06.27.08
Book-a-month Challenge: June
Leave Myself Behind
by Bart Yates
When your job includes both ordering new books and weeding old ones, and you’re paying any attention at all, you learn something not everybody realizes: you can’t force your tastes on your patrons. Or use fiction selection to foist your political or social views on them. We had a long-ago manager who just refused to believe this, and felt you could change people by force of will.
Which leaves me, now, at a library with about 50% minority patrons, and maybe 40% religious patrons, weeding books about gay white men by the truckload.* And while the purchasing seems to have been indiscriminate (short story collections full of poorly written “erotica” abound, along with bubble-headed chick lit in drag) I’ve tried to sort out real literature from the crap.
Which is where Leave Myself Behind comes in.
06.17.08
Book-a-Month Challenge: May
The Serpent’s Tale
by Ariana Franklin
May’s theme was, of course, mothers. I decided to stretch the idea a bit: while the main character’s relationship with her child is an important feature in the book, it’s by no means the central element.
This one is a sequel to the author’s first novel, Mistress of the Art of Death. There have been a few small changes to the cast: Gyltha’s grandson Ulf is away at school, and Adelia has a little one of her own, named Allie. In the year and some since the close of the previous book, Adelia has set up practice with Mansur (times being what they were, they pretend he is the doctor and she the assistant) among the tiny villages in the far countryside. Adelia is happy staying far away from the people of wealth and power with whom she dealt in the previous book, not only for her own sake to avoid the suspicions people had of a learned woman, but for the safety of her child and former love: Allie’s father, Rowley Picot, also happens to be a bishop.
06.02.08
Book-a-Month Challenge: April
Miss Leavitt’s Stars: the Untold Story of the Woman who Discovered how to Measure the Universe
by George Johnson
Yes, I know, I’m grossly behind on these things. That’s because I keep picking books for the themes that I don’t end up actually liking. Thus, procrastination city.
This month’s theme was beauty, so I read about the most remote and lovely of worlds: the distant stars.
This particular book features an interesting paradox: as it’s non-fiction, the title gives you a pretty clear picture of the material covered, but in reality Henrietta Swan Leavitt isn’t the subject of the book. The introduction states that this book was originally meant to be a collective biography of astronomical discovery in the early 20th century, but that Leavitt’s story was too interesting to ignore. Read the rest of this entry »
