We are book lovers, plain and simple. Our lives may be full to the brim, but we somehow manage to sneak away to that special place where we can be alone with a book. The library becomes our own candy shop - a place to discover a world of books, music, and so much more - that in the rush of our lives might well have gone undiscovered. Again, this spring we have been looking out for a wide selection of books, perhaps lesser known and yet wonderful, that will whet your appetite for a new author, a new genre that you may not have found as yet, a new fount of knowledge - or perhaps what we need the most - just a plain escape into a great story.

Alan Powers' Living with Books is a "must" for those of us who simply can't stop acquiring our own books and have an equally hard time getting rid of what are now our "babies." If you are not yet at the stage where books are piled on the floor for lack of space, but you just want to enjoy the most beautifully photographed ideas I have seen for storing and displaying your prized possessions, you will love turning the page of this gem. For those who already living in a library masquerading as a home, you absolutely must check this one out!

Reading anything by House & Garden editor-in-chief Dominique Browning will find the reader being oh so easily drawn into her own private world. Spring is upon us, and what better time to introduce you to her latest, Paths of Desire: The Passions of a Suburban Gardener. I am not a gardener, and yet I am drawn into her frank, enchanting - and yes, moving account of her struggles and attempts to restore her neglected suburban garden. Gardeners will find themselves identifying with her. But for the rest of us, Browning draws us into the band of neighbors and other characters, animals and human, who we can identify with in our own suburban lives. We are left with the feeling she has shared with us as only a close friend would. Don't miss her first either: Around the House and Garden.

And now, some mysteries for those of you who wouldn't have it any other way. Author Stuart Woods has been turning out those electrifying, edge-of-your-seat thrillers for years. . . a running total of 30. Doesn't this man have a life? I tracked him down. Woods calls himself a "born again bachelor" who shares custody of a Labrador Retriever. The plot thickens. He hides out in Key West, Maine, and New York City "when he isn't on a boat or small plane." One or all usually figures in his books.

Figures, doesn't it? Woods' Edgar award winning Chiefs introduced us to Will Lee, one of his most memorable characters. Now, in his newest, Capital Crimes, we find Lee, now serving as president of the United States, marshalling federal law enforcement agencies to catch an assassin who is picking off some of the high-level politicians. Just say that I could not put this one down.

For those of you who like mysteries by women, Joy Fielding's 18th novel, Puppet, also delves into the female mind. We find that the main character's mother has shot a man point-blank in the lobby of Toronto's Four Seasons hotel. Returning to a past that she has tried to escape, she must return to face the life and its demons she has left behind. In trying to discover the facts, she finds herself drawn into the dark strange power her mother seems to hold over everyone. Fielding's books are often about females manipulating females, especially in mother daughter relationships (and often almost as good at exploring female anger as is author Margaret Atwood). I think you will find Puppet cunningly crafted and definitely a page-turner.

For the armchair travelers among us, few have not read Frances Mayes's Tuscany, as well as the increasing array of others documenting that part of Italy. But we also find ourselves caught into Paul Theroux and his railroad journeys, and just about anything that the queen of travel essay writers, Jan Morris, has written. Now, in a twist on this, lucky author Michael Shapiro in A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk about Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration sets out on a journey of his own to visit all the heroes that have motivated one or the other of us to travel. Intrigued (and, yes, envious), I talked to the author, finding out that he first read each one of the famous books written by each writer - an accomplishment in itself. Next, he researched as much of their lives as possible. That accomplished, he felt he had a feel for the particular questions that, hopefully, would elicit the most fascinating answers for his book. The reader feels that he is sitting beside the interviewer as the conversation develops, thinking he, too, is having a "once-in-a lifetime experience." My favorite interviews? Isabel Allende, I'd say, and my "everyman" favorite, Bill Bryson. . . but don't you miss a single one.

A change of pace. If you know any recent college grads entering the workforce or seasoned employees looking to distinguish themselves, a deceptively simple volume called Carolyn 101, Business Lessons from the Apprentice's Straight Shooter is surprisingly astute. I, too, rolled my eyes when a book by Carolyn Kepner, Donald Trump's advisor, came out. But her common sense - particularly in the art of the interview - made it worth reading. Little bits of psychology hiding within make it valuable in real life also.

Flying to Greenland several years ago in a rather small plane, landing on one of the shortest airstrips I have encountered in one of the more remote places on earth, was memorable in itself. Narsarsuag was little more than a name, hidden by mountains and banked by a fiord. For us, it was a jumping off spot, as we were then led on a hike to the ocean's edge with armed escort against the polar bear threat . . . and then leaped into a Zodiac raft that took us to an icebreaker heading north. But as I stood to get my bearings, a local pointed at an old building not far from the strip, telling us that this had been the secret hospital after the Korean War for men that had the most terrible injuries. Nothing more was said. But now what Esquire calls "the rarest first novel achievement" has been written about this place in this land of nowhere.

With echoes of Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest abounding, in No One Thinks of Greenland author John Griesemer uses the base and its hospital as the inspiration for an inventive, sometimes hilarious, sometimes hair-raising tale of a obscure top-secret military hospital for the horribly mutilated casualties of the Korean War.

Forced to join the military due to a secret past, the main character is shipped off to Greenland where glaciers are on the horizon and polar bears are the wildlife. Assigned to start a base newspaper, he digs too deeply and discovers secrets about a part of the base named "the Wing." His harmless questions turn into a deadly cat and mouse chase, and as the truth is uncovered, people need to be rescued to escape the Arctic alive.

A woman's story. A Circle of Grace by Penelope J. Stokes is the story of enduring friendships, held together after college by a leather-bound journal passed by mail between four roommates. Years later, when one of the roommates has a terminal illness, she wants the group to gather together for one last time, confessing that her words in that journal had been falsehoods. The dialogue is fast-paced and has a ring of truth as we hear, as we often do, of women's dreams gone awry.

Just the name William F. Buckley, Jr. makes people take sides. But this man with his faint aristocratic sounding voice, the impish look in his eyes, and that reptilian grin, has written what he deems "a literary autobiography" - Miles Gone By - that, I believe, will stand the test of good writing. There are no chapters that have to be read in order. Instead there are 50 essays, each standing on its own, that take you through his life. If you read nothing else, read the beginning essays on his childhood, unforgettable in their thoroughness of education and leisure time activities that to the wealthy Buckleys were "just how the ten Buckley children lived." His words still live in my mind. Skip if you must to the eulogies to his parents, for Buckley has a sincerity and a way with words for family that warms the heart. The book seems a series of freewheeling reflections and snapshots - glimpses of his life and of history - in an easy-reading style all his own.

To us, the booklovers, books are gifts to be savored. Often they are full of riches, taking us on journeys to another world. They may touch your heart or find a place in your drawers of memory. They may enlighten or inspire. They may open the mind to the world beyond in ways never dreamed. Plan to come in through the doors of the library this spring to see the new surprises we have in store for you. We hope you'll be pleased.

Happy reading!
                                           -- Joan Larsen

from Atalanta in Calydon

For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green under wood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
                -- Algernon Charles Swinburne

I cannot meet the Spring unmoved-
I feel the old desire  -
A Hurry with a Lingering, mixed,
A Warrant to be fair -

A Competition in my sense
'With something hid in Her -
And as she vanishes, Remorse
I saw no more of Her.
                -- Emily Dickinson

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