There is a quiet waiting quality as the last weeks of winter's uncertain weather begin to wane, and the first signs of crocus blooming forecast a warming trend when green will once again cover our world. Spring at long last. . . and, with it, that renewed sense of wonder, a feeling of relaxation, and the urge to settle in that special place where you can once again be alone with a book.
Of course, our library has anticipated your wishes, your needs, and has come up with some Spring "reads" that are diverse and oh! So special. To set the tone of the season ahead, I highly recommend a book that will make your spirits soar - a book with spectacular photographs that will transport you in an instant to another world. Renowned photographers from the world over combine to give us glimpses of the best of the best in Beaches by Gideon Bosker. Besides the beauty of the pictures, what sets them apart from the National Geographic crammed versions is that Bosker varies the size of the images on every page, and you will find them still lingering in your memories long after. Using large white borders to make them evocative, each of them stands out as a separate work of art. For one very enchanted evening, sit back and enjoy!
And now an alert for the armchair traveler - and for the more intrepid of us who are not willing to miss a single out-of-the-way place. For each of you, I have discovered three books, each filled with photographs from cover to cover - pictures that are sure to whet your appetites for travel - or just allow you to dream of places left out of travel guides. My words cannot describe the spell cast by The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World's elegant coffee table size views of the most historic libraries, ranging from Europe to Spain to the U.S. These libraries are truly museums in themselves – and certainly are architectural treasures – and yet largely bypassed by the traveler. Library lovers will find the small bits of prose fascinating and the photographs purely exquisite. A visit could well be in order.
The Grand Tour, by architect Harry Seidler, happens to be the best one-volume collection of beautifully composed photographs of the peak achievement in architecture from 3000 B.C. to the present day that I have ever seen. A small size book, divided into chapters by country, it is an amazing journal of discovery of the world's great buildings, and, I must admit, it definitely gives the viewer that "itch" to see them first-hand!
And now a plea: please ignore the title of the final book: 1000 Places To See Before You Die - as I do agree it is a turn-off. However, as a traveler who has seen many of these places, I can vouch for author Patricia Schultz' knowledge of some of the greatest places in the world to visit - both on and off the beaten track. So if you are sailing in the Grenadines, going by truck through Canyon de Chelly, climbing the Tuscan hills, all the nuts-and-bolts that you need to know - including the most important "best times to visit" - are there in user-friendly detail and in continent-by-continent listing. Armchair travelers are definitely invited to go along for the ride. Serious travelers are urged to take this book out!! And, on top of it all, this one makes a much welcomed gift book!
Thrillers. The great ones - the ones that have you still glued in your seat far into the night - climb high on the best seller lists these days, suggesting that many of us have that need to "escape" from our everyday world to another place or time. What better example can there be than The DaVinci Code, #1 on the best seller list for a record number of weeks and eliciting more controversy and hype than has been seen in many a year. My own curiosity over this practically unknown author, Dan Brown, had me searching back to his roots. Brown is the son of a Presidential Award winning math professor and a professional sacred musician, and grew up surrounded by the paradoxical philosophies of science and religion. Obviously their perspectives were the inspiration for two earlier books that must be read by all Brown aficionados. I particularly enjoyed Angels and Demons, a high-tech drama pitting high-tech terrorists against the cardinals of Vatican City in a breathtaking, fast-moving tangle of a thriller featuring his popular protagonist Robert Langdon, the Harvard professor of iconology, who leads us on a hunt through the streets, churches and catacombs of Rome. It makes for one heck of a read! Follow that one up with Brown's earlier Digital Fortress, a fast paced tale of a cryptographer based at the National Security Agency who becomes enmeshed in political intrigue and murder when she breaks a mysterious code. I think you will find this book riveting. Tom Clancy, watch out, as Dan Brown is now right on your heels!
And now, a mystery! When asked how she came to write mysteries, P.D. James has a ready answer. As a child she wondered about Humpty Dumpty: "Did he fall or was he pushed?" This greatgrandmother at 84 has just written her 18`h novel, The Murder Room in her usual inimitable fashion, carefully detailing the characters of her suspects and the places where they live. Usually you can count on P.D. James to set the scene of the crime in a glorious old house or, in this book, the small Dupayne Museum in England and specifically in its Murder Room, which highlights the crimes of the 1920s and 1930s. And, yes, you can count on the brooding, intelligent Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard to take command of the investigation ably. James' age has not dimmed her lovely, clear prose or her ability to give us a line-up of well-drawn suspects to the murder. For the lover of carefully crafted writing by the grand dame of English murder novelists, this one's for you.
Author Louis Auchincloss' backyard has always been New York City. At the age of 86 (!) and a lawyer, living the gilded life of the rich in his Park Avenue abode, he continues to write what he writes best - and that is the stories of nineteenth and twentieth-century lives of the metropolitan rich in the city, particularly the lives of the lawyers, bankers, trust officers, corporation executives and their wives and daughters. For over 50 years, he has introduced us to its arrogant materialism, the glamour, the rigidity of its conventions, and in The Scarlet Letters we see that he has not lost his touch. The story opens with a scandal - and what juicier one than adultery by the son-in-law and most likely successor to the respected head of a prestigious Wall Street law firm. As the chapters unfold, we watch as one character double-crosses another to better his or her self at the expense of others as this tale of deceit, ambition, and disloyalty plays itself out. Auchincloss remains the last chronicler of a world of the metropolitan rich in the last century, holding us captive with the fleet footed fiction that he has always been known for. The man can write!!
"She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years". Like scattered diamonds, author Anita Brookner's prose glitters with that occasional sentence that hits home, especially to women middle-aged and beyond. When she writes "Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything" we find we may nod, knowing that Brookner has hit it on the head. It has been over 20 years since the Booker Prize winning Hotel du Lac made her international reputation, and each year since, like clockwork, her latest work appears. Her heroines usually have been left a little money, have friends who have scattered, and have the tiredness of one who has too little rather than too much to do. She captures this particular world, the people who inhabit it so well that we devotees find her books habit forming. Just out is The Rules of Engagement, as Elizabet, a child of the `40s, narrates a grim tale of the two friends since childhood, whose illusions about love each have tragic outcomes. This is far from the current "chicklit". Instead it is prim Englishness that sets Anita Brookner apart - that and her ability to write elegant, thought provoking and often unexpectedly moving prose.
This spring we invite you to come into our library often and browse
our tantalizing new book collection across from the circulation desk. An
added bonus is the bright new lighting in the fiction section which makes
browsing a joy . . . and the shelves throughout the library are chock full
of brilliant ideas, wonderful stories and visual images just waiting to
transport you to the larger world around us. Come in and enjoy!
-- Joan Larsen