The genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator 
Efraín Rios Montt, the Army general who ruled Guatemala from 1982 to 1983, ended May 10 with a landmark conviction of genocide and crimes against humanity for the 1982 massacre of 1700 Ixil Mayan Indians who were considered sympathetic to left-wing guerrillas. The two-month trial echoed another dark episode from US-Latin American affairs - the 1954 CIA coup that deposed Guatemala's reformist President and later provoked the thirty-six-year Guatemalan Civil War. The new catalog list of Latin America Historical Fiction doesn’t have a fictional account of the Guatemalan civil war, but there is a remarkable collection of short stories, River of Lost Voices, that chronicles life in the impoverished Guatemalan towns of Santa Cruz and nearby Coban, both close to where the massacres took place. Another book on the list, Lost City Radio, is set in a fictional South American nation (Peru) where guerrillas have clashed with the government for years. The list of books begins with the 1500s and ends with a book set in Bogota, Bolivia in 2005. They are not all tales of violence. Try Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon to experience love in 1920s Brazil, or The News from Paraguay to learn about a country you may never have thought about. Mario Vargas Llosa has four books on the list, and two are my favorites. The Green House is an epic of life in Peru in the 1950s and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is an unforgettable semi-autobiographical novel.
APL Recommends
Books from our Booklists
Mystery Favorites
By Kate Atkinson.
The author of One Good Turn presents a mystery of suspense involving the unexpected intersection of three lives, including a woman whose life had been shattered thirty years earlier, an ex-detective on a crowded train, and a teenage girl who is called upon to test her preparedness.
By Robert Barnard.
Death returns to a Yorkshire village when a museum opens on the site of an unexplained murder/suicide where a renowned author killed his sister with an ax and shot himself.
By Linda Barnes.
Boston P.I. Carlotta Carlyle investigates the death of a newborn baby and tries to find the mobster father of her "little sister."
By Nevada Barr.
On an island on Lake Superior, Anna Pigeon, a National Park Service ranger, investigates the death of a diving instructor whose body was found in an old shipwreck.
By Lawrence Block.
After a childhood friend is shot down while attempting to atone for past sins, Scudder is drawn into a murder investigation that threatens to upset his path toward recovery--and get him killed in the process.
By Ken Bruen.
Stuck in a rut after his dismissal from the Irish police force and still grieving over the death of his father, Jack Taylor finds renewal when an intriguing woman hires him based on his rumored talent for finding things.
By John Burdett.
Bangkok policeman Sonchai Jitplecheep investigates the murder of an African American Marine sergeant and the subsequent death of his partner, making his way through a world of illicit drugs and corruption to find a vicious killer.
By James Lee Burke.
Haunted by memories, Dave Robicheaux, a Cajun ex-detective finds himself thrust back into the violent world of Mafia goons and wily federal agents.
By Michael Connelly.
Detective Harry Bosch had thought that he had eliminated the "Dollmaker," a vicious serial killer, until he discovers that he had killed the wrong man, and now Harry must find the "Dollmaker" before he strikes again.
By Thomas H. Cook.
Elizabeth Channing comes to teach art at the Chatham School in 1926, bringing with her a world of experiences far different from those of the people in the small Cape Cod village, and setting off a scandal that haunts student Henry Griswald into his old age.
By Patricia Cornwell.
Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner for Virginia, investigates the sex murder of a girl by an escaped convict. The probe requires exhuming the body for a second autopsy. Lots of information on bodies and autopsies. By the author of Cruel and Unusual.
By Robert Crais.
A woman is shot while jogging in Los Angeles and her father, a rich Hispanic who does not trust the police, hires PI Joe Pike. But the police do not trust Pike, a former policeman who made many enemies and the result is conflict.
By by James Crumley.
C.W. Sughrue, a Montana private eye, is hired to track down a failing author and winds up searching for Betty Sue Flowers, a woman missing for ten years in Haight-Ashbury.
By Jeffery Deaver.
A paralyzed New York detective is talked out of committing suicide to hunt for a cab driver who tortures and kills. The detective, Lincoln Rhyme, can only move his head so he is paired with police beauty Amelia Sachs. Together they go after the killer who tantalizes police with clues to his next murder. By the author of A Maiden's Grave.
By Colin Dexter.
Inspector Morse investigates a murder that occured in the 19th century.
By Pete Dexter.
Navigating his way between hostile patrons and brutal fellow workers, African American caddy Train finds an ally in a police detective who encourages Train's ambitions and oversees a case involving a boat hijacking and a beautiful widow.
By Aaron Elkins.
American art historian Ben Revere braves assassins while searching Europe for a shipment of art stolen by the Nazis in World War II. One of the paintings, a Velazquez, surfaced in Boston where it was sold to a pawnbroker for one hundred dollars. By the author of Twenty Blue Devils.
By Janet Evanovich.
Out of work and out of money, Stephanie Plum lands a job as bounty hunter and her first prey is, guess who? None other than Joe Morelli, the macho pig who deflowered her in high school and bragged on the lavatory wall of Mario's Sub Shop. Now a cop, he is wanted for murder. The intriguing thing is she still rather fancies him and even more intriguing is that he will save her life. A debut in fiction.
By Gillian Flynn.
On the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick's wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police immediately suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they aren't his. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone. So what really did happen to Nick's beautiful wife?
By Tana French.
"Six months after the events of In the Woods, Detective Cassie Maddox is still trying to recover. She's transferred out of the murder squad and started a relationship with Detective Sam O'Neill, but she's too badly shaken to make a commitment to him or to her career. Then Sam calls her to the scene of his new case: a young woman found stabbed to death in a small town outside Dublin. The dead girl's ID says her name is Lexie Madison--the identity Cassie used years ago as an undercover detective--and she looks exactly like Cassie"--Provided by publisher.
By Sue Grafton.
Fearing that the assailant who had once tried to kill him--and had left him badly scarred and partially amnesiac--would again try to murder him, Bobby Callahan turns to Kinsey Millhone for help.
By John Hart.
When Work Pickens finds his father murdered, the investigation pushes a repressed family history to the surface and he sees his own carefully constructed faade begin to crack. Work's troubled sister, her combative girlfriend, his gold digging socialite wife, and an unrequited lifelong love join a cast of small town characters that create no shortage of drama in this extraordinary, fast-paced suspense novel.
By Reginald Hill.
Inspector Peter Pascoe and Superintendent Andrew Dalziel of the Yorkshire police investigate the disappearance of a girl amid mounting hysteria that a serial killer is back. Earlier, three girls disappeared and were never found.
By by Carl Hiaasen.
When the precious clue-tongued mango voles at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills on North Key Largo are stolen by heartless, ruthless thugs, Joe Winder wants to uncover why, and find the voles. Joe is lately a PR man for the Amazing Kingdom theme park, but now that the voles are gone, Winder is dragged along in their wake through a series of weird and lethal events that begin with the sleazy real-estate agent/villain Francis X. Kingsbury and can end only one way.
By Tony Hillerman
Two young boys suddenly disappear. One of them, a Zuni, leaves a pool of blood behind. Lt. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police tracks the brutal killer. Three things complicate the search: an archeological dig, a steel hypodermic needle, and the strange laws of the Zuni. Compelling, terrifying, and highly suspenseful, "Dance Hall of the Dead" never relents from first page til last.
By Peter Høeg ; translated by Tiina Nunnally.
"Smilla's Sense of Snow presents one of the toughest heroines in modern fiction. Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is part Inuit, but she lives in Copenhagen. She is thirty-seven, single, childless, moody, and she refuses to fit in. Smilla's six-year-old Inuit neighbor, Isaiah, manages only with a stubbornness that matches her own to befriend her." "When Isaiah falls off a roof and is killed, Smilla doesn't believe it's an accident. She has seen his tracks in the snow, and she knows about snow. She decides to investigate and discovers that even the police don't want her to get involved. But opposition appeals to Smilla." "As all of Copenhagen settles down for a quiet Christmas, Smilla's investigation takes her from a fervently religious accountant to a tough-talking pathologist and an alcoholic shipping magnate and into the secret files of the Danish company responsible for extracting most of Greenland's mineral wealth - and finally onto a ship with an international cast of villains bound for a mysterious mission on an uninhabitable island off Greenland." "To read Smilla's Sense of Snow is to be taken on a magical, nerve-shattering journey - from the snow-covered streets of Copenhagen to the awesome beauty of the Arctic ice caps. A mystery, a love story, and an elegy for a vanishing way of life, Smilla's Sense of Snow is a breathtaking achievement, an exceptional feat of storytelling."--BOOK JACKET.
By Arnaldur Indriðason ; translated [from the Icelandic] by Victoria Cribb.
Unofficially investigating a suspicious suicide, Inspector Erlendur becomes increasingly unsettled by the unsolved cases of two young people who went missing decades earlier under circumstances tied to his own past.
By Laurie R. King.
In San Francisco, lesbian police officer Kate Martinelli investigates the death of a homeless man. The prime suspect is Brother Erasmus, another homeless man, but getting him to talk is difficult because he only speaks in quotations. By the author of A Grave Talent.
By by Stieg Larsson ; translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland.
The disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden, gnaws at her octogenarian uncle, Henrik Vanger. He is determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder. He hires crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, recently at the wrong end of a libel case, to get to the bottom of Harriet's disappearance. Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old, pierced, tattooed genius hacker, possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age--and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness--assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, an astonishing corruption at the highest echelon of Swedish industrialism--and a surprising connection between themselves.--From publisher description.
By Jonathan Lethem.
A black comedy in New York's criminal underworld. The twitching hero--he suffers from Tourette's syndrome--is one of four misfits who were rescued from an orphanage by a man who gave them jobs in his detective agency. Now the man has been killed and the boys intend to get the killer.
By John le Carré.
Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carre's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. A master chronicler of the deceptions and betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, le Carre portrays, in The Constant Gardener, the dark side of unbridled capitalism. His eighteenth novel is also the profoundly moving story of a man whom tragedy elevates. Justin Quayle, amateur gardener and ineffectual bureaucrat, seemingly oblivious to his wife's cause, discovers his own resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love. The Constant Gardener is a magnificent exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time.
By Dennis Lehane.
"There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected." When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled tip to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean Devine is a homicide detective. Jimmy Marcus is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave Boyle is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay -- demons that urge him to do terrible things. When Jimmy Marcus's daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned to the case. His personal life unraveling, he must go back into a world he thought he'd left behind to confront not only the violence, of the present but the nightmares of his past. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy Marcus, who finds that his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave Boyle, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered with someone else's blood. While Sean Devine attempts to use the law to return peace and order to the neighborhood, Jimmy Marcus finds his need for vengeance pushing him ever closer to a moral abyss from which lie wont be able to return, and Dave's wife, Celeste, sleeps at night with a man she fears may very well be a monster. a monster who fathered her child and hides his true nature from everyone, possibly even himself. A tense and unnerving psychological thriller, Mystic River is also an epic novel of love and loyalty, faith and family, in which people irrevocably marked by the past find themselves on a collision course with the darkest truths of their own hidden selves.
By Elmore Leonard.
Chili Palmer, a Miami loan shark, pursues a mark, who's behind in payments, to Las Vegas and then to Hollywood where Harry Zimm has gambled away the $200,000 earmarked for his next production.
By Laura Lippman.
Interviewing a distressed and disoriented woman who has fled the scene of an accident, Baltimore County police department detective Kevin Infante is amazed when she claims to be the younger of a pair of sisters who were abducted thirty years earlier.
By Peter Lovesey.
A participant in a literary discussion on crime in Bath, England, opens a book to find a famous stamp, stolen earlier from a museum, and shortly after he is killed. Officer Peter Diamond investigates the murder, taunted by a killer who is a prankster.
By Val McDermid.
"On a freezing day in December 1963, Alison Carter vanishes from her rural village, an insular community that distrusts the outside world. For the young George Bennett, a newly promoted inspector, it is the beginning of his most difficult and harrowing case--a suspected murder with no body, an investigation with more dead ends and closed faces than he'd have found in the anonymity of the inner city, and an outcome that reverberates through the years." -- Jacket.
By Margaret Maron.
Deborah Knott, an attorney attempting to infiltrate the old boy network of tobacco country by running for district judge, is distracted from the race, and almost eliminated, when she finds new evidence to an old small-town murder.
By Sharyn McCrumb.
Laura Bruce, wife of a minister in Appalachia, experiences dangers after she is asked by the sheriff to help tend the survivors from a scene of carnage at a farm.
By Marcia Muller.
Successful in her investigative work for All Souls Legal Cooperative, happy with her newly renovated house, and feeling somewhat more secure in her relationship with the enviromental activist Hy Ripinsky, Sharon is shocked to find herself suddenly faced with a wrenching ultimatum ...
By Walter Mosley.
Leonid McGill, a New York City private detective, tries to put his past life behind him, to go "from crooked to slightly bent." But it's not that easy when someone like Tony "The Suit" Towers expects you to do a job; when an Albany PI hires you to track down four men known only by their youthful street names; and when your 16-year-old son, Twill, is getting in over his head with a suicidal girl.
By Sharan Newman.
Catherine LeVendeur, the most promising student in Heloise's convent, Paraclete, has the responsibility of discovering who has altered the text of a psalter given the the Abbot of Suger during the 12th century.
By Sara Paretsky.
V.I. Warshawski, private investigator, uncovers a network of corruption when she goes back to her old neighborhood in Chicago.
By T. Jefferson Parker.
Living in Orange County, California, in the late 1960s, three brothers pursue leads relevant to their respective careers as a homicide detective, a minister, and a reporter when a woman from a childhood rival family is found murdered.
By Iain Pears.
A novel on the way we interpret events to suit our purpose. The protagonists are four people giving evidence in a murder in 17th century England. One blames the crime on too much authority, another on the lack of it. A look at the controversies of the day, from medical experiments to religious freethinking.
By George Pelecanos.
Two brothers--rookie police officer Derek Strange, and his older brother, Dennis, a troubled Vietnam Veteran--become caught up in the riots engulfing Washington, D.C., in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
By Louise Penny.
An obsessive historian's quest for the remains of the founder of Quebec, Samuel de Champlain, ends in murder. Could a secret buried with Champlain for nearly 400 years be so dreadful that someone would kill to protect it? Although he is supposed to be on leave, Chief Inspector Gamache cannot walk away from a crime that threatens to ignite long-smoldering tensions between the English and the French. Meanwhile, he is receiving disquieting letters from the village of Three Pines, where beloved Bistro owner Olivier was recently convicted of murder.
By Arturo Pérez-Reverte ; translated from the Spanish by Sonia Soto.
Lucas Corso, middle-aged, tired, and cynical, is a book detective, a mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found hanged, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. The task seems straightforward, but the unsuspecting Corso is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas's masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris in pursuit of a sinister and seemingly omniscient killer. "A cross between Umberto Eco and Anne Rice. Think of The Club Dumas as a beach book for intellectuals."-New York Daily News. Part mystery, part puzzle, part witty intertextual game, The Club Dumas is a wholly original intellectual thriller by the internationally bestselling author of The Flanders Panel and The Seville Communion. Lucas Corso's search for the original copy of a book of the occult takes him from Madrid to Paris and into a secret society of antiquarians.
By Richard Price.
In this first-rate police procedural, Eric Cash, the 34-year-old bartender at Café Berkmann and a would-be screenwriter, ends up in jail as a murder suspect and it's up to two New York City police detectives to find out the truth.
By Ian Rankin.
Vigilantes appear in a housing complex in Edinburgh after police reveal a convicted child molester is living among them. Inspector Rebus, already up to his ears with a released serial killer, is put on the case.
By Kathy Reichs.
It's June in Montreal, and Tempe Brennan, Quebec's director of forensic anthropology, knows she is trailing a serial murderer when a dismembered and stored body turns up in a downtown park.
By Peter Robinson.
In Yorkshire, a dried water reservoir yields the skeleton of a woman who has been dead for fifty years. Inspector Banks learns the victim was a flirtatious World War II farm girl. The area was full of Yanks and her husband was at the front.
By S.J. Rozan.
Piano-playing PI Bill Smith teams up with Chinatown's PI Lydia Chin to investigate murder in an old people's home in the Bronx. They uncover racket after racket, from unnecessary medical procedures to the paying of protection money to gangs. By the author of China Trade.
By Peter Temple.
Shaken by a scrape with death, big-city detective Joe Cashin is posted away from the Homicide Squad to a quiet town on the South Australian coast where he grew up. Carrying physical scars and not a little guilt, he spends his time playing the country cop, walking his dogs, and thinking about how it all was before. When a prominent local is attacked and left for dead in his own home, Cashin is thrust into a murder investigation. The evidence points to three boys from the nearby Aboriginal community; whom everyone wants to blame. But Cashin is unconvinced, and soon begins to see the outlines of something far more terrible than a simple robbery gone wrong.--From publisher description.
By Fred Vargas ; translated from the French by Siân Reynolds.
In this remarkable addition to the Commissaire Adamsberg series, a serial killer has followed Adamsberg to Canada on his training mission in a novel that will keep readers spellbound until the very end.
By Minette Walters.
Journalist Rosalind Leigh is commissioned to write a book about Olive Martin, who murdered her mother and sister five years ago.
By Sarah Waters.
Growing up as a foster child among a family of thieves, orphan Sue Trinder hopes to pay back that kindness by playing a key role in a swindle scheme devised by their leader, who is planning to con a fortune out of the naive Maud Lilly.
By Don Winslow.
The seemingly disparate lives of a DEA agent, a drug lord, a call girl, a hit man, and a priest intertwine around a nexus of the drug trade involving the Latin American drug cartels, the American underworld, and the U.S. government.
By Paula L. Woods.
A black policewoman receives a beating from white officers while rescuing a black doctor in a race riot in Los Angeles. Alas, the doctor is no angel, as officer Charlotte Justice learns when he is murdered. A debut in fiction.
APL Recommends Blog
Thursday, May 23
by: carolyn.rogers
Monday, May 20
by: dean.smith
I was reading movie critic David Thomson’s latest, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (2012), and enjoying it so much that I checked out a bunch more of his books including The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, but after a few pages of that one, I decided I'd had enough of Thomson's style for now. Maybe another time.
But I did get past the dedication page, and near it are some quotations from people involved in making movies, one of them Gore Vidal, who said “Find out the movies a man saw between ten and fifteen, which ones he liked, disliked, and you would have a pretty good idea of what sort of mind and temperament he has.” I’m sure Vidal meant women, too, so I checked Wikipedia (sorry library gods) for lists of movies made from 1966 through 1971, the years I turned 10 and 15.
My first revelation was that I don’t remember seeing many first-run movies before 1968. I must have, but the earliest, and one of the few that sticks, is Goldfinger, 1964, and I remember it not for gold lamé nudity, but for my sister and me in our jammies in the back of the car trying to sneak a peek at the drive-in screen through the bucket seats of my dad’s Grand Prix. I better remember watching old movies on our tiny Zenith portable TV with a wire hangar antenna, pliers for changing the channel, and a green-tinted screen, and I remember the jingle from KNXT in Los Angeles:
The Late Show / Relax enjoy a snack and watch / The Late Show / Channel 2 is proud to bring the greatest of stars / Here on the great Late Show
(I wish I could link to the tune for you, but it’s nowhere. If you come to the library and ask for me, I'll sing it to you, if you have a library card.)
Late-night movies in those days were beat-up prints from the 30s and 40s—the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, Basil Rathbone as Sherlock, Fred and Ginger, Errol Flynn buckling swash, Hope and Crosby, Dean and Jerry, and Bogie. Those movies affected my development; I freely admit I am a Marxist. But doing this exercise made me realize that until 1968 I was either too young, too broke, or too dumb to pay attention to new releases. After 1968 is a different story.
NEXT: Lists of movies. And don’t we all love those?
Saturday, May 18
Many of you may know that this year is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. Austen wrote the novel in 1797-98, originally calling it First Impressions. Her father attempted to have it published, but the manuscript was rejected. It was not until her first novel, Sense and Sensibility was published in 1812 that Pride and Prejudice was accepted. By that time, another author had published their novel called First Impressions. Austen found another title for her book from a quote in fellow female author Fanny Burney’s novel, Cecila. Thus Pride and Prejudice was born. The novel was an instant success and has proved to be her most popular novel.
While we know much about her life from records and her own letters, there are aspects of her life of which we know nothing because her sister destroyed letters after the author’s death in 1817 in order to protect family privacy. Scholars and authors can only speculate what the subjects of those letters were and what dimensions they could have added to our understanding of Jane Austen.
By Jane Austen:
Jane Austen's Letters by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice (DVD) Miniseries starring Colin Firth
Based on Jane Austen:
Mr. Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange
Lost in Austen (DVD) Miniseries starring Jemima Rooper
Friday, May 17
by: betsey.blanche
The Twitter feed “Fake Library Stats” recently tweeted “After complaining the pituitary glands of 63% of librarians secrete a hormone that is necessary to keep them alive.” Sure, there’s a stereotype that we librarians like to complain but we can also be overwhelmingly positive when it comes to resources we offer. And I’m about to be super positive about the fact that I just read a library book and did not enjoy it at all.
The Library’s Graphic Novel Book Club just finished reading and discussing Yuichi Yokoyama’s Garden. In Garden, a large group of people with strange masks and costumes on explore a strange garden and describe what they see in terse sentences. That goes on for 300 pages in which none of the characters are developed and nothing really happens in a conventional plot kind of way. As a result, I was feeling nervous before the meeting. I couldn’t think of a single productive thing to say about it. Worse, I was reminded of a frustrating, non-library book club meeting I’d attended to discuss Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore in which most participants could only comment on the weirdness of the novel. Was that going to be me?! After finishing the reading all I could think was, “Huh. Well. I just don’t . . . What?! I don’t get it. It’s weird.” Neither articulate nor a good way to start a conversation. I felt like I was missing something. But this is one of the best things to happen to a book club because it this case everyone felt the same way and was more than willing to talk about how much they disliked the reading experience and why. It turns out this makes for a much more fruitful conversations than when everyone unanimously enjoys a book. In those cases all you can do is say, “yeah, it was good. I liked the art and the characters and the story. Yup.”
I’m willing to consider the possibility that I really just didn’t get it. So give it a try for yourself and see! Maybe ask some friends to read it too. It might result in a heated debate if one of you loves it. Or, you might just have a pleasant time complaining about how annoying it was. Either way is pretty fun.
Side note: Graphic Novel Book Club is free and open to the public. We meet on the third Wednesday of every month at Jo's Coffee Downtown and you can find our reading list on the Events page of the Library's website.
Thursday, May 16
by: carolyn.rogers
The 2010 novel Anthill is a fictional account of an Alabama backwoods boy who grows up to be a Harvard lawyer fighting to save the woodlands of his childhood, the West Nokobee Tract at the edge of William Ziebach National Forest. It is a privately owned tract of longleaf pine savanna. It becomes his secret place and he bicycles into it every chance he gets to escape his parent's troubled marriage. The woodlands and the national forest are fictional but the ecology is not. Longleaf pine forests are the most diverse ecosystem in North America, with 500 species per square kilometer. In the novel, the eminent Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson tells a southern coming-of-age story while persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, to protect our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.
E.O Wilson also wrote the forward to Longleaf, Far as the Eye Can See: A New Vision of North America's Richest Forest which offers 11 essays on these forests, including numerous photographs that cultivate appreciation for the beauty of the tree itself; of the unique species it supports; and of the breathtaking landscape it creates.
Longleaf pine savanna is one of the only ecosystems that is both forest and meadow. The book reveals this dynamic system in panoramic images of golden light filtering through trees and illuminating long grasses beneath. And there's no shortage of close-ups. Longleaf was once so common that it was hardly remarked upon, and ecologists are only now beginning to understand the forest that once covered 90 million acres of North America and now covers only 3 million acres, some of it in Texas. The final sections of the book detail potential restoration solutions for the longleaf that remains. Longleaf is not a story of loss, but one of deep reverence for the grandeur and mystery of these regions.
Using your Austin Public Library card you can read both books together.
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By Chad Harbach.
"At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big-league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended."--from publisher's description.
