Russian Reads!

I LOVE books set in Russia. I am not Russian, I have never been to Russia, and I cannot speak a word of Russian, but there is something about the culture and the richness of its history that attracts me. So here is a list (by no means exhaustive; I have much more reading to do!) of some great reads set in Mother Russia.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Soviet Union-inspired literary satire with a heaping ladle of magical realism poured on top! I won’t say more than that. This book can speak for itself: “Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out! Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!”

Erast Fandorin Mysteries by Boris Akunin
Historical mysteries set right before the Russian Revolution starring an unusually perceptive government employee! Boris Akunin is the real deal, people. As long as you can wrap your head around the seemingly endless number of patronymics (which to be honest is a shared trait among most novels set in Russia), these books will hold you captive. (Just don’t be too put off by the arm’s length the protagonist is held at—think of it as increasing the wow factor when he finally reveals the results of his astute deductions.)

Sister Pelagia Mysteries by Boris Akunin
More historical mysteries by Boris Akunin! But this time the books comprise a trilogy featuring a nun with a mysterious past and a whole lot of pluck. These have  more depth to them, or as Booklist puts it, the Erast Fandorin mysteries come off as "light, almost campy comedies compared to the Pelagia series." I wasn’t thrilled with the first one (dogs are poisoned—enough said), but the second is fantastic and the third is a remarkable achievement: intelligent, complex, and poignant.

The Grisha Trilogy by Leigh Bardugo
Young adult fantasy fiction about super-powered peasants in an alternate Tsarist Russian world! Leigh Bardugo has a killer imagination and wields it like a boss in this atmospheric and richly textured trilogy. I can’t wait for the final installment!

Censorship in Literature

Every year during Banned Books Week, libraries, publishers, and booksellers highlight the very real threat to our freedom to read. The Newport Public Library will recognize Banned Books Week this year with a program on censorship, a book club discussion and film screening of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a display featuring banned and challenged books.

Photo by Kim Nguyen

Dr. Pancho Savery begins the week with “To Cut or Not to Cut: Censorship in Literature” on Sunday, September 22, at 2:00 p.m. Recent efforts to remove the “N” word in literature—from the new edition of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn in which the word is changed to “slave” to the attempt to halt a high school production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone because of its "offensive" language—raise questions about censorship. Is censorship ever a good thing? Should accommodations be made considering the difference between a character’s and author’s point of view?

Savery is professor of English, humanities, and American studies at Reed College. He also teaches in Reed’s freshman humanities program on the Ancient Mediterranean World (focusing on Greece, Egypt, Persia, and Rome). For the last eleven years, he has worked with Oregon Humanities on the Humanity in Perspective program.

The library’s Reading Circle will meet on Tuesday, September 24 at noon to discuss Mark Twain’s controversial classic. That evening, at 6:30 p.m., the monthly Literary Flick will feature the 1939 version of the film, starring Mickey Rooney as Huck Finn.

Savery’s Conversation Project is sponsored by Oregon Humanities. Through the Conversation Project, Oregon Humanities offers free programs that engage community members in thoughtful, challenging conversations about ideas critical to our daily lives and our state's future.

The library will have buttons and bookmarks to give away during Banned Books Week, while supplies last.  Ask for your "I read banned books" button and wear it proudly!

Eighty classics: How many have you read?

A patron recently asked the Newport Public Library to make a bibliography of literary classics. So we looked at some resources and consulted our own tastes, and here’s the list we came up with (alphabetical by author).  Note that these are novels only:

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
2. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
3. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
4. Emma by Jane Austen
5. Herzog by Saul Bellow
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
8. If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
9. The Plague by Albert Camus
10. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
11. My Antonia by Willa Cather
12. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
13. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
14. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
15. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
16. The BFG by Roald Dahl
17. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
18. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
19. The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
20. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
21. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
22. Silas Marner by George Eliot
23. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
24. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
25. The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding
26. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
27. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
28. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
29. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
30. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
31. The Tin Drum by Günther Grass
32. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
33. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
34. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
35. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
36. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
37. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
38. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
39. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
40. Ulysses by James Joyce
41. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
42. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
43. The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
44. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre
45. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
46. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
47. The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
48. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
49. Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
50. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
51. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
52. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
53. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
54. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
55. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
56. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
57. Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
58. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
59. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
60. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
61. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
62. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
63. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
64. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
65. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
66. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
67. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
68. Dracula by Bram Stoker
69. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
70. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
71. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
72. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
73. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
74. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
75. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
76. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
77. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
78. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
79. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
80. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolfe

Although this list is not exactly exhaustive, we think it’s a pretty good sampling of great books.

 I’ve read 35 of the 80.  How many have you read? Which ones? Which ones do you plan to read?  Let us know in the comments!

(And, since lists like this exist to be argued about, also tell us which books should be on the list that aren’t, and which are that we should have left off.)

When truth is as exciting as fiction

I love a good narrative nonfiction book - the kind that tells a fascinating historical story, one with all sorts of implications for our lives now.

One such book is Bomb: The Race to Build - and Steal - The World’s Most Dangerous Weapon, by Steve Sheinkin. It tells the genuinely exciting story of the race to build atomic weapons during World War II.

While Robert Oppenheimer and his team were in Los Alamos developing uranium and plutonium bombs, daring commandos were intent on sabotaging the Nazi efforts to do the same. And Soviet spies were trying to steal the secrets from both. They would succeed, leading to the nuclear escalation of the Cold War.

What was Oppenheimer like?  Who were the saboteurs?  Who were the spies, and why did they do it?  This book delves into their lives, motivations, and the way they felt once the Bomb was a reality.

Harry Gold, soviet spy.

Bomb is marketed for children, and is written at the level an intelligent and well-read eleven-year-old can understand. It’s a great introductory read for adults who are interested in this period, too, and it comes with suggestions for further reading, if you’d like to go more in-depth. (It is also illustrated with excellent photographs of the people, places, and devices described in the book, which I loved. More books should have pictures!)

If it sounds like a great story to you, don’t let the fact that this is a kids’ book bother you. Put it on hold today!

The ABC of It: Why Picture Books Matter

I recently got back from a whirlwind New England/New York City trip! One of the highlights was going to visit the lions outside the New York Public Library in Manhattan and seeing the current NYPL exhibit, The ABC of It: Why Picture Books Matter.

The exhibit was incredible. To list just a few of my favorite things, there were two hand painted William Blake prints from Songs of Innocence, a little car that looks like it came straight out of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (I had to wait impatiently for a little girl to vacate the car so I could sit in it and make my friend take a picture), the bedroom from Goodnight Moon recreated so you  could walk right through it,  a fuzzy cutout of one of the monsters from Where The Wild Things Are, a constantly growing and diminishing Alice from Alice in Wonderland, and a telephone you can pick up to listen to E.B. White read from Charlotte’s Web.

If you’re not planning to head to NYC anytime soon, stop by our library’s children’s area to revisit  your favorite books from childhood, and maybe share them with a special little one in your life.

The second book in the Claire DeWitt series

When we last left Claire DeWitt, at the end of Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, the private investigator had just solved a missing-persons case that turned out to be an ugly murder in post-Katrina New Orleans. The bitter ending to that mystery sets up an even darker and more painful case, as told in Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway.

Claire is back in San Francisco, where an ex-boyfriend, Paul Casablancas, has been murdered. Things didn’t work out between Clarie and Paul, and he ended up getting married to Claire’s friend Lydia. Now he’s dead, apparently the victim of a spooked burglar, and Claire is obsessed with finding the killer’s identity. Obsessed, because it’s the only way she knows to deny her powerful grief over Paul:

“The guitars. The lock. The keys. The gun. The musician in the drawing room with the gun. The duchess in the kitchen with the guitar. I let my mind fill with the case. It was only a case. Only another case.”

The Claire DeWitt mysteries are suspenseful, fast-paced, humorous but dark. Their heroine is an antihero at best, a seriously troubled woman whose ability to solve mysteries contrasts with her disastrous mess of a personal life.

They’re also genuinely weird riffs on the noir genre. In Claire’s world, detection is not a job but a painful, life-changing vocation, a vocation that finds people and demands a lifetime of service and sacrifice from them.

The first book was pretty good, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sold on Claire’s strange universe. The second is complete dynamite. Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway is simply a fantastic story with a great ending, covered with bloody handprints from Claire’s past and thick with shining clues to her future. I could not put it down, and I can’t wait to find out what happens next.

Chronicles of Nick

Paranormal young adult tends to be heavy on female protagonists in the midst of an adolescent maelstrom of difficulties, complicated by magic, which will lead them to become strong, self-directed young women who’ve survived tough situations and learned how to make hard choices. It’s refreshing to throw a male main character into the mix once in a while-- although, because this is young adult fiction, the boy will of course be in the midst of an adolescent maelstrom of problems, complicated by magic, which will lead him to grow into a strong, self-directed young man, yadda yadda yadda.

I make fun, yes, but Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Chronicles of Nick series takes this formula and runs with it, fast. Fourteen year old Nick Gautier (go-SHAY) has a mom who’s a Bourbon Street stripper and a dad in prison for murder. Despite his academic scholarship to a prestigious school, Nick just can’t stop getting into trouble. Nick’s mom loves him to pieces, and he’s devoted to her, but that’s not enough to keep him on the straight and narrow. Getting into fight after fight at school, usually when someone disrespects her, has put him one step away from being kicked out of his only chance for a better future.

 Then everything changes. Nick makes one small choice that gets him shot and hospitalized: but which also wins him the patronage of a Darkhunter, a modern-day paladin devoted to fighting supernatural evils for the ancient goddess Artemis. The good news: Nick’s new friend is on the side of good and will do everything in his power to make sure Nick and his mom have the opportunity to change their lives. The bad news: Nick learns he has a destiny that’s thus far been hidden from him. He’s fated to grow up to be the Malachi, an evil figure that will bring the apocalypse down on humankind. New and strange powers start to manifest, zombies attack his school, he meets a very sweet demon, and the plot gallops ahead in unexpected but always entertaining directions.

 Sherrilyn Kenyon is the author of the Darkhunter series of popular and steamy paranormal romances, but although the Chronicles of Nick take place in the same fictional world and have overlapping characters, the “steamy romance” part is tamed down in this young adult subseries. Nick’s a fairly convincing teenage boy, possibly a tad more self-aware emotionally than most, but likeable in his struggles to resist the low expectations people have for him based on his parentage and his dire supernatural destiny. This isn’t literature: the prose is sometimes purple, and high-stakes emotional drama is on every other page. But if you enjoy Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan, Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse, or Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy Nick Gautier too.

 1. Infinity 
 2. Invincible
 3. Infamous 
 4. Inferno