The Late, Lamented Molly Marx

In her second novel, Sally Koslow scores with this light yet serious look at life from the hereafter. Molly Marx, wife for seven years, mother for three, has died mysteriously in a bike wreck in New York City's Riverside Park. Did she take a nasty tumble in the big wind before the year's first thunderstorm? Did she kill herself after writing a long emotional letter for her daughter Annabel, not to be read until she grows up? Did her dermatologist husband's lover--pushy, ambitious Stephanie--grind her into the rocks either accidentally or on purpose? Or did sweet Luke, her photographer heartthrob totally lose it when she told him she had to break off their relationship? What happened the day Molly died is not the most important part of this book, instead it's the message to enjoy each day no matter how imperfect. How incredibly rich, sensual, interesting life looks when it's suddenly closed off to you.

Molly's voice, earnest, searching, and often riotously funny keeps you turning the pages. You learn about her family: her Mom and Dad, Claire and Daniel Divine, with their perfect marriage, one Molly aspires to but knows she can never achieve. Her twin, Lucy (Moosey), passionate and impetuous who careens through life, sometimes risking too much; Molly's husband, Barry, maddeningly flawed, but who perhaps cares for her more than Molly knows or even wants. Koslow also includes a cast of other interesting characters: the best friend, Brie, and Brie's Latin love, Isadora, her mother-in-law, brittle, ambitious, and totally impossible, Delfina, the incredibly kind nanny who holds their household together, and, finally, Hiawatha Hicks the detective assigned to her murder case. Molly loves fashion and food, both perhaps too much. Koslow spins fashion labels like a Vogue writer, but she has the empathy to really understand people and the connections among them. On one level you can read this book as a frothy take on a rich New Yorker's life; but on other level, it's an optimistic rendering of what it means to be human and confused, a state that lasts even after death. Other books where the deceased speak are The Lovely Bones and the much lighter That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo.

Fiesty Female Friendships

March is Women's History Month, and in honor I dug up an article from The New York Times from last year that reports on evidence that having female friendships is actually good for your mental and physical health. As mentioned in this article, The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship by Jeffrey Zaslow came out about this time last year too. This non-fiction book reports on a group of friends from Ames, Iowa whose remarkable friendships have remained close despite geographic distances and have supported each other through family deaths, divorces, children, career pitfalls and life's general ups and downs.

A quick catalog search for female friendships in fiction brings up hundreds of results. Titles in this genre range from fun fiction including titles like Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Lorna Landvik and The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs to giggly good times for teens as typified by Ann Brashares' popular series Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (my own personal guilty friendship favorite). Interested friendships of a little more serious nature? Try Sula by Toni Morrison, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See or even the classic Vanity Fair by William Thackery.

During this Women's History Month, I'd like to thank all my women friends for making that hill seem not so steep. Celebrate with some fantastic female fiction today!

Books Plus Book Discussion for March

Please join us on Sunday, March 7th, to discuss the One Book One Bloomington title for the year.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is part family history, part homage to comic books, and all character-based following two Jewish cousins from the age of 19 to 32. Set in Czechoslovakia, New York, and even Antarctica, this novel is epic in scope. Come tell us what you think of the Pulitzer Prize winner. If you haven't had time yet to finish it yet, come to discover information about the author and this very modern book. Kyle Knight, an Indiana University School of Library Science's student and a MCPL intern will lead the interesting discussion. For more details, see below. Hope to see you there.

Books Plus meets the first Sunday of each month from 2:00-3:00 in Program Room 2B at the Main Library. All are welcome. Join the discussion or simply come to listen.
No registration necessary. Drop in.

Vampire Books

What is the deal anyway with all the vampire books? They are everywhere - from sparkly titles for teens to darker reads from the Swedes and everything in between. Like it or not, vampire books have become part of our pop culture fabric - both in print and on the screen. I admit to a love/hate relationship with this particular sub-genre, but was fascinated by a recent article from NPR corespondent Margo Adler, who recently read a whopping 75 vampire books! Adler argues that vampire books are a bit more nuanced and morally complex than in the past. I don't think I could read with such focus, but the article did pique my interest in at least one new title.

Do you have a favorite vampire book?

Novelist and The Great War

Recently a friend suggested I re-read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. This World War I classic is told from the perspective of a front line German solider and is heart wrenching in its detail and emotion.
World War II features heavily in movies and fiction, but there are many fewer titles that focus on World War I. Curious to see what else was out there, I turned to Novelist Plus. Novelist Plus is a database that you can access at the library or from home with your library card from our Research Tools page. This database can help you find books that are similar to a title or author that you've read and liked. We use it at the reference desk frequently, so if you haven't used it before, check it out.
Using Novelist and the subject of World War I as my starting point, I was led to discover and read A Very Long Engagement by Sébastien Japrisot (also a movie starring the lovely Audrey Tautou from Amélie). This novel is complicated, purposely misleading, and is loaded with lots of unique characters who all happen to have confusing nicknames. With that said, it is completely worth the effort in the end. Novelist Plus also pointed me to Deafening by Frances Itani. This gem of a book starts with Grania, a deaf girl living in rural Canada before the war. As a young woman she meets Jim, a hearing man, who is sent overseas to war. Itani's novel has a sharp instinct for both language and sound. Good World War I books aren't impossible to find, but sometimes it does take a little digging. Both of these titles were well worth the discovery.

Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays by Eula Biss

The cover of Notes from No Man's Land sums up it's appeal nicely. At first you totally ignore the photo. Then you perhaps wonder what a splintered plank of wood has to do with anything (a book of essays is daunting enough for many - one having to do with mundane, inanimate objects more so). Having read the first essay, however, you might find yourself closing the book for a break and noticing the telephone pole on the cover and, for a second, be made to understand that forgotten legacy Biss has just reminded you of. That while they are omnipresent in our lives, and rather ugly and most often disregarded, telephone poles with their history of violent opposition in the early days and frequent use in lynchings later, are disturbingly like the way we approach race relations in America. Unless we literally run into one in a car, we're likely to dismiss the pole as something not needing our attention anymore.

These are essays that are stronger for their focus on the details of everyday life. Children's dolls, discarded sofas at the end of a college semester, palm trees and graffiti - each serves as a focal point for Biss as she chronicles her time in New York City, San Diego, Iowa City, and Chicago, tempering the author's fascination and anxiety with her relation as a white woman to the mostly minority neighborhoods she lives in. In "Relations," Biss uses sociological studies of children's preferences for white or black dolls as counterpoint in describing her time in Harlem, sharing a room with her cousin, a Jamaican-American. "Babylon" explores the concept of non-native plants (particularly the palm tree in California, slowly dying off) in contrast with the phenomenon of white suburban migration. Even when she is living in Iowa City, by far a mostly white, liberal university community, she is struck by her students' reaction to media reports of looting and murder in New Orleans following Katrina - at once dismissive of the continued existence of racism and ready to accept the cultural inheritance of viewing African-Americans as "victims or villains - children or savages." Never condescending, idealistic but grounded in reality, persuasive without resorting to preaching, Biss writes personal essays in the best manner, allowing the reader to identify, relate, and carry the unease and hope far past the book's final pages in their own narrative of life.

If you enjoy Biss' writing and would like to read one of her influences (and a similar voice), try Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. June Jordan's Affirmative Acts: Political Essays presents essays on race relations in the United States from the African-American woman's perspective, while Gemini by Nikki Giovanni examines race through the lens of the poet's early career. If you are interested in reading some of the better selections of more contemporary American essays, try the Best American Essays series, published yearly.

Village of the Ghost Bears

This is the fourth book in the Nathan Active mystery series. Nathan is a half-Inupiaq, half-Caucasian trooper in the bush village of Chukchi, Alaska. If you're just discovering Stan Jones' well-written arctic mysteries, you can start anywhere. Each book can stand alone. Ghost Bears tells the story of the village's Rec Center fire, which may or may not be arson. This mystery strikes close to home because Chukchi's chief of police, Jim Silver, dies in the fire.

The book has everything from illegal polar bear hunting to wild bush pilot flights to a couple of naked troopers taking a frigid swim out to a plane in an arctic lake--if they wait even a day or two, freeze-up will occur and they will have to wait months to continue their investigation of a downed plane. Jones, a native Alaskan and former bush pilot, knows the Arctic landscape and Inupiaq culture well. He's excellent at plotting, and even more so, at writing prose that makes you feel as though you are on the scene: in the cockpit of a little Cessna as Cowboy (what an authentic name for a bush pilot who loves to takes risks) barrels through ice fog through a pass in the mountains with a crazed possibly gun-toting criminal waiting on the ridge beneath. Clues from the fire point to the village of Cape Goodwin, even further north than Chukchi, an Inupiaq village famous for twins, schizophrenia, and polar bear hunting. Two of the characters of interest are in fact twins, Pingo and Eve Kivalina, and one seems very crazy. Is he or not? Crazy enough to start a fire that kills eight people?

Jones knows how to make his main character complex and very human. Nathan's in love with Grace who was raped by her own father and has issues about sex. He also is close to his birth mother who gave him up for adoption and loves to feed him native dishes while trying to coax him not to accept a big promotion in Anchorage.

The title comes from an Eskimo myth that when polar bears die they come to a village on the sea ice, full of seals and walrus and their own kind, where hunting is good, and they are finally safe and content.

Other Alaskan mystery writers include Dana Stabenow, Sue Henry, and John Straley. Stabenow writes mysteries set in a fictitious national park modeled upon Denali while Sue Henry writes mysteries featuring female sleuths set in Homer and other central Alaskan places, some featuring woman musher Jessie Arnold. If it's the beauty of southeast Alaska you prefer, John Straley writes investigator mysteries set there. But--for my money--Stan Jones captures Alaska best, especially the modern Arctic culture and lifestyle. These Nathan Active mysteries will seat you on your very own snowgo and let you roar across the snow-covered tundra experiencing the glorious scenery, the bitter cold, and the great warmth of the native people.