Author: Lynn

Banned Book Focus: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

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To celebrate Banned Books Week 2024, one of our staff, Lynn, has written about a banned book that has stuck with her through the years.

I read Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret. when I was in 6th or 7th grade.  When I read it the first time, I just assumed that all authors were so honest and frank. I’m afraid that I didn’t appreciate the groundbreaking nature and cultural importance of the work. I just enjoyed the directness of Margaret and the diary-like style of the book. It was maybe the first time I thought that I could be a writer, too. Just be honest and put down your thoughts and other people may find them interesting. I realized, subconsciously, that you don’t necessarily need a lot of action or plot or heroics to make a book appealing.

When the movie came out last year, I re-read my copy and was surprised at how well it held up. I was amazed at how well Blume was able to tap into the emotions and insecurities of a young girl as she navigates the everchanging alliances of her friend group.

As well as serving as an example of a literary style, the book also served to make me feel seen. I felt that if Margaret was important enough to be the subject of a book that maybe I was, too.

Want to know more about Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret? Check out the following description from the publisher.

Margaret Simon, almost twelve, likes long hair, tuna fish, the smell of rain, and things that are pink. She’s just moved from New York City to Farbook, New Jersey, and is anxious to fit in with her new friends—Nancy, Gretchen, and Janie. When they form a secret club to talk about private subjects like boys, bras, and getting their first periods, Margaret is happy to belong.

But none of them can believe Margaret doesn’t have religion, and that she isn’t going to the Y or the Jewish Community Center. What they don’t know is Margaret has her own very special relationship with God. She can talk to God about everything—family, friends, even Moose Freed, her secret crush.

Margaret is funny and real. As you read her story, you’ll know why this book has been the favorite of millions of readers. It’s as if Margaret is talking right to you, sharing her secrets with a friend. – Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Old Farmer’s Almanac

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Every fall since 1792, another edition of The Old Farmer’s Almanac comes out and every year it’s a bestseller.

According to the Washington Post, “The antique cover, still sporting mugs of Benjamin Franklin and Robert B. Thomas, reeks of great-great-grandma’s potpourri, and yet the 2024 edition of “The Old Farmer’s Almanac” is flying off the shelves like hotcakes, for which there’s a great recipe on page 65.”

According to publisher Sherin Pierce, “This year ‘The Almanac’ just shot right out of the gate.” Sales on Amazon, in particular, have never been so strong, and copies are also selling briskly at bookstore chains and indie bookstores. (Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)

While every other publisher in the world is in a sweaty panic to reinvent itself and chase after those unicorns known as younger readers, “The Almanac” just clomps along selling about 2.5 million copies a year… She attributes the magazine’s continued popularity to two very current trends: weather anomalies and home gardening.

“People are more interested in the environment,” she says. “They want to be self-sustainable. They want to have a guide of how to do something yourself, right? …

And in a world of constant change and rising strife, it’s undeniably comforting to find a journal that’s “Useful, with a Pleasant Degree of Humor.”

Pierce says, “Trends come and go, fashions come and go, but ‘The Almanac’ remains.” ‘

There’s also an Old Farmer’s Almanac for Kids, an Old Farmer’s Almanac Everyday Cookbook, an Old Farmer’s Almanac Gardener’s Companion and the Best of the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

John Irving Returns to Iowa

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John Irving will be speaking with Lan Samantha Chang, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop director, on October 13th at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City. A graduate of the IWW himself, Irving’s most recent book is The Last Chairlift.

Graduating from the IWW in 1967, Irving was mentored by one of the workshop’s most celebrated authors, Kurt Vonnegut. Like Vonnegut, Irving’s books often veer from violence to comedy, in an unexpected and unnerving way.

Irving’s connections to Iowa, wrestling and writing are evident in his novels – Iowa settings and characters, (and wrestlers) pop up frequently.

When The World According to Garp was published in 1978, Irving’s literary stardom was assured. Garp was a long, strange saga – peopled with eccentric characters and shocking twists and turns. It was revolutionary in the way farce, tragedy and taboo subjects were woven together. In recent years, Irving has spoken about how many of the subjects he addressed in the seventies are relevant again.

New, and, True Crime Books – Art Thieves and Con Artists Edition

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Looking for new true crime books? Our true crime selector, Lynn, has two brand new true crime books about art thieves and con artists! Read more about them below and share your favorites art thief/con artist true crime book in the comments.

Con/Artist: The Life and Crimes of the World’s Greatest Art Forger by Tony Tetro

Art forger Tetro is known for his virtually perfect copies of works by such artists as Rembrandt, Dali, and Rockwell. Charged in the late 1980s with more than 40 counts of forgery, he eventually pleaded no contest to a drastically reduced number of charges. Tetro, born in 1950, is a self-taught artist, who, in his early years, copied famous paintings (often from library books) and put them up for sale at art fairs. But nobody wanted them, and he figured he knew why: he signed them with his own name. Inspiration struck when he read Fake!, Clifford Irving’s 1969 book about the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory. As Tetro tells us, he thought, “I could do this.” And he did—better, perhaps, than anyone before or since. His memoir, cowritten with investigative journalist Giampiero Ambrosi, is absolutely fascinating, full of the kind of evocative writing and precise detail that brings an autobiography to life. He might have been doing something illegal, but it’s awfully hard not to like Tony Tetro. Like reformed con artist Frank W. Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can), he seems straightforward, open about his crimes, and just a bit proud of his success as a crook. A welcome addition to any true-crime shelf.  From Booklist Online

Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel

Finkel (The Stranger in the Woods, 2017) presents a roller-coaster read of hubris and romance, contradiction and despair. French art thief Stéphane Breitwieser’s story is full of epic highs that seem never-ending and crucial questions regarding his mental state and motivation. He is a man who “exempt[ed] himself from the rules of society.” Over nearly eight years, Breitwieser stole a work of art once every dozen or so days, amassing over 300 objects, including engravings, weapons, tapestries, and paintings. Acting on instinct, often spontaneously, improvising, and thrilled by the challenge, Breitwieser seems to have reveled in the exhilaration aroused by taunting the authorities. But he also comes across as lonesome, guided by passion and aesthetics, and obsessed with acquisition; he kept all that he stole. Is he criminally insane? Immature and spoiled? Certainly his unquenchable thirst for stealing art was indulged by the people who loved him and whom he loved, including his mother, and his crimes ultimately destroyed their lives. Finkel examines the circumstances that fed Breitwieser’s obsession and led to his downfall. From Booklist Online

 

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop

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Also known as the Program in Creative Writing, the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop began in 1936 and immediately counted Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren and Dylan Thomas among its students.

Now, 87 years later, the IWW is still cultivating writers of literary and popular works.  Some of their novels reference life in a town very like Iowa City.  Some are set in places that couldn’t be more different.  Here is a selection of books published in 2023:

The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor

The Late Americans reads more like his interconnected story collection Filthy Animals (2021) than his debut, Real Life (2020), though both are campus tales centered on graduate students. In Iowa City, there are dancers who frequent the poet bar, poets dismissed early from seminar, art students whose day jobs label them outsiders, and those who will trade art for the security of med school or banking. Among the large cast, students and townies who come and go, sometimes in deep focus and other times in side roles, is Ivan, who dabbles in making porn, and his boyfriend, Goran, who doesn’t know how to feel about it. There’s poet Seamus, dancer Noah, and landlord Bert, whose lit-fuse presence bookends the novel as he becomes a menacing, sort-of lover to them both. Taylor writes feelings and physical interactions with a kind of sixth sense, creating scenes readers will visualize with ease. At the beginning and ending of things and in confronting gradations of sex, power, and class, ambivalence pervades. Lovers of character studies and fine writing will enjoy getting lost in this.  From Booklist Online

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

When yet another shmopey guy—this time, her office mate at the Saturday Night Live–style show where she works—starts dating an uber-hot and talented female celebrity, comedy writer Sally channels her rage/certainty “that a gorgeous male celebrity would never fall in love with an ordinary, dorky, unkempt woman” into a sketch. The host and musical guest for this week’s episode of The Night Owls is the “outrageously handsome” superstar Noah Brewster, who seeks Sally’s help punching up his own sketch—she’s known around the studio as the queen of comedic structure. Sure that there could be nothing between them, due to the aforementioned law-turned-sketch, intimacy-phobic (and perhaps ordinary, dorky, and unkempt) Sally is her best, brilliant, warm self with Noah during the weeklong lead-up to the show, a fun and frenetic frame for the book’s first half that’s full of insider-feeling, behind-the-scenes excitement. You can see where this might be going, and yet how much you’ll enjoy getting there. Dialogue zips and zings as hearts plummet and soar through Sally and Noah’s meeting, misunderstanding, and years-later rapprochement as COVID-19 dawns. Sittenfeld’s (Rodham, 2020) meta-romance is an utterly perfect version of itself, a self-aware and pandemic-informed love story that’s no less romantic for being either.  From Booklist Online

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton The epigraph of Booker Prize–winner Catton’s fine new novel is a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which is appropriate given that the spirit of the Bard is mightily present. Mira Bunting is a young Kiwi horticulturalist and founder of a New Zealander activist collective called Birnam Wood. Bunting has a habit of assuming false identities to look at listings of land she cannot afford to buy and plants crops without permission on overlooked patches of land. In essence, Birnam Wood is a guerrilla gardening group, a combination of environmental anarchists and direct-action protesters. “Birnam Wood was . . . a pop-up, the brainchild of ‘creatives’; it was organic, it was local; it was a bit like Uber; it was a bit like Airbnb,” writes Catton. Bunting herself turns trespassing into a type of performance art. But when she inadvertently meets an American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, her world and the future of the collective change in ways she could not imagine. Catton’s filmic novel features vivid characters, not all of them likable, and sharp, sizzling dialogue. Themes in the intricate plot include identity politics, national identity, and exploitation by the -super-rich. Birnam Wood is tightly wound and psychologically thrilling, and Catton’s fans and readers new to her powers will savor it to the end.   From Booklist Online

The Thing in the Snow by Sean Adams

When confronted with a blank space, the mind tends to wander. Adams’ second novel, following The Heap (2020), takes place in such an environment. Hart is transported via helicopter to a research facility known as the Northern Institute, where it’s bitterly cold and snow-covered. He’s tasked with supervising two other employees, Gibbs and Cline, as they keep the recently vacated facility primed for an eventual but vaguely pending return. His instructions are helicoptered in each week, and feedback is curt to the point of mechanical. What, then, to do if a thing is spotted on the barren landscape outside the facility, where it is forbidden and dangerous to venture? The banter among the three about their monotonous tasks and their stress about the thing in the snow veers into the absurd. Adams’ quirky look at a confined and isolated workspace also offers an almost Stoppard-like look into character development while making a rather bleak but humorous statement about contemporary working life. Though the world Adams created is spare, the reading mind fills every corner with all that is dreamed and feared. From Booklist Online

Playhouse by Richard Bausch

Novels about contemporary stagings of classic plays, such as Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016), Meg Wolitzer’s The Uncoupling (2011), and Adam Langer’s Cyclorama (2022), contrast epic social changes with timeless aspects of the human condition. Fiction virtuoso Bausch’s psychologically lush and situationally entangled tale is catalyzed by the building of a glitzy Globe Theater in Memphis and its ambitious, inevitably stormy opening production of King Lear. This endeavor forges highly problematic relationships, bringing back together the former husband of one of the two philanthropists funding the venture—his ex-wife and her wife—and a former TV anchor struggling with alcoholism and disgrace over an allegedly inappropriate involvement with his underage niece-by-marriage, who is also appearing onstage. Add a visiting artistic director with attitude, bad ideas, and his own woes; the imperiled marriage of the set designer and the general manager; and a leading actor who has just taken her dementia-afflicted father out of an assisted living facility against her family’s wishes. Profound turmoil ensues, driven by conscience, longing, gossip, guilt, anguish, rage, and sexual assaults, all taking place in a vibrantly depicted city assailed by nature’s fury. With Shakespearean moments of confusion, regret, and dissemblance, sharp-witted banter and all-out showdowns, Bausch’s enthralling, tempestuous, empathic drama illuminates with lightning strikes paradoxes of family, loyalty, and love.  From Booklist Online

New, and, True Crime

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It’s summer time and there’s an explosion of new crime books. Check out these new titles:

Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History’s Most Astonishing Murder Ring by Patti McCracken

They called her Auntie Suzy: a pleasant, friendly woman who acted as a midwife in a village in Hungary a century ago. Most readers, even devoted fans of true crime, have probably never heard of her. And yet she was the leader of a ring of women who committed dozens, maybe hundreds, of murders over a period of perhaps 15 years. This is journalist McCracken’s first book, and it is simply excellent. The storytelling is dramatic and compassionate; unlike works of crime nonfiction that relate facts at a journalistic remove, this book feels like it was written by someone who cares deeply about the victims of the crimes. There are a lot of mysteries surrounding this story: for example, there are conflicting accounts of how the “murder ring” was uncovered, and the total number of victims remains uncertain. Historical accounts conflict with one another. As much as it is possible to do so a century later, McCracken separates the wheat from the chaff and arrives at a representation of events that seems to tell the real story of the crimes—both who committed them, how they did it (distilling arsenic from flypaper), and how Auntie Suzy and her gang were finally apprehended.   From Booklist Online

Tangled Vines: Power, Privilege, and the Murdaugh Family Murders by John Glatt

The horrific double homicide may have thrown the South Carolina low country into an unflattering national spotlight, but the murders of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh are but two in a series of tragedies. At the center is Maggie’s husband and Paul’s father, Alex, a former lawyer descended from a long line of South Carolina prosecutors. Investigative journalist and veteran true-crime author Glatt (The Doomsday Mother, 2022) tells the story, from the first Murdaugh solicitors to hold office through Alex’s 2023 trial, including the several deaths in Alex’s orbit: Stephen Smith, his son Buster’s classmate, who was found dead under suspicious circumstances in 2015; longtime housekeeper Gloria Satterfield, who died after allegedly tripping and falling on the Murdaugh’s property in 2018; Mallory Beach, Paul’s 19-year-old friend, who was killed in a 2019 boating accident while Paul was driving drunk. And of course, the 2021 shooting deaths of Maggie and Paul on the family hunting property. Adding to the horror, Alex all the while was stealing millions from his clients’ settlements, including from the sons of his deceased housekeeper. With the flurry of recent coverage, including Netflix and Dateline documentaries, readers will be swept up in this account of the circumstances that enabled such tragedies.  From Booklist Online

Devil’s Coin: My Battle to Take Down the Notorious Onecoin CryptoQueen  by  Jennifer McAdam

McAdam, with journalist coauthor Thompson, tells the incredible journey of how she, a Scottish grandmother and the daughter of a coal miner, went from cryptocurrency fraud victim to a champion for herself and the millions of others who were deceived by OneCoin, losing their savings for a total of $27 billion worldwide. Her memoir is both a cautionary tale and a story of endurance in the pursuit of justice. Readers will come to understand McAdam’s health conditions as well as her fascination with OneCoin’s founder, Ruja Plamenova Ignatova, who would later be convicted for fraud. McAdam relates how she worked with law enforcement to uncover the scandal, weathered death threats, and continued to tell her own story and push for awareness in the media. Readers interested in true-crime tales of deception and scams, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology will find this book fascinating as it unfolds McAdam’s point of view on the personal and worldwide impact of the OneCoin scandal. From Booklist Online

What the Dead Know: Learning about Life as a New York City Death Investigator by Barbara Butcher

Butcher’s life is right out of a novel, and a best-seller at that. She was one of the first women to be hired as a medicolegal investigator in New York City, spending over two decades in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. She battled alcoholism and depression before and during her career as well as the fraught interpersonal dynamics that come from being a gay woman in an overwhelmingly male profession and still managed to rise in the ranks and become one of the most trusted voices in her field. There’s even her mystery-series, protagonist-ready name. And, after reading What the Dead Know, readers will wish that Butcher would turn to mystery writing. The book is part memoir, part crime—or more specifically death—procedural. She shares specific cases from her long career, chronicling the range of death scenes she encountered, from the many suicides to front-page-ready double murders. The chapters that follow the complicated nature of her job following the 9/11 attacks are especially harrowing and emotionally resonant. Butcher’s relaxed writing style allows her to show off her engaging personality, which often lends moments of humor despite the heavy topic, making this a recommended addition to any public-library collection.  From Booklist Online

The Soulmate by Sally Hepworth

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Soulmate by Sally Hepworth (is this a trend?) is made up of very short chapters. Another trend that Hepworth follows is the jump from the present time to the recent past in alternate chapters.  Both of these techniques are actually suited to this particular story: a story of suspense and literal cliff hangers.

Set near Melbourne, Australia, Pippa marries golden boy Gabe, and, while he is good looking, charming and a great father, their married life is full of drama. Because of Gabe’s work and personal issues, they relocate to a house on a cliff.  It’s beautiful, but also dangerous.

Hepworth is adept at sketching in the setting (a small seaside town full of young families) and the extended family, friends and co-workers of the couple.  All this, though, seems like a structure that is built to examine the marriage of Gabe and Pippa – why they stay together and the repeated blows that threaten the nuclear family.

I enjoyed it on both levels. It was a quick, propulsive read, but the examination of the interior lives of all involved, in particular Pippa, was meaty enough that it was worth my time. I felt like the ending was especially satisfying; it felt inevitable, yet also surprising.

Once Upon a Tome

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Once Upon a Tome  by Oliver Darkshire is actually a pretty fun read, considering its arcane subject matter. The author answers an ad for Sotheran’s – an antiquarian bookseller in London, little knowing that he’d be drawn into a strange and eccentric society. Slyly witty and self-deprecating, he makes every element of book collecting entertaining. In particular, the account of his accidental entry into the world of rare books is gently absurdist. This could be happily enjoyed on the level of comic workplace narrative. Even the introduction, written by the bookshop’s owner, is delightful in a very British manner.

He goes into some detail to explain the duties of the staff. As a librarian, it’s sometimes confusing to read how this profession uses a term like “cataloging.”  In the bookselling trade, cataloging means describing an item with a list of generally agreed upon vocabulary words. But how those terms are used is very subjective. For example, the degree of “foxing” or discoloration can be described such that it seems like a positive feature.  (When librarians catalog, they use a set of rules that are mathematical in their precision).

Darkshire’s descriptions of how he’s taught to tempt patrons into becoming first-time buyers and onwards to obsessed collectors is a treatise in salesmanship and human psychology.  It finally occurred to me that I was enjoying it so much because the writing voice was so similar to Bill Bryson – one of my favorite American-British writers.

 

The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan

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  The Queen of Dirt Island  by Irish author Donal Ryan is a short novel with even shorter two-page chapters.  The brief chapters allow for quick mood changes – bleakness and sad events are followed by the very dark humor of Nana and her daughter-in-law.

The novel follows several generations of women in a housing estate in rural County Tipperary in the 1990s. Seen through the eyes of Saoirse, we get to know Mary (Nana), Eileen (Saoirse’s mother) and Pearl (Saoirse’s daughter).  They are the focus though there are other richly drawn characters, such as Paudie, Saoirse’s uncle who is in prison for his IRA activities.

The vocabulary and idioms are so very authentically Irish that googling is a must (boreen, busht, and cop on). Eileen and Mary, in particular have a very clear-eyed view of the Catholic church – abiding by its traditions but also uncowed by the local clergy. The irreverence of these two women is a very major part of the charm of this book. They squabble with large amounts of profanity but are devoted to each other.

The title refers to a childhood idyll, an island that was part of the farm where Mary grew up and she ultimately inherits it even though her family has disowned her. The untraditional group of women are the objects of gossip but Eileen is fierce and will physically fight anyone who disrespects the little family. The women rely on each other to survive after the men die, are absent, or who have used their power to withhold property and inheritance.

The Plague Year

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Lawrence Wright’s book about the coronavirus disease, The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid, serves as a summary of recent events (already receding into hazy memory) and also a cogent explanation of how the virus works and why it erupted the way it did.

Wright had written a novel about a plague, The End of October, so was already was familiar with the subject of pandemics. In fact, the timing of his novel’s publishing date was spring 2020 – just as lockdowns were in full gear.

One of the most fascinating sections is about Bellevue Hospital – Ground Zero during the spring of 2020. This illustrates the toll the deaths of Covid patients took on medical professionals and how their personal lives were affected.

Other chapters are about Broadway, and the actors and writers whose lives were upended, and about the origins of Covid – detailing the various theories about where the virus came from in the first place. Wright is a true journalist; interviewing experts and allowing readers to decide for themselves whether the pandemic originated in a lab leak or a wet market or something else.

Perhaps the most thrilling chapter is “Spike,” the story of the development of a vaccine. The way scientists raced to develop a vaccine is truly thrilling. Barney Graham was a scientist at the NIH, and the deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center. He is credited as the “chief architect of the first Covid vaccines to be authorized for emergency use.” To appreciate the scale of what these scientists accomplished, Wright summarizes the history of immunology, and how scientists’ experience with SARS accelerated the process of developing Covid vaccines. It’s hard to believe that on March 16th, 2020 the first person was inoculated.

Wright is such a good storyteller, that, even though we know the outcome, there is still an element of surprise in his telling.