Fall Books Preview
Fall is the busiest season of the year for book publishers, which is good news for readers. Bob Minzesheimer, president of the library's Board of Trustees who writes about books for USA Today, offers some fall highlights for all kind of readers. And please note that several of the authors mentioned here, including Frank McCourt and Peter Sis, may speak at the library this fall or spring -- once we finish the new parking lot:
BIG NOVEL:
Bridge of Sighs
No novelist writes better about struggling small towns and the working class than does Richard Russo. His novels have been set in towns a lot like the one he grew up in upstate New York in Gloversville — where they no longer manufacture gloves.
Russo's 1993 novel, Nobody's Fool, was made into a lovely movie starring Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy. His last novel, Empire Falls, was turned into a HBO mini-series that also featured Newman. His new novel, Bridge of Sighs, explores both familiar and new territory. It's set for the most part in an upstate town where an tannery creates most of the jobs and pollutes the local waters. But as the novel's title suggests, it also ranges across the Atlantic — to Venice.
The novel covers more than a half century in the lives of three friends — a romantic triangle of sorts. Two of them stay at home. One because he can't imagine living anywhere else. He's content to take over and expand the family-run deli. His wife, a would-be artist, stays home more reluctantly — out of love and duty.
But the third friend become a world-famous artist in Venice. It's home to the 16th century Bridge of Sighs, where, as legend has it, prisoners would enjoy their final view of beautiful Venice before being lead to their cells.
It's a big-hearted novel, driven by its vivid and complex characters. It deals with big issues of everyday life — about the compromises you make — about tradeoffs and the different kind of price you pay for happiness and success.
The novel is dramatic in a small-town kind of way, which is a big part of its beauty.
SMALL NOVEL:
The Uncommon Reader
Alan Bennett's novella, The Uncommon Reader, is a mere 120 pages, but he manages to fully imagine a modern-day Queen of England who happens upon a mobile library and finds that reading changes her life.
Bennett, whose plays and screenplays include The History Boys. and The Madness of King George, has a deft touch for dialogue and intrigue. His novella is both hilarious and pointed.
The Queen turns out to be more than a Oprah Winfrey-like literary cheerleader: "She was not a gentle reader and often wished authors were around so that she could take them to task. 'Am I alone,' she wrote, 'in wanting to give Henry James a good talking-to?'"
On one level, The Uncommon Reader is a political and literary satire. But it’s also a lovely little lesson in the redemptive and subversive power of reading — without being preachy about it — and how one book can lead to another and another and another.
Along the way, The Queen discovers that reading, as she puts it, "was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed."
SHORT STORIES:
The Best American Short Stories — 2007
Stephen King is the guest editor of this annual collection. Many of his selection were written by well-known writers, including Alice Munro, Richard Russo, Ann Beattie and Mary Gordon. But the biggest delight may be in discovering some new talents, including 29-year-old Lauren Groff whose story "L. DeBard and Aliette" explores a love affair between a girl in a wheelchair and an Olympic swimmer. King calls it "mesmerizing."
ESSAYS:
I'll Fly Away
Wally Lamb is most widely known for his novels, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much is True which were both Oprah Book Club selections. But for the past eight years Lamb has been a volunteer at a woman's prison in Connecticut where he has taught a writing workshop to the inmates. His second collection of their work is titled: Ill Fly Away: Further testimonies From the Women of York Prison. In a lovely introduction, Lamb, a former high school English teacher, traces his own (slow) growth as a reader and writer. He also writes how he was turned into an "accidental activist" who's come to believe "firmly that the more transparent the prison walls, the better and more humane the prison — and the world at large."
HISTORY:
The Coldest Winter
No writer has been better at blending basic reporting with the skills of a historian than David Halberstam. In June, at the age of 73, he died in a traffic accident, just days after putting the finishing touches on his 20th book. It's titled The Coldest War: America and the Korean War, and offers a sweeping, narrative history of our "forgotten war." Halberstam can be wordy at time, but he's worth reading, especially for what he writes about two major unpopular decisions made by President Truman: to limit the war to Korea and to relieve Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the U.S. commander who wanted to expand it to China. Halberstam writes that Truman believed “the historians would rescue him.” They did.
FOR PARENTS & KIDS:
The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain
By the time his daughter and son were born in the 1990s, Peter Sis, the acclaimed children's author and illustrator, had defected from Czechoslovakia and become a U.S. citizen. His "American children," as Sis (pronounced Sees) calls them, knew that their father had come from elsewhere. A few years ago, they asked a question inspired by history lessons at school: "Are you a settler?"
Sis found it almost impossible to explain what communist Czechoslovakia had been like when he was young, so he did what he does best: "I thought, 'I have to draw it.'"
The result is Sis' most ambitious and personal book, The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain. It's a 46-page, oversized graphic memoir, told mainly through detailed drawings about an artistic boy who "didn't question what he was being told. Then he found out there were things he wasn't told." It's a story that involves The Beatles, the Beach Boys and Soviet tanks invading Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Sis, who lives in Irvington, may speak at the library this fall or winter.
MORE FOR PARENTS & KIDS:
Father Knows Less
Wendell Jamieson's book grew out of the kind of questions asked by a 4-year-old: "Why do ships have round windows?" "Is hummus like dinosaur poop?" And one prompted by a temper tantrum thrown by the boy's infant sister, "Why can't we just cook her?"
The boy's father, being a modern dad and a journalist, decided to write down the questions, no matter how strange, dark or ridiculous. Jamieson thought it would be fun someday to show his son, Dean, the questions he asked when he was full of questions. Then Jamieson had a better idea. He'd find answers — serious ones — to even the oddest questions. His book is titled Father Knows Less, or: "Can I Cook My Sister?" One Dad's Quest to Answer His Son's Most Baffling Questions
The book is part memoir about being a kid with questions and being a dad without answers. It's built around 124 questions from Dean and other kids. The answers come from scientists, ship captains, and other experts. Jamieson, who is the city editor of The New York Times, writes well and knows how to find answers.
And if you're wondering, ships have round windows because they're less likely to crack than square ones. Dinosaur poop probably wasn't like hummus. And as cooking your sister, Jamieson found an archaeologist who says that even among the more than 70 species of mammals that are cannibals, "it would not be your sibling you would kill and eat." — which is good to know. Jamieson may appear at the library this fall or winter.
MIDDLE-SCHOOL READERS:
The Aurora County All-Stars
At 12, House Jackson is the star of a sandlot baseball team whose bylaws state "NO GIRLS." His rival is Frances Schotz, 14, home from boarding school, where, as one of House's friends puts it, "she took too much French and drama and turned into Marie Antoinette." Baseball, Walt Whitman's poetry and the legacy of racism all play roles in Deborah Wiles' third novel set in Mississippi, The Aurora County All-Stars. It's an endearing mystery that deals with loyalty, community and friendship. It should pique the curiosity of young readers about this guy Whitman, who advised: "Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book."
FOR BUDDING STUDENT JOURNALISTS (AND OTHERS):
Adam Canfield Watch Your Back
Author Michael Winerip writes a lovely column about the joys, challenges and frustrations of being a parent every weekend in the Westchester section of The New York Times. He's also a former education reporter who knows his way around schools. He understands kids and the odd way that most educational bureaucrats talk and write. Adam Canfield Watch Your Back is the second in a series of novels staring an over-scheduled middle-school student newspaper editor. It's aimed at readers ages 8 to 12, but parents, teachers and school administrators would do well to read it as well. We're planning to invite Winerip to speak at the library this fall or winter.
CHILDREN:
Angela and the Baby Jesus
Frank McCourt first introduced his mother, Angela, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Angela's Ashes, the first of his three bestselling books. Now, he's written his first children's book, illustrated by Raul Colon, that tells the story of the day that McCourt's mother, at the age of six, took the naked baby jesus from the church crèche because she thought he looked cold without a blanket. We've invited McCourt to speak at the library. Stay tuned.
Frank McCourt first introduced his mother, Angela, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Angela's Ashes, the first of his three bestselling books. Now, he's written his first children's book, illustrated by Raul Colon, that tells the story of the day that McCourt's mother, at the age of six, took the naked baby jesus from the church crèche because she thought he looked cold without a blanket. We've invited McCourt to speak at the library. Stay tuned.