Little old lady got mutilated late last night

Werewolves, zombies, berserker warriors - these are a few of my favorite things. According to a new nonfiction book, tales of werewolves, zombies, and berserkergangers all owe their persistence to humanity’s age-old terror of rabies.

Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus describes the disease - how it affects the animals and people who are so unfortunate as to become infected.  Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy show that rabies has always been, throughout civilization, a terrifying public health risk - and in much of the world it still is. It infects many mammals, from donkeys to squirrels to dogs, bats, and people, and kills nearly 100 percent of those who exhibit symptoms.

Famously, in killing its victims it also transforms them into something else - the shy fox into an aggressive attacker; the trusted pet into a foaming killer; the civilized man into a barking, convulsing half-beast.

Robert Carlyle in 28 Weeks Later.

It is the horror of this that has spurred centuries of folklore: infected people, bloody-jawed and mad-eyed, struggling against an inexorable transformation that will cause them to attack and kill those they love. Zombies. Werewolves. Interestingly, while rabies is now vanishingly uncommon in the United States, tales of killers who spread madness with a bite are more popular than ever before.

The authors spend a chapter on the dramatic labors of Louis Pasteur, a scientist who had (among other things) previously developed a vaccine for anthrax. That’s a bacterial disease, a microbe that Pasteur could see though his microscope. In attempting to develop a vaccine for rabies, he was unknowingly battling an organism he did not understand - a virus, too small to be visible. Attempting to isolate the rabies microbe, he accidentally discovered Streptococcus pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia - a worthy accomplishment, but a confusing distraction in Pasteur’s attempt to cure rabies. That he did succeed in creating a vaccine for a disease he didn’t understand and couldn’t see is an impressive feat of scientific genius.

In all, Rabid is an interesting book for anyone who enjoys the history of medicine, or anyone who likes stories of inexorable blood-maddened rage-beasts. If you (like me) fit in that Venn diagram, check out Rabid.

Wild and crazy juggler comes to Literacy Park!

The amazing jugglemaniac Rhys Thomas performs in Literacy Park this Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. All children and families are invited to attend this great show.

Rhys Thomas is an amazing entertainer and perfect for our summer reading programs. He makes us laugh with his comedy and timing, he amazes us with his awesome juggling and he teaches us through his passion for learning and promotion of reading. Rhys has a large following in Newport so folks need to get to their library early to get a good seat.

The Jugglemania website has more information about Thomas and his shows.  For more information about his performance or other summer reading presentations, just ask me.

Best teen novel?

I read a lot of fiction written for the young adult market, even though I am neither a young adult nor the parent of one. Why not? Some of the most fresh and creative novels I’ve read lately have been YA books.

That’s why I’m keen on the new poll that NPR Books is running right now. What is the best-ever teen novel? They polled readers on their favorites, narrowed it down to 100 choices, and are putting that slate of 100 to the vote.

You can vote for ten, which is good, because narrowing it down to fewer than that would be very hard. I love some of the books on there:

• Cory Doctorow’s brilliantly subversive Little Brother, about kids who find ways to assert their freedom in the tyrannical aftermath of a terrorist attack. 
• The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart, about a smart girl who longs to prove to her boyfriend’s smart friends that she’s worthy of joining their boys-only secret society. She succeeds - sort of, with unintended consequences. 
•  Feed by M.T. Anderson, a genuinely frightening book about a dystopian society where everyone has entertainment and advertising constantly streamed into their brains. 
•  I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier, another truly scary book - I’m not even going to tell you what it’s about, because I don’t want to spoil the surprise. If you haven’t read it, read it. 
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by the great Douglas Adams.  I literally fell off my bed laughing the first time I read it. 
• Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, one of the many controversial books on the list, a story about the trauma a girl suffers at the hands of a high school classmate, and how she copes.  
•  The Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld, about a future society in which all teenagers get plastic surgery that makes them beautiful, but also compliant and obedient, is science fiction at its most exhilarating. 

And lots more! Best of all, the list is packed with fascinating-looking stuff that I haven’t read. NPR's listeners thought the books on this list were the best of the best, so I’ve taken notes for my to-read list.

 If you enjoy YA fiction, click here to see the list and vote. The results will be announced in a few weeks.

The Unreal (and ultimately, tragic) Life of Sergey Nabokov

It wasn’t until the third edition of his acclaimed autobiography, Speak, Memory, that novelist Vladimir Nabokov bothered to mention his younger brother, Sergey.  And even that mention was grudging. "For various reasons” he wrote, “I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother.”

Where Vladimir was good looking, charming and talented almost from birth, Sergey was shy, flamboyantly gay with a terrible stutter. After the Russian Revolution took away the family title and wealth, Vladimir emigrated to America, where he taught at university and wrote such masterpieces as Pale Fire and Lolita.

Sergey chose a different path. He moved to Paris in the 1920’s and through his relationship with artist Jean Cocteau, travelled in circles that included Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky. In Paris, Sergey fell in love with an Austrian aristocrat and the two of them settled down to what they both hoped would be a quiet life in the family Schloss.

Then all hell broke loose with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.

American novelist Paul Russell captures the brave, if naïve, Sergey’s life in a fictionalized autobiography, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov. Relying on the barest of literary asides, oblique mentions in scholarly articles and coded references in other biographies, Russell pieces together the younger Nabokov’s mostly unrecorded, and certainly unheralded, life. With almost Nabokovian (Vladimir, that is) fluency and style, Russell describes Nabokov’s early life as the son of a wealthy Russian aristocrat, through his university days at Cambridge, the heady pre-war life of a social gadfly in Paris, up to the final chilling knock by the Gestapo upon his Berlin apartment door. Shortly thereafter, Nabokov would perish in a concentration camp, a lavender triangle on his striped prison pajamas.

Even though it’s only July, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov just might be my favorite book of 2012. And you can reserve it here.

Book Bingo is Back!

Book Bingo is something we played at the library's summer reading programs for many years, but by 2008 we had so many children attending that we could no longer fit inside the library’s McEntee meeting room. When Newport's Rotary Club built Literacy Park, we had room for all the children but I couldn’t figure out how to play bingo in the outdoor amphitheater. Fortunately, I don’t work alone and my esteemed colleague, Jan Eastman, figured out how to make it work. So, finally, we are back in the Book Bingo business!

Book Bingo is played using the covers of children’s books instead of numbers in the columns headed R E A D S. The books were selected to go with our summer theme, "Dream Big, READ!".  When a child has a bingo, they get to select a book from among the many that have been donated to the library throughout the year.

Join us at 1:00 p.m. this Wednesday in Literacy Park for this year's edition of Book Bingo.

Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton

We’ve all heard stories of people leaving their bodies during near-death experiences, but the departure is usually brief, consisting of a ceiling-level view of one’s own surgery. In Afterwards, Rosamund Lupton takes this concept and runs with it, imagining the aftermath of a terrible fire at an elementary school in which a teenager and her mother receive life-threatening injuries.

Grace awakens in the hospital and sees her body lying on the bed, head swathed in bandages, life support machines beeping away. She can’t affect the world around her, only observe it, and she soon finds her daughter Jenny in the same condition. The two of them become watchers: observing their family’s grief and refusal to give up hope, observing the efforts of the police to discover who or what really caused the fire. Their dialogue is often light, in counterpoint to the emotionally fraught situation and the violent memories aroused by reconstructing the fire. The movement of the book is not only toward the solution of the mystery of the fire, but toward the resolution of the two lives in this temporary purgatory.

Tearjerker factor: extremely high. The family has a little boy, and his grief and confusion are hard to bear. Frankly, I don’t usually enjoy reading family dramas for just that reason. I picked this one up for the suspense, and the family drama turned out to be not a secondary plot but an equally strong thread. I’m not sure I would read it again, because it’s so heart-wrenching, but it sure made for a crazy, stay-up-til-2 a.m. page-turner of a novel. And Afterwards is extremely well-written, just the right telling details revealing so much about the characters and the families involved. British author Lupton also wrote the award-winning mystery Sister.

Frances, starting now

At the beginning of Alys, Always by Harriet Lane, Frances Thorpe shares an odd, tense moment of intimacy with a stranger. There has been a car accident, and Frances speaks to a woman trapped inside an overturned vehicle. The woman, Alys Kyte, dies. When Frances meets with Alys’s husband and children, she tells them that Alys’s last words were “Tell them I love them.”

It’s a lie. Alys never said anything like that. So why does Frances claim she did? Is it an impulsive attempt to make them feel better? Or does Frances have another motive, one that’s less kind?

 Alys, Always is a British novel of manners that at first seems to be about a nice young woman meeting a lovely family under unusual circumstances.  Soon you notice, though, that it absolutely reeks of class jealousy, covetousness, and manipulation.

Frances is a lowly copyeditor at a beleaguered literary magazine, with embarrassing parents and a gray London flat, who longs for a more beautiful life - the kind that money can buy. At Alys’s funeral, Frances checks out the Kyte house and notices the rugs, the china, the “bathroom with a rolltop bath, a snatched impression of an airing cupboard luxuriously stashed with fat, white towels.”

In her world, novelists are regarded as celebrities. Alys was the wife of a Booker Award-winning author and screenwriter, and her upper-class gentility shines even as she’s dying in a crushed car.

What can Frances possibly do with that brief connection? It’s hard to imagine; but the sly and industrious Frances knows how to make the most of her chances. She is not a good person, but she's so smart and so remorseless in going after what she knows she deserves, you have to admire her nerve.

Pick up Alys, Always, for an entertaining read about one very ambitious character.