Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman

Cover of Snow is the first novel published by Jenny Milchman. Nora Hamilton lives with her husband, a policeman, in Wedeskyull, a town in the Adirondack Mountains in New York. She wakes up one morning to find that the house feels empty and discovers the body of her dead husband. Their town is a small town, not particularly welcoming to newcomers but Nora feels the coldness even more now that her husband is dead. She does not understand why he is dead and begins to investigate it and this brings attention, most of it being the wrong sort, to her.

When I was thinking about this book, I decided it was an excellent example of "snow gothic." So, what is a snow gothic? It is not like the traditional meaning of gothic in which supernatural elements mix with disturbances among the characters but it is more like "Southern Gothic" in which there is a strong sense of place and unease brought on by secrets among the characters. The town is dark and silent because of the snow and truly because of the secrets. Snow gothics are characterized by secrets, silences and that overbearing sense of gloom that you can get before the storm really hits.

Snow is very present in this book. It is always either snowing or about to snow and when the book delves into the history of the characters--snow is present then.

Milchman does a great job creating a place, an atmosphere and characters that you will remember. A very good book and a great one to read on a snowy afternoon in New Jersey. I am already looking forward to Milchman's next book

Favorite Books of 2012

Most of the books on this list were new in 2012. However, this list is really to capture the books that I enjoyed reading the most last year.

The Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler Many New Year's resolutions involve more healthy eating, using what we have instead of buying more and An Everlasting Meal shows you the way. What is different about this book from other food books promising to show you a better way, is that Adler makes cooking and eating exciting. While reading this book, I was excited at the richness of what she was preparing even though many of the lessons were simple, the bounty was evident.

Carry the One by Carole Anshaw A carful of people leave a wedding and accidently kill a young girl who has wandered out of the woods. Everyone is affected by the accident and Anshaw does a wonderful job of conveying the different ways the pain changes everyone.

Arcadia by Lauren Hoff This is set in a commune in New York state beginning in the 60s and ends in the same place in 2018. Bit is a child of two of the original members who eventually leave when the commune is overtaken by people who do not contribute and overtax their dwindling resources.

Beyond the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo I am hoping to start a non-fiction book discussion at my library and I think that this will be the first book that I choose. As nearly all reviewers (and readers) have noted, this is a book that reads like a novel. Its power is that Boo depicts the poverty and corruption in the daily lives of the people as it affects them not merely as statistics and footnotes. Of course, that the writing is masterful is another reason that this book was one of my favorites.

Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift Jack lives with his wife managing a summer caravan park. He is informed that his brother, Jack, was killed in Iraq and he must travel to Devon for the funeral. During the trip, he thinks about his relationship with his brother and the death of his father. Quiet and thoughtful.

The Black House by Peter May Location, location, location is a powerful draw for me in choosing my books. It is best if the location is isolated, unusual and dark. This book's setting in the Northern Hebrides and it also features an annual ritual that the men conduct on another island that is isolated and populated only by the birds that are an important part of the ritual. The policeman, now living in Glasgow is called home after many years to investigate a death that looks like one that happened when he was a youth. Moody and atmospheric with the promise of another book in the series.

Where'd You Go Bernadette? by Maria Semple Set in Seattle, this book is told via emails, text messages and FBI documents. Bernadette has moved with her family (husband and daughter) and lives in an un-Seattle-like house (not a Craftsman) that is in a remarkable state of disrepair. Bernadette has "issues" she does not leave the house, she does not cook and has some amazing encounters with her neighbors and the other parents in her daughter's school. She gets lost (and then found) in this funny, barbed yet endearing book.

Broken Harbour by Tana French This is a novel in French's Dublin murder squad series. Set in a dying housing development outside of Dublin that is now largely empty because of the collapse of the Irish economy. The policeman knows the man and his family who are brutally killed in the murder that begins this book. But there is so much more in this book--the Irish economy, the expectations of marriage and family life and the need to keep up appearances not just for the sake of outsiders but for one's own identify and sanity. Brilliant.

Dare Me by Megan Abbott Abbott writes noirish books featuring women and girls. Her newest is set among cheerleaders and explores friendship, relationships with adults (especially their coach) and the rivalry between the girls. How far will someone go to be the favorite? Dark, engrossing and well done.

Available Dark by Elizabeth Hand This is a second book featuring Cassandra Neary, a photographer who mostly recently traveled to Maine to meet and interview one of her favorite photographers. This book starts almost immediate after the other as she gets a mysterious call to travel to Iceland for a job evaluating photographs. It is a weird and wonderful tale including Icelandic mythology and Iceland's current travails as well as this deeply flawed and arresting heroine.

When We Argued All Night by Alice Mattison Set mostly in New York over a period of decades, it follows two friends as they travel from the 30s to contemporary times. Harold and Artie are friends from the neighborhood who experience Communism, the blacklist, the importance of good work and their families.

Asta in the Wings

I just finished Asta in the Wings by Jan Elizabeth Watson. It is a marvelous book, set in 1979 in a rural community in Maine. Asta lives with her brother, Orion and mother in house isolated from other people because Asta's mother convinces the children that there is plague all around them.

Asta and her brother finally venture out of the house when their mother does not return one night and she is amazed and yet matter-of-fact as she finds the world is different than the one had been led to believe in.

This wonderful book is Watson's first novel and it conveys the love of Asta for her mother and brother even though their lives together were anything but safe and normal.

Rediscovering Gems: Swimming to Antarctica

The Summer Olympics are going on now and every day the newspapers have more stories about swimming. There are human interest stories about the swimmers, information about new suits and how those affect the swimmers cutting through the water and improved techniques used by swimmers. The focus on swimming made me think of Swimming To Antarctica by Lynne Cox as a book that should be re-discovered.

Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long Distance Swimmer was published in January 2004 and was written by Lynne Cox, a long distance swimmer who broke records by swimming the Cook Strait, the Bering Strait, the Cape of Good Hope and the Magellan Strait. Through her training she realizes that her body is unusually capable of withstanding extreme cold. She decides to swim a mile in the Antarctic Ocean, a swim conducted in 32 degree water, that she finishes but leaves her with some physical damage due to the extreme cold.

It is a story about discipline and sacrifice. Her commitment to long-distance swimming means that she spends much of her time in the water and is able to spend less time on in-land relationships. It reminds us that obsessions and talent have consequences, that the choices we make affect our lives and relationships.

Cox is matter-of-fact about the problems and focuses on the training, the swimming and all the auxiliary activities she needs to complete them. It is a terrific story and Cox is a terrific writer. She helps you understand why long-distance swimming is so important to her and she works to have the swims mean something to the world hoping that the swim through the Bering Strait will remind people how close in distance Russia and the US really are. Writers often say that they write because they have to, and this is a trait that is found throughout the creative professions. Cox shows that her talent and ability for long-distance swimming became something she had to do and in her book, she shares her successes as well as her challenges. Although this is about swimming, it is indeed a universal story.

Who would like this book: You certainly don't have to be a swimmer to enjoy this book. It is also a good tie-in to the Olympics. Further it is a good book to highlight the importance of discipline and the consequences (the good and bad) of following your dreams.

Rediscovering Gems: Random Family

Family sagas are popular and here is the twist with this one--it is a family saga and it is real. Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc was written after 10 years of studying a Bronx family. It centers on two young women, Jessica and Coco and follows them as they fall in love, get pregnant and start families. Jessica falls in love with a drug dealer and spends years in prison and to get away from the neighborhood and start fresh, Coco takes her family to Troy, NY.

LeBlanc does not preach or use statistics to make her case--she simply presents these lives as they happen. The women assume their own dignity but for many readers their lives will seem more like fiction than most novels because the women's experiences are so different from the lives of many readers and yet, they started off with many of the same dreams.

While there is much sadness in this book, LeBlanc's depiction of the family and their lives is engrossing, touching and well done. I started out wondering how she researched it but quickly fell into the story of their lives.

Who would like it: People who like family sagas, but more realistic ones. People who are interested in sociology and city life.

Showcasing Older Books

In between questions, one of the things that I like to do at the library is to review the circulation statistics for books that I have particularly enjoyed. Often, they are books that were well reviewed but not terribly popular but I have often thought that one reason they are not popular is that they are not well known. If people could find out about these books, they would re-discover them and enjoy them too.

One book in this category for me, is Frankie's Place by Jim Sterba. It is about the courtship and marriage of Sterba and Frances Fitzgerald and is most centered in her place in Maine where they stay from June to October. This was a lovely book--about their romance, their lives as writers, their activities and friends in Maine and it also includes recipes. Good ones too--I copied some of them and made them myself.

This is also a great seasonal read. It is a book about summer and is terrific to read during that time of year. Of course, you can also read it in the winter when you are yearning for summer, but for this, this is a summer book.

But back to my original question: How do you share books like this with your reading public? Displays help but I would like to see something more proactive to help readers discover wonderful books that they might have missed the first time out.

The Fisher Boy by Stephen Anable

I just finished The Fisher Boy by Stephen Anable. It is set on Cape Code, mostly in Provincetown with some forays to Truro (although as the author notes, not a depiction of Truro that is geographically accurate) and Gloucester, MA. Mark, the main character, is part of a troupe of improvisational actors who are looking for bookings in the summer.

Bad things happen in Provincetown this summer, beginning with a dead dog deposited on the steps of the party that always opens the season and a murder of a friend of Mark that soon follows. Added to the usual crush of summer residents is a group called the Christian Soldiers and young blond-hair people who are pan-handling and claim to be from a Scandinavian ship. Added to this is the opening of an exhibit of the paintings of Thomas Royall that includes information about a utopian community that he founded in Truro and that ended badly.

All of this comes together to make a kind of Cape Cod-gothic novel. I doubt that it really conforms to the true gothic genre but there is something about the baroqueness of the plot that reminded me of gothic novels.

As a lover of Cape Cod and a lover of mystery novels, I enjoyed this book greatly.

Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

I just finished Londonstani, the first novel by Gautam Malkani. It takes place in London as you can tell from the title and is the story of 4 rudeboys. They are part of London's Asian community and refer to themselves as desis which the glossary in the book describes as "self-referential term for the Indian disapora that refers to people and culture." The four rudeboys, one of them is more an aspiring rudeboy than actual rudeboy join with Sanjay, an entrepreneur and former student of their college in a business deal that has tragic consequences. It also serves the vehicle to reveal the final twist that concerns the identify of one of the rudeboys.

The book is written in the jargon of the rudeboys and required much flipping back and forth between the pages of the novel and the glossary. I would have been totally lost without the glossary and found the book slow-going at first because of the constant flipping. As I got further into the novel, I picked up both the terms and the rhythm of Malkani's writing.

This is not a book for people who are offended by profane language.

The Long Tail and Libraries

I just finished reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. He writes about how business has been transformed by the Internet and the availability of choices in a business not bound by bricks-and-mortar.

The three main forces behind the Long Tail are:

1. "Democratize the tools of production"--digital cameras, video recorders enlarge the field of content producers beyond the specialist or professional to the passionate amateur.


2. "Democratize the tools of distribution"--this is the role played by aggregators such as Amazon or Netflix


3. "Connect supply and demand" --this is done by filters such as recommendations in Netflix, customer reviews and list on Amazon. Essentially, a filter orders information so a user can find items.

A library would seem to be both an aggregator and use filters via the catalogs. Most libraries allow searching for subjects as well as authors and titles and one could certainly argue that the filters used in libraries could be more robust and some libraries are attempting that by adding patron reviews or linking to patron lists or even allowing tagging by patrons to help identify items using labels that are most meaningful to them.

In my former career in publications, we found that categorizing was, no surprise, the most difficult part of determining how to organize information and we used to have to mediate disagreements between the professional developers who would tell us the proper way something should be organized versus our need to make sure the readers would be able to find the information and the two were often in conflict. We tended to go with an information organization that the readers could understand (which tended to be task-based) because if the they could not find what they were looking for our work was not very successful.

While reading the book, although fascinated by the 80/20 rule and was reminded that we discussed the 80/20 rule in our collection development class--20% of the items circulate 80% of the time. We talked about the importance of user needs surveys to improve our collection practices and our services in general. I have been thinking a lot about user needs surveys and it is clear that while they are very important they are also extremely difficult to do well and I wonder whether we can get better user needs information from examining the circulation data of our own libraries and other libraries using the library's ILS data. Do our library systems collect data about searches that patrons make that are not successful? We could use that data to determine what items they are searching for that they cannot find and determine whether they cannot find them because the items are not available in our collections or whether there is a problem with their search terms or our categorization? That would go a long way to helping us refine our choices.

Anderson argues for the importance of the filter. Businesses such as Netflix are successful because they are able to distribute older films and less-viewed items such as documentaries. In fact, it is a large part of their success because they are able to distribute many of the older and lower-priced DVD options. Most importantly, people are drawn to Netflix because of the older and more obscure films. They simply have titles not found elsewhere and they make it easy to find them via their recommendations and terrific search capabilities. Right now, many libraries do not have the appropriate terms to search for CDs or DVDs; they do not have fields particular to those media, a director, or an actor or performer might get listed as author since that was the closest field available. I can understand that this might be necessary for older systems and older entries but I was quite shocked in a recent class, that many classmates seemed to think that listing a director or performer as author was just fine. Our patrons are getting used to the search capabilities of a Netflix or iTunes and we owe it to them to produce the best search experience that we can.

My Top 10 Books of 2007

Every year I keep a journal of books that I have read but I have never gone back through that journal and compiled a top 10 list. This is my first top 10 list and unlike most others is not a list of the top 10 books published this year, but rather a list of books that I read this year and enjoyed. It will be a mix of new and old books.

So, in no particular order, here they are:

1. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (2007). I am drawn to books that take place in extreme climates, primarily cold ones. And this book by Vida was set primarily in Lapland in Northern Scandinavia. It is a novel about family, family secrets and self-discovery. Vida is a co-editor of Believer, the literary magazine, and this is a luminous book about finding yourself in a world of cold and darkness in the midst of a people, the Sami, on the brink of extinction.
2. The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid (2007). It is a rainy summer in the Lake Country in Britain and a modern day scholar, Jane Gresham, is intrigued by the discovery of a 200 year old body with unusual tattoos. Lake District legends have said that Fletcher Christian returned to England after the mutiny and his time on Pitcarin Island and Jane is determined to prove that the body is Christian's. This book is well written and may be enjoyed by people who love intermingled stories but it is also of interested to lovers of maritime history. One can see the influence of Caroline Alexander's masterful The Bounty (2003) in McDermid's book.
3. The Bloomsday Dead by Adrian McKinty (2007). Set in Ireland and Northern Ireland on Bloomsday, June 16th. This is the final book of McKinty's so-called Dead Trilogy and Michael Forstythe is set the task of finding the daughter of his beloved, his Penelope, Bridget Callaghan. McKinty is an extraordinary writer mixing scenes of violence, keen observation of Ireland today and lyrical soul-searching as Michael questions his life and years in exile. Any allusions to Ulysses, both by Joyce and by Homer (the Odyssey) are of course, quite intentional.
4. GhostWalk by Rebecca Stott (2007). Set in Cambridge both in the modern day and in the days of Isaac Newton, a writer, Lydia Brooke, has been contracted to finish the work of a scholar who drowned just before she finished her expected to be controversial biography of Isaac Newton. Stott uses murders in the 17th century and in her contemporary story to explore alchemy, neurology and animal rights activism. GhostWalk works as a mystery as well as a thought-provoking book about science, the commercialism of science and the conscience of scholars and scientists
5. About Alice by Calvin Trillin (2006). Simply one of the most romantic books I have read. Alice, Trillin's wife died in 2001 at the age of 63 from the effects of radiation treatments. Trillin writes about their courtship and marriage in a style that is honest and loving and filled with longing. Simply lovely.
6. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid (2007). This is Hamid's second novel and was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2007. It is short, only 182 pages and told in the form of a monologue by Changez, a Muslim who left Pakistan to study at Princeton. There, he falls in love with a woman who is emotionally unavailable to him and joins a consulting firm. After 9/11, he goes back to Pakistan because he believes that he no longer fits in the United States and yet finds that he does not really fit in at home either. One of the characters tells Changez about the janissaries, Muslim boys who were taken from their homes as very young boys to fight for the Christians because only the very young could be enlisted to fight against their own people. Changez was too old to be a modern-day Janissary and so goes home to be with his people.
7. Consumption by Kevin Patterson (2007). Set in the Arctic, this novel by Patterson, a medical doctor and the author of the travel book, The Water in Between, concerns a woman who is sent from her Inuit people south to recover from consumption. There she falls away from the ways of her people but is sent home where she must learn to readjust. Her doctor falls in love with her and this totally one-sided love (only on his side) affects his life. This is a subtle and lyrical book, with fascinating discussions on cross-cultural epidemiology bookmarking each of the chapters.
8. Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand (2007). I have never really enjoyed science fiction or fantasy but I was mesmerized by Waking the Moon an earlier Hand novel (1995). I don't remember much about the plot but the images and writing were stunning and so I looked forward to her newest book. Set largely on an island off the coast of Maine, Cass Neary, a post-punk photographer is set to interview Aphrodite Kamestos, a photographer whose work influenced Neary. Hand explores the artistic genius and madness in this stunning book. This is a dark book with fascinating discussions on the history of photography that also captures the claustrophobic character of life on an island.
9. Eat the Document by Dana Spinotta (2006). This novel, Spinotta's second was a National Book Award finalist and New York Times Notable Book. It follows the lives of two former 60s radicals as they live underground and continue hiding in the present. It shifts between the decades and the characters and explores and illuminates their decisions in the past and present.
10. Raven Black by Ann Cleeves (2007). This is the first book of an intended Shetland Trilogy. Set in the Shetland Islands part of Great Britain but also Viking in heritage, this novel introduces Jimmy Perez, lead detective, an outsider who has lived on the island for many years but because he was born there, he will never be considered a Shetlander. The murder takes place on New Year's Eve when the island is cold and dark. Cleeves manages to teach the reader about Shetland history while telling a wonderful story--I am looking forward to her next book also set on the island and featuring Perez.

Bloody Harvests by Richard Kunzmann

One place where love of books and love of anthropology come together is in international mysteries. This particular sub-genre of mysteries is one of my favorites and I plan to write about international mysteries that I have read and enjoyed.

Bloody Harvests takes place in South Africa and features two detectives, Jacob Tshabalala, and Harry Mason. Tshabalala is a Christian who is from a family of tribal priests and healers and Harry Mason his partner was born in England and came to South Africa as a youngster. Both have secrets from each other and those secrets influence their behavior through this case.

Kunzmann shows us a South Africa in which history and old wounds piercethe present. The characters are credible and they fight a criminal who is mythic and uses his knowledge of tribal religion and healing and his own unusual appearance to construct a persona that frightens and controls the local population.

Kunzmann has a new book, Salamander Cotton, coming out which features Harry Mason again. It is being published in the U in mid-November.

Another South African author to explore is Deon Meyer who has had 3 books translated into English and published in the US. They include: Heart of the Hunter, Dead before Dying and Dead at Daybreak. Heart of the Hunter is particularly interesting because it touchesthe history of South Africa in the Cold War. Tiny, the lead character, the nickname for Thobela Mpayipheli, is a former anti-apartheid operative trained by the KGB. He races across the country to honor a promise he had made to an old friend. He is a wonderful character, a now-peaceful man who has to reach back into his old life and old skills to survive to fulfill his promise.

Both of these authors are worth reading--they have much to author as thriller writers but also as guides to an unfamiliar place and history.