Gary’s Staff Picks
Andrea’s Staff Picks
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“A very personable look at Abraham Lincoln’s role as a father. Based on historical facts. And with lovely illustrations.” |
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“A creative little girl overcomes peer pressure and makes a new friend. Marvelous illustrations.” |
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“Interesting story, well-developed, likable characters. I learned about a new facet of World War II history.” |
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“A sweet, heart-wrenching story about an Appalachian girl–with a happy ending!” |
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“Every winter I try to read a classic. I love the characters in this one. It is also somewhat autobiographical.” |
Staff Picks Display
Looking for a good book or movie? The next time you’re in the library, stop by our November Staff Picks Display and check out our favorites.
Throughout the month, we’ll also post some of our choices on our blog. Here’s what David G. had to say about his picks:
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“I enjoy legal-themed fiction and also all of the character and plot development that Grisham uses.” |
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“I love golf! And this was a great golf story about an average guy who found a new life through his passion for the sport.” |
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“I enjoyed how Maguire took a classic, Wizard of Oz, and expanded it into a new direction.” |
Staff Pick: Urban Pantry
Although I wouldn’t exactly call Nicholasville–or even Lexington, where I live–urban, if you have a small pantry or just want to be more resourceful with food and cooking, check out Amy Pennington’s Urban Pantry: Tips and Recipes for a Thrifty, Sustainable & Seasonable Kitchen.
The book gives advice not only on how to stock your pantry, but also on how to make meals out of what you’ve got. The recipes are divided into chapters that focus on pantry staples, such as whole grains, beans, eggs, nuts, and milk. The book features meat dishes, such as Milk-Braised Pork and Perfect Roast Chicken, as well as many vegetarian and even a few vegan dishes.
As someone with a milk allergy, I was especially pleased to see many dairy-free recipes. I tried two: Potato Gratin with Cashew Cream and Carrot-Coconut Milk Soup. Both recipes are delicious and easy to make. The Potato Gratin may become my new favorite milk-free comfort food. The carrot soup recipe has just seven ingredients, but my husband and I agreed that it tasted better than a similar recipe I had tried that used twice the ingredients.
The photographs that illustrate the book are lovely and spare. The color photographs in the center may even make you want to whip up some Rhubarb Jam, a recipe in the “Small-Batch Preserving” chapter. If you’re a fan of chefs Jamie Oliver or Ina Garten, you might like Urban Pantry.
Staff Pick: Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe
At an early age, Birdie Baker, the main character in Jenny Hollowell’s novel Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe, understands the allure of becoming someone else, someone other than the small-town Virginia girl who preaches in the park with her Evangelical parents. At twenty-two, Birdie acts on this desire, leaving her pastor husband and heading to Hollywood to become an actor.
After nine years in Hollywood, Birdie is still just getting by, appearing mostly in commercials and as a body double in films. She’s worried she won’t break through before her beauty “sags and unravels.” The novel chronicles Birdie’s struggle to become “someone else’s happy dream” where she is “beautifully, beautifully blank… her failures forgotten, blasted away by the roar of her name being shouted and those lovely bright flashes of light.” In spare, lyrical prose, Hollowell explores the parallels between religious faith and Birdie’s own faith in becoming a star.
Birdie’s story is told in short, episodic passages that move back and forth through time. Some of the chapters are only a few lines long. While there were times this technique left me wondering about Birdie’s motivations and reactions, overall it helped convey the surreal dream of Birdie’s Hollywood.
If you’d like a quick taste of the book before checking it out, you can read the first chapter here, at NPR’s website.
Staff Pick: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
I decided to read Alan C. Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie after seeing the book favorably reviewed all over the Internet. Plus, the book has received numerous honors, including the 2007 Debut Dagger Award and the 2009 Agatha Award for Best First Novel. The Amelia Bloomer Project added the book to the 2010 Amelia Bloomer List, which selects books “notable for feminist content, quality of writing, and appeal to young readers.”
Fortunately for me, the book lived up to its accolades, mostly because of its utterly charming narrator, Flavia de Luce. Flavia is the 11-year-old daughter of a wealthy English widower, Colonel de Luce. When a man dies in their cucumber patch, Colonel de Luce is the main suspect of the murder. In the tradition of the cozy mystery, it is, naturally, up to Flavia to save the day.
Staff Pick: Winter’s Bone
After seeing the movie Winter’s Bone, I didn’t think I’d want to read the book it was based on. Don’t get me wrong. The movie is excellent. The Sundance Film Festival awarded it the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatics and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, and CBS Sunday Morning recently called it “the movie of the year.” But because of its subject matter–the violence and poverty that surround methamphetamine drug culture in the Ozarks–at times the movie is difficult to watch.
However, Daniel Woodrell’s book came across my desk a couple of weeks ago, and I opened to the first page and read this:
“Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.”
After that, I found it pretty hard to put the book down.
Staff Pick: Out Stealing Horses
In Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, Trond Sander, a widower in his late sixties, leaves the city for what he hopes will be an isolated life in a rustic cabin in rural Norway. He soon learns that his closest neighbor is the brother of Jon, a friend from his adolescence. This chance meeting causes Trond to recall the life-shaping events of the late 1940’s summer when he and Jon went out together to “steal” neighbors’ horses.
Out Stealing Horses is moving, evocatively written, and full of surprises. It is one of the few books that has received unanimous approval from my rather critical book group. Although we have found that the books we all like don’t always make for the most interesting discussions, Out Stealing Horses is so faceted and subtly mysterious that it gave us plenty to talk about.
Here is what some other critics had to say about Out Stealing Horses:
“A gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life.” —Thomas McGuane, The New York Times Book Review
“Read Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. From the first terse sentences of this mesmerizing Norwegian novel about youth, memory, and, yes, horse stealing; you know you’re in the hands of a master storyteller.” —Newsweek
“That’s the effect of Per Petterson’s award-winning novel: It hits you in the heart at close range.” —Alan Cheuse, NPR’s All Things Considered
“Petterson’s spare and deliberate prose has astonishing force . . . Loss is conveyed with all the intensity of a boy’s perception but acquires new resonance in the brooding consciousness of the older man.” —The New Yorker
“A marvelous book.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
Book Trailer Awards
Book trailer videos have become popular enough to have their own awards ceremony, complete with red carpet and formal attire. The ceremony for the 2010 Moby Awards for Best and Worst Book Trailers is tonight in New York City. If you’ve never seen a book trailer before, check out the list of finalists here.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s grandmother is a finalist in the Best Cameo in a Book Trailer category for his book Eating Animals. Adult Services Librarian Sara recommends this book, but be warned that she became vegetarian after reading it. (Don’t worry–the book trailer alone won’t make you want to change your eating habits.)