The Rain Wilds Chronicles by Robin Hobb

Far up the Rain Wild River, whose poisonous waters dissolve the wood of normal boats and cause mutations in those who live too close, the Elderling city lies in ruins. According to the old stories, the dragons of long-ago created Elderlings to serve them, but now both seem no more than legends. Then a small group of dragonkind hatches and emerges from the sea, stunted and sickly but undeniably real. By hook and by crook, a party of low-caste young adults is forced to shepherd them up the treacherous river, seeking the riches of the fabled city to which the dragons may have the key.

The four books of The Rain Wilds Chronicles follow this seemingly hopeless quest through the eyes of several of the main characters. My favorite, Alise Finbok, is a scholar trapped in a sham marriage. After years of studying the few remaining Elderling artifacts in the world, she’s uniquely qualified to follow the party of young humans and dragons up the river, and to be there for what she hopes will be the historic rediscovery of the Elderling city. Other characters include Thymara, an outcast girl with severe mutations, Tats, a former slave, and Leftrin, a barge captain. Each struggles with the weight of the past as well as the challenges and wonders of the present.

Robin Hobb is also the author of the Farseer Saga, the Tawny Man Series, and the Soldier Son Trilogy, among others. She is renowned for her ability to create fantastic fully-realized worlds and strong character-based plots. The Rain Wilds Chronicles are meticulously crafted if a little slow, and although I enjoyed them and became engaged with the characters, I would recommend them mostly to dragon-lovers and fans of her previous series. If you have not yet discovered Robin Hobb, start instead with the Farseer Saga or the Liveship Traders books, both of which have faster pacing and perhaps more suspense. Hobb has also written a number of books under another pen name, Megan Lindholm, which are worth checking out if you find you like her style.

 The Rain Wilds Chronicles
 Dragon Keeper
 Dragon Haven
 City of Dragons
 Blood of Dragons

Water Music by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Take a healthy serving of 19th-century picaresque adventure, stir in a generous handful of between-the-sheets, Tom Jones-like ribaldry, bake it all in the ironic literary stylings of the late twentieth century, and you might just come up with T. Coraghessan Boyle’s first novel,Water Music.

First published in 1983 and now in its 21st printing, Water Music follows the parallel adventures of British explorer Mungo Park, and London low-life, Ned Rise. The two men’s alternating narratives wend and weave their way through England and Scotland at the end of the eighteenth century. Eventually their fortunes collide in the middle of the African jungle when the ever-resourceful Ned joins Park on his second expedition up the Niger River. 

This wonderfully atmospheric novel fairly bursts at the seams with larger-than-life characters. You will meet Fatima, the four-hundred pound African queen and Katunga Oyuo, aka Johnson, who offers to guide Park up the Niger River for the price of a complete set of the works of WIlliam Shakespeare. Inhabiting exotic and dangerous settings, from the slums of old London to cannibal-infested African swamps, Boyle’s writing vividly displays a lust for life that knows few bounds and even less propriety. 

Water Music is a hilarious romp across two continents and you can reserve it here.

The Start of Everything

Cambridge, England police detectives Chloe Frohmann and Morris Keene are investigating a badly decomposed corpse found in a drain. They know nothing about the victim, except that she was wearing a red sweater when she died.

Unknown to the police, someone else is investigating, too.  Mathilde is an intelligent and perceptive young woman who can barely tolerate human interaction. She works in the dead letter office at the University of Cambridge, where she is trying to track down the intended recipient of a series of passionate love letters (which Mathilde reads), sent to someone called Katja at Corpus Christi College. One of the letters mentions Katja’s red sweater.


These two investigations converge and intertwine in The Start of Everything, a British thriller by Emily Winslow.

The Start of Everything is fraught with confused identities, lost objects, undeliverable mail, and mistaken assumptions. The timeline spirals backwards, from the discovery of the body to the previous spring at a former manor house, once grand, now chopped up into a warren of apartments. There, tenants can easily listen to each other through the walls. As you might expect, they misunderstand what they hear.

The cops, Frohmann and Keene, are smart and well-trained, but preoccupied with their own separate emotional problems. This makes them only slightly more effective than the autistic girl, who views the world through a lens of fear and alienation. They stumble over vital clues without realizing their importance, misunderstand what they’re being told (and what they’re saying to each other), and allow the ragged edges of their lives to intrude upon their jobs.

The Start of Everything is messy, twisty, and atmospheric. It’s really different from the Golden Age writers I cut my teeth on - authors like Sayers and Christie, in whose hands clues always add up to tidy solutions. Nothing is tidy in Emily Winslow’s world - it’s a lot more like ours.

The Strongest Librarian in the World!

With wry humor and clear-eyed optimism, librarian Josh Hanagarne shares his beautiful, unique, difficult and lovely memoir of life with Tourette’s Syndrome in his book The World’s Strongest Librarian. I feel like some disclaimer is in order—yes, he’s a librarian, I’m a librarian—but despite my natural sympathies for the breed, I swear I would have enjoyed this book anyway. I have no particular liking for weightlifters, after all, (no offense intended) and yet I hung on every word in those sections of the book as well.

Hanagarne's memoir is peppered with amusing commentary from the present, where he works at the Salt Lake City Public Library, but it starts back when he was a little kid with a huge love of books.  His Tourette’s first announced itself during the first grade Thanksgiving pageant where Hanagarne's efforts to act like a tree were undermined by constant and worsening facial tics. His childhood was defined by his loving and supportive parents, his love of reading, his family’s Mormon faith, and his Tourette’s Syndrome. These threads stayed with him, to be joined by the desire for his own family, and his own place in the world—which is where weightlifting, libraries, and now writing fit in.  His journey is both unusual in its details and familiar in its trajectory, so one can empathize and also marvel.

One thing I find fascinating about Hanagarne’s story is the way his family dealt with his condition on their own terms, and how that influenced his experience and his eventual adult choices. The other thing I love is the happy ending—well, there’s no ending, in the sense that Hanagarne is alive and well and currently enjoying his success as an author. But the memoir follows him through some difficult and even suicidal periods, when everything seemed grim—tics getting so bad he couldn’t eat, being too ‘weird’ to find love, not being able to hold down a job or stick with school due to periodic flare-ups—and yet, he pushed on, to greater control, greater understanding, and a good life of his own.

Hanagarne’s blog, established in 2009, is at http://worldsstrongestlibrarian.com/.

Post-Neawanaka Blues

Newport Reads is over for another year, but the pleasure of reading Mink River, viewing the Readers Theater program, and attending Brian Doyle’s high-energy conversation lingers on. I am especially tuned in to Brian’s talk, because I just finished splicing a recording of it into eight segments, which I uploaded to YouTube.

I laughed along with the audience as I reviewed the footage, and felt a chill in my heart as he talked about the bombing in Boston (Brian’s talk was just three days after the Marathon) and the tragic, necessary stories that arose out of the events of September 11.



Brian shared so much with us in the space of 90 minutes, that it’s hard to encapsulate his talk in a sentence or two. We learned that he comes from a large, Catholic family; he learned Gaelic from his grandmother; he believes in miracles (people came out of his wife!); and he cries in public. We also learned that he didn’t write his book, his characters did, and he was just as surprised as his readers were that a crow spoke English and Cedar could talk to bears.



If you could not attend this memorable Newport Reads event, or even if you did, join us in the wonder of an evening spent with the lyrical, inventive mind of Brian Doyle. He doesn’t disappoint. - Sheryl

The Best Mystery Novel of the Year is ...

The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny is the winner by a landslide in the Newport Library’s Best Mystery Novel of 2012 contest.

Newport voters gave the book three times more votes than any other contender.

(Interestingly, Penny was also the clear winner the last time we held this contest, in 2011. That year her novel Bury Your Dead got more than twice the votes of its nearest competitor.)

The Beautiful Mystery, part of the popular Canadian author’s Chief Inspector Gamache series, deals with the murder of the choir director of a famously reclusive monastery. Only reluctantly do the monks of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups open their doors to admit the police. Gamache uncovers deep conflicts in the silence of the cloister.

Three novels tied for a distant second place. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is the suspenseful story of a missing woman and a marriage gone horribly wrong. The Buzzard Table by Margaret Maron tells of an ornithologist who discovers a body while studying the habits of vultures - or so he claims. And The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins links small-town crime with big-time drug cartels in the hills of northern Mississippi.

This weekend major awards were given to mystery novels, not just by Newport Library, but also by the Mystery Writers of America and by Malice Domestic.

The Edgar Award, presented by MWA, went to Live By Night by Dennis Lehane, a story of gangsters and crooked cops set in Boston in the 1920s.

Malice Domestic agreed with Newport voters by granting the Agatha Award to Louise Penny’s The Beautiful Mystery.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Have you ever wondered what the earth would look like if all the people suddenly vanished? What would happen to our houses, our pets, our bridges and buildings? How long would it be before the last traces of our existence finally disappeared?

According to award-winning journalist Alan Weisman’s 2007 book, The World WIthout Us, it wouldn’t take very long. In fact, it’s rather disturbing how quickly our cherished possessions and grand monuments would turn to dust, as if we’d never been here at all. Makes ya think, don’t it?

Weisman’s book takes the reader along a fascinating timeline that counts off days, weeks, months, years, and centuries after the last human has gone. After a few days, our pets, those that have not already died from hunger or thirst, will wander the streets in feral packs. After a few months, power grids and water supplies will fail from lack of fuel and upkeep. Let a few years go by and our homes, apartment and office buildings will begin to rot from the inside out as insect-chewed 2x4 framing fails and glass windows shatter and fall onto the street. And centuries after our demise, our roads, tunnels, bridges and other monuments of steel and stone will turn to vegetation-covered heaps.

After a few thousand years, probably the last visible sign of our time here on planet earth will be four weather-worn faces carved out of the granite escarpment on Mount Rushmore. 

The World Without Us is a sobering but also highly entertaining look at just how transitory our lives are. And you can reserve it here.