Category: Staff Picks

Landscaping with Fruit by Lee Reich

- Ann Leave a comment

landscaping-with-fruitThe next time you’re thinking about adding a tree or bush to your landscape, consider one that bears fruit. Most are just as beautiful as “ornamental” trees and they have the added bonus of rewarding you with fresh, delicious fruit!

Lee Reich, well known in gardening circles for his excellent The Pruning Book, now brings us Landscaping with Fruit.  He’s gone through all the varieties and types of fruiting plants available and compiled a list of the best – best for beauty, ease of maintenance and tasty fruit. Only plants that meet all three requirements are included. Among others you’ll find sweet cherry, raspberries, grapes and apples as well as exotic tropicals that can be grown in pots. You’ll find that alpine strawberries make excellent edging plants and blueberries make beautiful shrubs year round.

In addition to information on plant varieties, Reich has an excellent section on growing and maintaining, and lots of ideas on how to incorporate these plants in your yard (so it doesn’t look like you’ve plopped an orchard down in your front yard) What about an alle of pear trees along your front walk? Or a hedge of strawberries, Nanking cherry and red current? Or try surrounding a patio with huckleberry, blueberry and Juneberries. The possibilities are endless – and delicious!

Dilbert Meets the Recession

- Lynn Leave a comment

then-we-came-to-the-end1Seems like there is a novel for every situation. We can take some comfort from the fact that people have gone through layoffs and recession before.

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is the devastating tale of an ad agency, where, one by one, workers carry their box of belongings out of their office during the dot-com bust of the late ’90’s. Ferris captures exactly the love/hate relationship we have with our cubicles and our co-workers. He depicts how painful it is to lose the community, the gossip , the petty resentments, and the infantile behavior that make up our work lives.

Described  as “The Office meets Kafka,” (Nick Hornby) the characters are written with compassion and depth by Ferris,  a University of Iowa graduate.

Emma’s Table by Philip Galanes

- Ann 1 Comment

emmas-tableIn Emma’s Table by Philip Galanes, Emma Sutton – famous interior design and lifestyle guru – attends the prestigious FitzCoopers auction determined to purchase a unique antique table, no matter who stands in her way. Fresh from a stint in Federal Prison and feeling battered by the accompanying public scrutiny, Emma doesn’t realize she’s going to come away with much more than a table.

Still enjoying great success professionally, Emma’s personal life needs some work – her ex-husband has returned to try to work things out, her adult daughter is aimless and angry and Emma  goes through personal assistants at an alarming rate. Despite the public image of perfection, she has no idea where or how to make the needed changes.

Emma’s weekend-personal assistant Benjamin (one of the few that has hung on), struggles with his own issues – a social worker during the week, he is puzzled by the case of Grace, a troubled, overweight little girl and her mother, as well as demands from his girlfriend. And then there’s the Japanese diplomat whom Emma outmaneuvered for the table. Emma searches for a way to make things right, heal all the insults and wounds she’s inflicted and therefore somehow save herself.

These disparete characters slowly come together in a story that is both lighthearted and thoughtful, about second (and even third) chances, redemption and starting again. Because everyone deserves a second chance.

Pizza : Grill It, Bake It, Love It by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough

- Ann Leave a comment

pizza-grill-it-bake-it-love-itWho doesn’t love pizza? An Italian staple that has been embraced by America and made our own, we consume, on average, more than 46 slices of pizza a year. From deep-dish to exotic toppings, loaded with meat or vegetables only, the pizza can be adapted to any taste, any whim and still be delicious. Now Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough take it up another notch in Pizza : Grill It, Bake It, Love It when they show you just how easy – and scrumptious – homemade pizza can be.

The authors first cover the basics – including in-depth descriptions of different cheeses, recipes for eight crusts and three basic sauces – and then launch into ideas for putting together your masterpiece. Pizzas range from the classic Pepperoni to international Tandoori Chicken to modern Prosciutto and Arugula as well as ten variations of Deep Dish pizza. Weinstein and Scarbrough also provide inspiration for “appetizer” pizzas (including Artichoke, Olive and Feta) and “salad” pizzas (such as Chicken Ceasar Salad)

Our own Frugal Librarian will soon be posting his own tips for making this dinnertime favorite that is both economical and fun – watch this space!

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

- Ann Leave a comment

housekeeper-and-the-professorThis lovely jewel of a novel, set in Japan, explores the power of memory and how it shapes our lives, and how love and friendship can transcend hardship and loss.

The Professor is a brilliant mathematician, able to describe and demonstrate the most complex formulas into something simple and poetic and beautiful, but due to a traumatic head injury his short-term memory lasts only 80 minutes. The Professor spends his days in his study, working on difficult mathematics problems; everything before that fateful night in 1975 still clear and real to him, everything else more than 80 minutes old, new and confusing.

The Housekeeper, a struggling single mother, is assigned to care for him. Gradually they make a connection – the Professor pins multiple notes to his coat to help him cope with his handicap – and the Housekeeper’s young son often joins them. The Professor shares his love of numbers with them and joins the boy in his love of baseball.  Together the three form an unconventional family.

Thoughtful, poignant and bittersweet, this spare, elegant novel will stay with you long after you’ve finished.

Explore Darwin in Fiction

- Lynn 1 Comment

evolution-of-janeHave Darwin’s birthday celebrations piqued your interest in natural selection and evolution? One painless way to learn about a complex subject is to explore it through fiction.  A funny, easy-to-read example is The Evolution of Jane by Cathleen Schine. While on an ecological tour of the Galapagos Islands, Jane  begins to apply Darwin’s principles to her own relationships – in particular, the unexplained break with her childhood friend, who(coincidentally!) is leading the tour.

Barbara Kingsolver calls the book  a “beautifully descriptive travelogue of the Galapagos, loaded with mini-lectures on natural history, evolutinary theory and Darwiniana, wrapped around a rollicking family saga tinged with hints of sexual intrigue….My hat is off to any writer who can render such complex ideas comprehensibly in English…”

A Matter of Justice by Charles Todd

- Ann Leave a comment

matter-of-justiceThis is the 11th in the Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery series, but the first one I’ve read.  As a historical mystery, it makes for an interesting genre, but what I found even more intriguing was that the author, Charles Todd, is a pseudonym for a mother-son team who don’t even live in the same state!  Even in this high-tech world, I still marvel at that kind of skill, but for now, let’s focus on the story.

A Matter of Justice takes place in 1920’s England, and the main character, Rutledge, is an inspector for Scotland Yard.  He is called to the rural village of Somerset to investigate the brutal murder of a successful London financier, Harold Quarles.  There are no shortages of suspects, as many of the villagers openly admit to totally despising the man.  Even Quarles’ wife and the town’s police officer are under suspicion.

In what turns out to be a very effective technique, the reader is clued in to the real killer early on, and as the pages kept turning, I began to fear that Rutledge would arrest the wrong person or never literally bring the “matter to justice.”  Another useful ploy was the voice of Hamish in Rutledge’s head.  Hamish,  a soldier who died under Rutledge’s command in the trenches of WWI,  serves as a sort of guilty conscience for the inspector. This contributes greatly to making him a fully human character and not just some singular sleuth.  Though some will find this similar to an Agatha Christie mystery, I found it refreshingly superior.

The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

- IT Leave a comment

hour-i-first-believed2
Finally! I’ve been waiting 10 years for Wally Lamb to write anther book. He has been busy with his Women of York Prison writer’s workshop compiling collections of their work in two published books (Couldn’t Keep it to Myself and I’ll Fly Away). Similar in terms of pace to his previous novels, The Hour I First Believed is a journey to say the least. This would indeed be a very long blog if I tried to summarize the whole story so I will focus briefly on only one of his heavy themes.

Caelum Quirk is an English teacher and his wife Maureen a school nurse, both working at Columbine High School. Although this is fiction, Lamb does incorporate the real people and events from the massacre in April of 1999 into his story. Maureen is hidden in a cabinet in the school library and listens as students are systematically shot and killed by two fellow classmates. Lamb then sheds huge light into the world of PTSD. The damage that Maureen is left with is severe, complicated and the catalyst to much more trauma.

Once again Wally Lamb writes an amazing story. If you’ve read either of his other two books (She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True) I would love to know what you think of them in comparison to this, his new one.

Random Acts of Heroic Love by Danny Scheinmann

- Ann Leave a comment

random-acts-of-heroic-loveTold in two parallel stories set in different times, Random Acts of Heroic Love is about the power of love, of how it can devastate but also uplift and empower us do what might seem impossible.

In one story, Leo and his girlfriend Eleni are traveling through South America when a horrific bus  accident takes Eleni’s life.  Nearly crushed by guilt and grief, Leo tries to make sense of his loss by seeking answers through science, but the weight of being left behind is almost too much.

The second story takes place in Poland where shortly after  Moritz and Lotte declare their love, Moritz is swept into the horrors of the First World War. Captured by the Russians and sent to prison camp in Siberia, he is literally thousands of miles from home. After escaping from the camp, Moritz undertakes the arduous journey back to his beloved.

At first the stories are so disconnected that you may wonder what the author is up to, but about two-thirds of the way through things begin to come together, rewarding the reader with a poignant examination of love and redemption across time and distance.

Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch

- Ann 1 Comment

girls-in-trucks2“Sweet coming-of-age saga meets Sex-in-the-City.“

This single phrase describes Crouch’s debut novel Girls in Trucks, in a nutshell.  What starts out as a pleasant story about a young Southern debutante, full of all the appropriate adolescent angst, suddenly and surprisingly turns into a slightly tragic sitcom version of the once popular TV show.  I actually liked the first part better, though the novel is really a collection of stories pieced together in the appearance of a novel.  Still, this will prove to be hugely popular, especially with the twenty-something crowd,   as the author effectively captures not only the charming Charleston, South Carolina dialogue and decorum, but also replays the New York City scenes with a saucy wit that leaves the reader both in laughter and in tears.  Warning:  it doesn’t end at all the way you would expect it to —  you’ll just have to read the book to find out for yourself!