Staff Picks
Check the blog every Wednesday for updates on what our staff is reading and watching and recommendations for our new and all-time favorite books and movies. What is your favorite book or movie? Post your answer in the comments section below. To see all previous Staff Picks posts, simply type "Staff Picks" in the search box at the top left of this blog and click the "search blog" button.

The Best of Friends by Sara James and Ginger Mauney - recommended by Stephanie
“Ambition is like the sea wave,” Tennyson wrote, “which the more you drink, the more you thirst.” Sara James, a “Dateline” correspondent for NBC, and Ginger Mauney, a wildlife filmmaker, are two women with just such a thirst, and they have taken many years and traveled thousands of miles to slake it. They believe that what binds them together is not their great desire to achieve but the durability of a friendship that has lasted decades and that took root during their idyllic girlhoods in Virginia. Yet “The Best of Friends” seems to address ambition as much as friendship. This is an interesting read that takes you away to explore other life choices.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan - recommended by Robyn
It is 1962, and college graduates Florence and Edward, very much children of late 1950s London, are ready to launch themselves as a couple. Musical Florence is hoping for a concert career and looking forward to the wedding she believes will truly define her adulthood. Edward, a budding historian from a troubled family, envisions lifelong domestic joy with his beautiful fiancée. However, both are plagued by private anxieties they can't bring themselves to discuss. As Edward plans an idyllic beachside wedding night, he broods about overcoming Florence's physical shyness given his own sparse experience. He has no idea she is terrified of sex but has grimly resolved to do her submissive duty. The results are false assumptions, confusion, and a nightmarish (and graphically described) sexual disaster that destroys the marriage even before it starts. - library catalog

MOVIE WATCH

The Way We Were - recommended by Patrice
A handsome, former star athlete and an attractive defender of radical causes meet by accident eight years after college and fall in love. Their marriage of opposites is strained by seemingly inevitable conflicts and finally reaches a painful end.

Catch Me If You Can - recommended by Cheryl
Based on the autobiography of a brilliant young master of deception and the FBI agent hot on his trail. Frank W. Abagnale, Jr. passed himself off as a pilot, a lawyer, and a doctor all before his 21st birthday.

Quote of the Week

I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed-reading accident. I hit a bookmark.
-Steven Wright

Staff Picks
Check the blog every Wednesday for updates on what our staff is reading and watching and recommendations for our new and all-time favorite books and movies. What is your favorite book or movie? Post your answer in the comments section below. To see all previous Staff Picks posts, simply type "Staff Picks" in the search box at the top left of this blog and click the "search blog" button.

Set in Darkness by Ian Rankin - recommended by Gayle
When a body, long dead, is found on the site of the new Scottish Parliament and is soon followed by another, fresher kill, this time that of a leading candidate for the new governing body, Rebus is convinced of a connection between the two. Det. Siobhan Clarke witnesses a third death, the suicide of a surprisingly wealthy homeless man; the question of where his wealth came from seems related to the other deaths. Clarke, a determined young woman trying to make her way in the male world of police work, is a refreshing, complex addition to this series.- from Publisher Weekly Review

The Beautiful Miscellaneous by Dominic Smith - recommended by Andrew
This books is about a child who survives a car crash and falls into a coma. When he wakes up, he finds that he has synesthesia (his senses have been crossed and he can see smells and hear colors). He also has to live under the pressure of being a genius by his father.

HEATH LEDGER - MOVIE WATCH

Brokeback Mountain - recommended by Cheryl

It's 1963, a time in the United States when life was simple, straightforward and the lines between the sexes and sex roles were crisply drawn and severely delineated. Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist find themselves thrown together when they are hired to tend sheep in the remote area of Brokeback Mountain, Wyoming. Because of the job, the two are forced to spend many hours together alone in the wild. Ennis and Jack are inexorably drawn to each other through their proximity, loneliness and through a shared lack of tenderness and emotion in their lives and are emotionally, physically and psychically bonded to each other almost from the start.

Casanova - recommended by Megan
Casanova has to begin searching for a wife. He is a womanizer with many conquests and If he cannot show he is living a more respectable life, the Church will throw him out of Venice. He is quickly engaged to Victoria, a woman with a pure reputation. As soon as that is arranged, he meets Francesca, a feminist who hates all he stands for. He pretends to be someone else to get into her good graces, and soon finds out she is engaged to Papprizzio, a man whom she has never met. Meanwhile, arriving in Venice to find Casanova, is Pucci, one of the Vatican's most known and feared inquisitors. Francesca falls in love with Casanova, who is pretending to be the Lard king himself. Francesca's brother Donato is in love with Victoria and her mother Andrea wants Francesca to marry a man of substance.

Quote of the Week

We Read to Know We Are Not Alone.
-C.S. Lewis

Staff Picks
Check the blog every Wednesday for updates on what our staff is reading and watching and recommendations for our new and all-time favorite books and movies. What is your favorite book or movie? Post your answer in the comments section below. To see all previous Staff Picks posts, simply type "Staff Picks" in the search box at the top left of this blog and click the "search blog" button.

Rabbit Redux by John Updike - recommended by Cheryl
The assumptions and obsessions that control our daily lives are explored in tantalizing detail by master novelist John Updike in this wise, witty, sexy story. Harry Angstrom--known to all as Rabbit, one of America's most famous literary characters--finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife. How he resolves--or further complicates--his problems makes a compelling read. - Library Catalog.

The Duke and I by Julia Quinn - recommended by Thea
In an effort to keep himself footloose and single in spite of the efforts of the town's matchmakers, Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, begins a sham courtship with Daphne Bridgerton. - Novelist.

MOVIE WATCH: Stardust Watch this film at the library on Friday, January 18th at 6:30 p.m.

Tristan hopes to win the heart of his beautiful, but shallow love, Victoria. He promises to recover a star that fell somewhere beyond the stony Wall that sets between the mundane England and the fantasy kingdom of Stormhold. So Tristan sets forth on his own journey in Stormhold. Meanwhile in that magical land, the dying king has set his four surviving sons on a quest for the crown. And the witch Lamia is seeking the heart of the star for an entirely different purpose, one that involves her secret power.

Quote of the Week

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
-Mark Twain

Staff Picks
Check the blog every Wednesday for updates on what our staff is reading and watching and recommendations for our new and all-time favorite books and movies. What is your favorite book or movie? Post your answer in the comments section below. To see all previous Staff Picks posts, simply type "Staff Picks" in the search box at the top left of this blog and click the "search blog" button.

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson - recommended by Thea
Decades into our future, a stone's throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neoVictorians. He's made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer. Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild, stolen for Hackworth's own daughter, the Primer's purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. It performs its function superbly. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands. - book jacket.

The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard - recommended by Gayle
"Small Plains, Kansas, January 23, 1987: In the midst of a deadly blizzard, eighteen-year-old Rex Shellenberger scours his father's pasture, looking for helpless newborn calves. Then he makes a shocking discovery: the naked, frozen body of a teenage girl, her skin as white as the snow around her. Even dead, she is the most beautiful girl he's ever seen. It is a moment that will forever change his life and the lives of everyone around him. The mysterious dead girl - the "Virgin of Small Plains" - inspires local reverence: In the two decades following her death, strange miracles visit those who faithfully tend to her grave; some even believe that her spirit can cure deadly illnesses. Slowly, word of the legend spreads." "But what really happened in that snow-covered field? Why did young Mitch Newquist disappear the day after the Virgin's body was found, leaving behind his distraught girlfriend, Abby Reynolds? Why do the town's three most powerful men - Dr. Quentin Reynolds, former sheriff Nathan Shellenberger, and Judge Tom Newquist - all seem to be hiding the details of that night?" "Seventeen years later, when Mitch suddenly returns to Small Plains, simmering tensions come to a head, ghosts that had long slumbered whisper anew, and the secrets that some wish would stay buried rise again from the grave of the Virgin. Abby - never having resolved her feelings for Mitch - is now determined to uncover exactly what happened so many years ago to tear their lives apart." - book jacket.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman - recommended by Megan
Looking for excitement, Coraline ventures through a mysterious door into a world that is similar, yet disturbingly different from her own, where she must challenge a gruesome entity in order to save herself, her parents, and the souls of three others.

MOVIE WATCH: As Good As It Gets - recommended by Megan
A single mother/waitress, a cranky, bigoted, obsessive-compulsive writer, and a gay artist form an unlikely friendship. - library catalog

Quote of the Week

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.
- Pablo Neruda

Time Magazine's Picks for 10 Best Fiction Books of 2007

1) The Brief Wondorous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

2) Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

3) A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

4) Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

5) Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

6) House of Meetings by Martin Amis

7) No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

8) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

9) Like You'd Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard

10) The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver

Visit the Time Magazine website to see the 50 Top 10 Lists of 2007