To have and to ... whatever

Imagine our delight here at the Key West library when we saw that our inaugural One Island One Book program , featuring Ernest Hemingway's Key West novel To Have and Have Not, had made the pages of American Libraries, one of the premiere professional journals of libraryland! And it was the issue with library god Neil Gaiman on the cover, even. How cool is that! Until ... we turned to page 12 and saw the nice write-up that explained our book of choice was Ernest Hemingway's ... To Have and To Hold. Huh?

Having written for publication for many years I understand how this sort of mistake happens. Once in awhile your brain just takes a little timeout -- and next thing you know, the action of your misfired synapse is set in type. If you're lucky, you have a smart editor whose brain is working better than yours that day and she catches the goof. If not ... it's mortifying. One of my favorite things about blogging is that you can go back and fix these kinds of screw-ups as soon as you, or someone else, notices them.

Unfortunately for the good folks at the American Library Association, and for us, you can't do that with print. So there we are, for eternity, with Hemingway's To Have and To Hold.

By the way, there is a novel with that title in our collection -- we came across it the other day while moving the large print novels. It's by Fern Michaels, the prolific romance writer. It's probably a fine piece of entertainment -- but it's unlikely to be chosen as a One Book One Island title. (And not to be confused with To Have and To Hold by Jane Green, which it looks like we used to have in the collection but no longer do.)

Catching up

You know what's really cool about finding a series you like after it's started? You can gobble the books up ... none of this waiting around for a year or two for the author to produce the next installment (maybe that's why people like James Patterson and Stuart Woods so much -- you only have to wait around for a month or two!). But I digress. This week, I unfortunately caught up to C.J. Sansom with the fourth installment of his Matthew Shardlake series, Revelation. Fortunately I don't have to wait that long -- the fifth title, Heartstone, is due out this fall. This situation is especially frustrating because this series just keeps getting better, in my estimation. Maybe I'm just getting fonder of the characters or more familiar with the milieu but Sansom is doing a great job keeping up the intrigue and filling in the setting of London late in the reign of Henry VIII. This time, Shardlake is called in to help investigate a serial killer (a couple centuries before that term existed) -- mostly the debate between the characters is whether the killer is mad or possessed by the devil. Either way it's a scary chase involving Shardlake's friends, household and of course himself. I'm going to give this one -- the only in the series you can get from the Monroe County Library collection (we have it in print and audio) -- an A, or 4 stars out of 5. But I recommend starting from the beginning of the series, with Dissolution, the first in the series -- you can buy the earlier titles or do like I did, and order them from interlibrary loan.

A couple other quick links while I have your attention. Keys residents should check out our newly redesigned library website -- and a darn sight prettier it is, too! It also includes some book recommendations from staff throughout the Keys -- you look under "books and more" and then "staff favorites." Also I've done some revising to the links on this site -- new additions include Citizen Reader, a kickass book blog from a librarian who appears to read even more than I do and Flashlightworthy Books, a cool site of book lists. I find this especially handy for book recommendations in genres about which I know next to nothing, such as slipstream and steampunk.

Happy reading!

Book Bites doubleheader

If you've ever thought about re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterwork, The Great Gatsby -- or if for some reason you never had to read it multiple times in high school and college, like I did -- now is a very good time, at least if you're in Key West. The Great Gatsby is one of the twin foci of the May Book Bites Book Club at the Key West Library. And on Wednesday, May 5, at 5:30 p.m. we'll be showing the movie version starring Robert Redford (as Gatsby, natch) and Mia Farrow (as Daisy Buchanan). Typically, Book Bites discusses anything by or about an author but this time Circulation Librarian Kris Neihouse is trying something a little different and the book discussion, at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 12, will focus solely on Gatsby from Fitzgerald's work -- and on a much more recent novel, The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian. Why The Double Bind? Here's an excerpt from Jodi Picoult's guest review on Amazon:

"Fact and fiction become indistinguishable in The Double Bind: The story centers on Laurel Estabrook, a young social worker and survivor of a near-rape, who stumbles across photographs taken by a formerly homeless client and tries to understand how a man who'd taken snapshots of celebrities in the 50s and 60s might have wound up on the streets. However, an author's note tells us that Bohjalian conceived this book after being shown a batch of old photographs taken by a once-homeless man; and the actual photos of Bob "Soupy" Campbell are peppered throughout the text. In another neat twist, Bohjalian's resurrects details from The Great Gatsby, which become "real" in the context of his own novel--Laurel lives in West Egg; part of her hunt for her photographer's past involves meeting with the descendants of Daisy and Tom Buchanan."

Pretty cool, huh? Gatsby itself is a pretty slim volume and the Bohjalian title, while I haven't read it, strikes me as the kind of book that once you enter, you have a hard time leaving until you're through. There's still time to read one or both. Questions? Stop by the library or call Kris at 292-3595.

A series matter

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I suppose it shouldn't come as any surprise that as I've started to read more widely in genre fiction (historical mysteries, kid lit, etc.) in recent years, I've found myself delving into series far more than I used to. In the last week I've read two series installments: Sea of Monsters, the second in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series for kids and A Murderous Procession, the fourth and latest in Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death series. Both of them are available at the Key West Library. In both cases, I liked the books the best of the series so far (OK in Riordan's case that's only two) but I was pleasantly surprised because I enjoyed but wasn't wowed by The Lightning Thief, the first in that series. As is becoming usual, my respect for J.K. Rowling grows every time I read another magical/fantastical book meant for young readers. And I am realizing that a lot of the time I struggle with the first-person voice in kid lit. Suzanne Collins pulls it off in The Hunger Games -- but it really limits the perspective of the narration and means the writer has to really nail an authentic voice for a kid. Both tough conditions, but I think Riordan is improving at least based on reading two of the books. Sea of Monsters gets an AB.

Ariana Franklin's books are pretty popular and I'd like to think it's more than a case of CSI-meets-Lion in Winter. Our heroine, Adelia Aguilar, is a Sicilian physician who winds up in Henry II's England (both Henry and my old favorite Eleanor of Acquitaine make appearances in the series -- though I'm fond of them not from the scenery-chewing A Lion in Winter but from E.L. Konigsberg's superb kids' book A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver). Anyway, Aguilar is called into the king's service as an investigator to determine how people died -- the 12th century equivalent of a coroner, or Mistress of the Art of Death. In the latest installment, she's not supposed to be investigating murders but safeguarding the health of Henry and Eleanor's daughter, Joanna, on her way to Sicily to marry that island's king. Naturally, murders occur en route and lots of other adventures, too. I have just about no historical knowledge of the time period and imagine purists cringe at some of the events in the book, not to mention the dialogue but it would be hard to write (or read!) a novel in authentic 12th century speech supposing we knew what such a thing was. What matters to me is that Franklin tells a good story with some interesting subjects to think about along the way (the nature of love between independent adults, the role of the Church in medieval society). And she did a good job distracting me with a red herring for the villain, which is always nice. (No Scooby-Doo moment, either!). Best of the series yet and I hope she writes many more. A

Judging a book by its title

The other day I finished reading The Queen's Lover by Vanora Bennett -- which I mentioned finding serendipitously on the library shelves. I enjoyed Bennett's previous two works, Portrait of an Unknown Woman and Figures in Silk, quite a bit. This one the least of the three -- and I have to say I am irritated beyond reason at the decision to change the title from the UK version, Blood Royal, to The Queen's Lover. That's probably not Bennett's fault but paired with the extremely Philippa Gregory-esque cover art, it just smacks of bandwagon jumping and Bennett doesn't deserve that in any sense. I'm not slamming Gregory -- I've enjoyed some of her books and I'm all for anyone keeping Tudor Trash on the bestseller lists. But honestly. Blood Royal really captures the importance of this story -- that of the French Princess Catherine of Valois, who married Henry V and then married a nonroyal, Owain Tudor -- that match made them grandparents to Henry VII, founder of the dynasty. But royals didn't just marry nonroyals back then so and this was a pretty tumultuous time in European history -- Agincourt! Joan of Arc! Wars of the Roses! OK, rant over. I have to admit I kept going in this book mostly because I didn't really know how all the characters fit into my understanding of English history -- I knew the Tudors were upstarts of some kinds and I'm pretty good from Edward IV on, but the back story was new to me. So that definitely kept me engaged. The lifelong love story between Owain and Catherine, not so much. I could sympathize with an intelligent, compassionate young woman caught in a warring family and between warring countries. But I didn't care, on a gut level, what happened to these people, which is too bad. So I'm going to give it a B. I hope Bennett goes on to write more and maybe more about common people -- that was one of the attractions of Figures in Silk, was its merchant's-eye view of the goings on of royalty.