came out to Ohio where Maureen was attending graduate school to stare intensely at an old bottle, examining it from all sides, holding it up to the light, looked carefully at the few others alongside it and pondered the all important question - to buy or not to buy?

Counting Down to the Tucson Festival of Books

Elmore Leonard was on the cover of the New York Times Book Review this morning, and my happy thought was, "Oh, he'll be in Tucson at the Festival of Books next month!" And so will an astonishing number of authors we love to read, but rarely get to hear: Larry McMurtry, Richard Russo, Sebastian Junger, Alice Hoffman, Pete Dexter, Richard Peck, Terry Brooks, Iris Johansen, T.C. Boyle, Diana Gabaldon, John Sandford, Michael Palmer, Pam Houston -- the list goes on for nearly 400 names, and is as wonderful as it is astonishing. Imagine, they'll all be here, in Tucson, on the UA Mall for two very memorable days, the 10th and 11th of March.

With so many great authors at our very own literary miracle in the desert, readers who love books and the folks who write them will want to make a plan to see their favorites. My plan includes checking in on some of the most interesting women writing today, like Susan Casey, who'll be on hand to talk about her recent best-seller, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean. U of A alum Casey embedded herself with scientists and extreme surfers around the world to learn about monster waves, the unimaginably gargantuan ocean behemoths that swallow up ocean-going vessels and coastal cities. Once the stuff of sailors' legends, these waves are now a reason for concern about the planet. Casey's narrative will mesmerize and terrify you, and will certainly make you think twice before signing on for an ocean cruise.

Creatures - All Great, Some Small

I tend to shy away from animal rescue stories. Having been in the animal shelter business, I am painfully aware of how many of the stories end. In A Small Furry Prayer : Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life, Steven Kotler relives unrelenting loss - he dug seven graves in seven weeks during one bad stretch at Rancho de Chihuahua - but also celebrates the compassion and kinship connecting us all.

Happy New You!

What are your New Year's resolutions? Learning a new skill, traveling the world, reinventing yourself, or getting around to something you've put off for a while? I just put up a display of books to help get you started. Here's the virtual version!

• Freerunning and parkour amp running and jogging up a notch, into an extreme sport. Do you dare try?
• Get crafty! Arizona's own Crafty Chica writes about sparkly, fun, Mexican-heritage-inspired crafts, not to mention fashion and style. She even penned a little crafty fiction! And you can save the planet by delighting your friends and family with recycled crafts from Recyclo-Gami, Craft Activism, Upcycling, or Steampunk Emporium.
• Take an offbeat vacation with The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel. Challenge your travel-mates to a game of "Trip Poker": winner picks a destination...and loser pays. Already have a destination in mind? We keep some always-available guidebooks in our ebook collection.Visit our digital downloads page and see if we have the right one for you! (P.S. If one of your resolutions involves reading classics, we have plenty of free public domain ebooks available that don't count against your checkout limit and never expire.)
• Create something really important, a lasting video record of a life-and death struggle where all of human existence hangs in the balance. That's right, I'm talking about making your own zombie movie with Filming the Undead!
• A lot of resolutions involve diet and exercise. Our collection includes books that run the gamut from vegan diets to pilates to fat acceptance; something for everyone!
• Maybe all this talk about diet got you thinking about growing your own food. We have a wide selection of gardening books, and we've got an awesome seed library to check out...literally!
• Finally, do you have trouble sticking to your resolutions, feeling like they're important, or even remembering them after a few months? (Me too!) This Year I Will offers tips on making lasting changes in your life. And although I have a pretty low tolerance for the self-help genre, Sark always makes me feel creative and inspired.

But library resources don't end with books! Visit our website to...

• Learn a language,
• Research your family's genealogy,
• Find articles, instruction videos, and more for all kinds of hobbies,
• Or start a business!

We also offer a wide variety of free classes in person at your local branch, where you can learn anything from computer basics to GED prep to languages to photo editing to Excel!

What are your resolutions? How do you use the library help you reach your goals?

On The Nightstand

For a reading addict, it's a bit dangerous working in the library.  I read book review magazines to find out the latest and greatest, I talk with coworkers about books and then folks coming in to the library gush about the wonderful book they just read and I "must" read it too, and let's not forget about the serendipity of walking in the shelves when a book cover catches your eye.  Which is why I have over 1500  books on my to-read bookshelf on Goodreads.  Of course, many of those books I actually check out with plans to read and then they are on my nightstand just waiting for the right moment.  Below is a random sampling from the nightstand:

The Voodoo Wave by Mark Kreidler and Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad - it's impossible for me to pass by a new surfing book.  I'll never surf myself, but I love to watch and read about it whenever I can.

NaNoWriMo Nears!

Have you always wanted to write a novel? Maybe you even have a dusty half-finished manuscript in a dresser drawer or saved on your computer somewhere. Someday, you tell yourself, when you are not so busy, when you have that good idea, when you can take a workshop, when... But that day never comes.  Wouldn't you like to get this goal off your bucket list and be able to tell yourself that you've written a novel? Well, have I got an idea for you...

Death, Cataloged

I'm a big believer in judging a book by its cover! I browse the library's new arrivals all the time, looking for a catchy title, an author I've heard good things about, or a description that grabs me. The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham was one that appealed to two very different sides of me: the one that loves catalogs (naturally, since I work at the library!), and the one that morbidly enjoys grief memoirs. In this National Book Award finalist, Wickersham crafts the stark, painful story of her father's suicide, organized in an index.

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

OK, this title didn't send me scurrying to the shelves, but when I saw that Shakespeare: The World as Stage was written by the incomparable Bill Bryson I was delighted with my find. I love the way Bryson serves up information that's good for you and presents it with so much great storytelling, wry observation and outright wit that its impossible not to get smarter just reading him--sometimes in spite of yourself.

Shakespeare the man is a challenging subject. There's not much known about the Bard, who departed this good life in 1616 without leaving posterity much of a personal record. As Bryson points out, there are only a handful of days in Shakespeare's entire life about which we can say "...with absolutely certainty where he was." So, four hundred years later, to know Shakespeare the man one must understand the world in which he lived.

Bryson is a jolly tour guide to this world, clearly at home in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He happily walks us through these calamitous times and covers all manner of diverse topics along the way, from economics (a well-paid headmaster earned 20 pounds annually) to societal norms (40 percent of brides were pregnant on their wedding day), and from jurisprudence (you could be fined for letting your ducks wander in the road) to diet (folks liked their food sweet, so black teeth, rotted from sugar, were commonplace. Poor people blackened their teeth so as to look more prosperous). There's fascinating stuff to learn about the theater, too (the Puritans believed theaters were "hotbeds of sodomy [and] wanton liaisons," and blamed them for all sorts of social ills and even a few natural calamities, like the earthquake of 1580).

Strong Women

Traveling with Pomegranates: a mother-daughter story by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor

In this intimate memoir, novelist Kidd and her daughter, Taylor, travel through Greece, Turkey and France. Each woman chronicles her unique quest to navigate a stage in life. Fifty-something Kidd is anxious about her health, menopause and creativity. Twenty-something Taylor struggles with depression and rejection as she tries to figure out what to do with her life. Both women seek to redefine and strengthen the mother-daughter bond.

Although this book moves slowly, almost too slowly, I'm glad that I fought the urge to stop reading. The resolution is satisfying. Ultimately, inspired by the lives of Athena, the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc and strengthened by a renewed understanding of each other, each woman finds clarity. The message is moving, memorable and thought-provoking. Additionally, the alternating narration adds interest and depth to the story, as do the descriptions of the fantastic travel destinations.

The story of this journey will resonate with women everywhere. Get ready to plan a trip--for your mother or your daughter, or maybe just for yourself.

mk

Fact and Fiction at the Tucson Festival of Books

Jess Walter is high on my list of authors to meet at the Tucson Festival of Books, because I love his novel on how not to cope with the current economic crisis in The Financial Lives of the Poets. Matt Prior is a likable Everyman who has lost his job as a business reporter and is within days of losing his upside down-mortgaged house. His wife has filled their garage with junk from the Home Shopping Network, and he's afraid that she's having an affair with the high school flame she found on Facebook. Caring for his senile father is another of Matt's challenges and he can't afford to keep his sons in their over-priced private school, even though he knows they won't survive the predatory jungle of public education. His attempt to launch a website where financial advice is given in poetry is a failure: people don't seem to want economic updates delivered in iambic pentameter or haiku.

What, then, do people want? The answer comes to him in a flash, when a chance encounter with some gang bangers at a convenience store results in him getting stoned for the first time in many years. Of course! Middle-aged folks are longing for marijuana! And selling pot is a recession-proof business. Not surprisingly, this doesn't turn to be the best idea for saving his bacon that Matt could have had, but it's by no means the last bad decision he'll make in this hilarious satire on The-way-we-live-now-but-really-wish-we-didn't. Multiple "What was he thinking?" moments will keep you turning pages.

Still on the subject of business reporters--nonfictional this time--I also plan to check in on Michael Hiltzik, Pulitzer Prize-winning business reporter for the LA Times, and author of Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century. Hiltzik digs deep into the social, economic and political factors that surrounded the construction of this eternal symbol of the Southwest, and places them in an environmental and historical context that is as eye-opening as it is informative.

Hundreds of authors will be at the Tucson Festival of Books, March 12 and 13 on the UA Mall. And, it's all free, even the parking. You absolutely can't afford to miss it!

Helene

Follow the book title links to the Library's catalog for these and other great titles by authors appearing at the Book Festival.