People’s Republic of China at 60

NPR will be turning to best-selling Chinese authors this week to gain some insight into the people’s perspectives on the People’s Republic during its controversial 60 years of rule.  Today’s story, the first of the three parts, focuses on Jian Rong’s, Wolf Totem which I happened to pick up not too long ago, fascinated by the subject of Beijing intellectuals electing to go live with the nomadic people of Inner Mongolia and learning from their cultural adoration for the wolf.  Listen to the story and join in the conversation, here.

In the Stacks

We’re constantly adding new fiction for adult readers in every genre, from Westerns and Science Fiction to Romances and Mysteries. Here are a few that caught my eye this week.

Pandemonium, by Daryl Gregory. Since the Fifties, a plague of demons has infested this alternate Earth, temporarily taking over humans to use for their own mostly inscrutable ends before abandoning their hosts, hours or days later, sometimes even longer, as in Del Pierce’s case. As a five-year old, he was infected by one of the many named demons, the Hellion, and spent weeks sedated in the hospital and months strapped into his bed at home when not carefully supervised. One day, the Hellion releases its grip and Del is back to being a kid again. Now an adult, Del is discovering that the Hellion may never really have left… Rich language and solid characters make this inventive novel a compelling and exciting read.

The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris, by Chris Ewan. By his own admission, Charlie Howard is a poor decision-maker. For a bestselling writer, which he is, that’s not necessarily bad, but for a professional thief, which he also is, it can be the kiss of death. While trying to unstick a plot point, he’s hired to break into an apartment by the owner so Bruno can see how it’s done. Bad decision… The very next day, Charlie is hired by another man to break into the same apartment to steal a painting – but the painting isn’t there to be stolen. When Charlie returns from the aborted job, he finds the apartment owner’s body (and it isn’t Bruno) in his apartment. He knows he’s never been in bigger trouble. To top things off, his agent, Victoria, has arrived to meet with him face to face, and what upsets her isn’t that Charlie is hiding out in a hotel while he tracks down a murderer (or at least keeps from being fingered), or that he’s getting nowhere with his latest novel, but that he looks nothing at all like his author photo. Fans of Lawrence Block and Janet Evanovich are likely to be sucked right into Charlie’s world.

The Dart League King, by Keith Lee Morris. Though unassuming in its premise, this story of the few hours before two dart players meet for the title of Dart League King turns into an often-dark meditation on small-town life. Russell Harmon is defending his title against former professional dart player-turned-gas-station-owner Brice Habersham, but his distractions at the game include his hair-triggered drug dealer (who may be ready to force Russ to pay up on his debt) and his former girlfriend (who arrives on the arm of Russ’s teammate Tristan). Brice has his own problems, beginning with the fact that he’s not really a gas station owner at all, but an undercover DEA agent. Tristan’s mind is still consumed with a years-old drowning, and Kelly is yearning for someone to rescue her from Garnet Lake’s small town claustrophobia, and by the end of the evening, lives have changed.

Death: a life, by George Pendle. Readers who thought Gaiman and Pratchett’s “Good Omens” showcased Pratchett’s humor at the expense of Gaiman’s disturbing darkness ought to give this a try. Written as an autobiography, this raucous and irreverent spoof is not for the faint of heart or stomach. Death, the child of an incestuous relationship between Satan and Sin, goes about his duties releasing the souls of deceased deer, radishes, and humans off into the eternal darkness. He tells all, revealing the names of the Four Horsemen’s horses, confessing his unhealthy addiction to Life (especially the Life embodied in one suicidal Sumerian woman), and outlining his time in rehab. Droll drawings sprinkled throughout are captioned amusingly: for instance, “a druidic barbicue”; and “dachshunds, the reason there are no fairies in the world”. This is a laugh-out-loud addition to the realm of humorous fantasy.

Memorial Day is this Monday, May 25th, and the Downtown and Douglas Libraries will be closed. The Mendenhall Valley Library will be open regular hours. For information about our upcoming programs, or to place a hold on any of our material, please visit us at www.juneau.org/library or call us at 586-5249.

Audio(book)phile?

Are you an Audiobook junky?  It’s okay, a library forum is a safe place to admit it.  In case you’re running out of library audiobooks be sure to check out the electronic offerings available through 2 downloadable audiobook services, Netlibrary and ListenAlaska.   Check out Audiobooker, a new blog supported by the American Library Association’s Booklist magazine.  Blogger, “Mary Burkey, a teacher, librarian, and audiobook addict, writes about listening, learning, and the joy of headsets.”  Free audiobook downloads, behind the scenes video clips of audiobook production and more.  

In The Stacks

In celebration of National Poetry Month, today’s column highlights works of poetry new to the Juneau Public Libraries.  And if you’ve already got a poem niggling at you, try using Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry, which contains over 50,000 poems available in full-text representing a wealth of supplemental information with over 1,100 commentaries, over 500 biographies, and definitions for 200 poetic terms, to find it.   Head over to JPL Podcasts to hear an audio sampling of some master poets at work.

Behind My Eyes by Li-Young Lee. Lee is the Keynote Speaker at this summer’s Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference in Homer.  Behind My Eyes, Lee’s fourth critically acclaimed collection, explores identity through family, memory, exile, loss, and questionable virtue.  Lee’s humor is at times subtle, at times sharp as his insight into the unforgettable magic of childhood: “Whenever I talk, my wife falls asleep./ So, now, when she can’t sleep, I talk./ It’s like magic”.  The reader falls into the boring husband’s engrossing conversation with his sleeping wife debating the positioning of lovers in the physical and romantic world; “It isn’t that lovers always speak together in a house by the sea/ or a room/ with shadows of leaves and branches/ on the walls and ceiling/…It’s that such spaces emerge/ out of the listening/ their speaking to each other engenders.”  His style is entirely his own, alternating between narrative quatrains and unrhymed couplets often in the form of lines of dialog or image speak reminiscent of Paz.  It washes over you, leaving you in that blissful moment between sleeping and waking, “What do the past lives of the color blue have to do/ with the fate of words and the future of wishing?”

Seven Notebooks: Poems, by Campbell McGrath. McGrath’s latest collection explores agriculture, civilization, language, luxury and the cosmos.  Ranging in form from haiku to panoramic, in-flight prose observations, McGrath’s verse is rich in texture, historical reflection and careful attention to the unnatural order of human existence invading nature’s myriad disorder.  Set in the agricultural remnants of south Florida, “vanishing order endangered as the legendary panther,” McGrath’s Florida is an Eden-like backdrop full of bloom and rot.   Images linger, in particular from “Time”, an ode to our futile efforts to elude time described as “the match strike / of consciousness enacting its doomed insurgency / against the dark mountain’.  Or the “Ode to a can of Schaefer beer”, which artfully extracts marketing text from the label of a discarded can, “it wears its heart on its sleeve / like a poem / laid out like a poem / with weak line endings and questionable / closure” and leaving on your tongue the distinct flavor of cheep beer, “Thin, rice-sweet, tasting of metal / and crisp water”.

One Secret Thing: Poems, by Sharon Olds. From intense portraits of war taken from unusual perspectives, to judgment and eventual forgiveness of family and their indoctrination, Olds’ latest collection rings out with lyrical precision and energy (light and dark).  Much of the work feels inspired by old photographs, almost an exercise in giving voice to the voiceless, those whose lives were skirted or entirely re-routed by war.   In “Free Shoes” evacuated children prepare to receive new shiny shoes while the old ones are disposed of, the shoes analogous to their new lives away from the war, “This life that has been given them like a task!  This life, this / black bright narrow unbroken-in shoe”.  If you value family, but also value speaking critically about family, you’ll enjoy this collection.  There are some very controversial poems worth checking out, in particular, “Last Words, Death Row, Circa 2030”.

Bikeman: An epic Poem, by Thomas F. Flynn. This collection inspired by 9/11 will leave you squirming, which, depending on your tastes, is either the mark of great poetry or difficult subject matter.  Flynn accurately captures the awkwardness of the subject, “I am witness to this and embarrassed./ I am an intruder on the most private moment/ of her life: her death”.   An award winning television writer/producer, Flynn makes his first foray into poetry in order to document the very personal, yet universal aftermath of the World Trade Towers’ collapse.  Through observations both passive and judgmental, the verse shines when turned upon the arc which the lives of those affected by great loss will travel, “He, a banker from India on a temporary work visa/ is praying for the wife and son/…His widow,/ without a visa, will be deported,/ leaving her New Jersey home for India,/ where she becomes an outcast/ with her fatherless American-born/ baseball-loving blue-jean wearing son”.  The introduction describes the narrator as one who “did not live through it” but “just did not die” alluding to the survivor’s guilt fueling the narrative. Plow through this one in one sitting to avoid 9/11 overload and you’ll walk away with a new perspective on loss and survival.

“Coraline” is coming back to Juneau this week – check the schedule at the Gold Town Nickelodeon for showtimes, and at our blog, for presentation and puppet workshop times and more.