Category Archives: Books

Books, CMLE

April Book Choices for our Goodreads Books Groups!

We hope you will join us online in our two Goodreads book groups and read some fun books with us as we wait for the snow to melt!

For our group CMLE Librarian Professionals, we will learn how to use timing to our advantage by reading When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink.

“Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don’t know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of “when” decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work, and succeed. ”

For our group CMLE Librarians Enjoying Fiction, we will bury ourselves in the mystery of Homicide in Hardcover by Kate Carlisle.“The streets of San Francisco would be lined with hardcovers if rare book expert Brooklyn Wainwright had her way. And her mentor wouldn’t be lying in a pool of his own blood on the eve of a celebration for his latest book restoration. With his final breath he leaves Brooklyn a cryptic message, and gives her a priceless and supposedly cursed copy of Goethe’s Faust for safekeeping.”

 

Do you need more book suggestions? Check out our series, or listen to our Readers’ Advisory podcast Books and Beverages!

Books

Reading Across MN: Sugarhouse

Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House into Our Home Sweet Home, by Matthew Batt

Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes, and it also has many interesting books. In this series, we are sharing some of the books we like from Minnesota, or Minnesota authors.

We are mapping our literary journey around Minnesota, so you can see all the interesting places where our books are set. Follow our progress on our Google Map, accessible by clicking that link or searching for the title CMLE Reads Across Minnesota!

This week we look at a book not set in Minnesota, or that even mentions Minnesota. We do want to recognize all Minnesota authors, and Matthew Batt @MattCBatt is in St. Paul. And this is a fun book about home renovation! As a former Cheesehead myself, it was also nice to read about his visits home to Milwaukee.

As someone who also bought the neighborhood crack house, and spent time fixing things up (horrifying, terrible things), I really enjoyed reading this book! The overpowering smells, the always-weirdly-damp carpet – I fondly remember it all. He doesn’t mention having to clean cigarette burns from the bathtub, or scrubbing down the walls because they are too covered in cigarette smoke (or whatever) to paint. But I assume that happened to him and his wife just as it did with us – you can’t discuss everything in one book. Oh the fun of knowing you are unlikely to make anything worse with your DIY home improvement! It really does take the pressure off.

From Amazon:

“An improbably funny account of how the purchase and restoration of a disaster of a fixer-upper saves a young marriage

When a season of ludicrous loss tests the mettle of their marriage, Matthew Batt and his wife decide not to call it quits. They set their sights instead on the purchase of a dilapidated house in the Sugarhouse section of Salt Lake City. With no homesteading experience and a full-blown quarter-life crisis on their hands, these perpetual grad students/waiters/nonprofiteers decide to seek salvation through renovation, and do all they can to turn a former crack house into a home. Dizzy with despair, doubt, and the side effects of using the rough equivalent of napalm to detoxify their house, they enter into full-fledged adulthood with power tools in hand.

Heartfelt and joyous, Sugarhouse is the story of how one couple conquers adversity and creates an addition to their family, as well as their home.”

 

Books

Book Suggestions: The Hypothetical Girl

The Hypothetical Girl, by  Elizabeth Cohen

We love to read books, and to talk about books. Check out our entire series here! Need more book chatting and suggestions in your life? Listen to our Books and Beverages podcast!

This is a book of short stories – good for reading when you only want to have a short reading, or only have a few minutes available. Each story is about some sort of love or dating situations in today’s electronic world of meeting people. (I’ve been married a long time, and have not been dating; so it’s interesting to read about all this newfangled dating and strategies for meeting people!)

From Amazon:

“Love meets technology with a dash of quirk in this collection of highly original short stories
 
An aspiring actress meets an Icelandic Yak farmer on a matchmaking Web site. An online forum for cancer support turns into a love triangle for an English professor, a Canadian fisherman, and an elementary school teacher living in Japan. A deer and a polar bear flirt via Skype. In The Hypothetical Girl a menagerie of characters graze and jockey, play and hook up in the online dating world with mixed and sometimes dark results. Flirting and communicating in chat rooms, through texts, e-mails, and IMs, they grope their way through a virtual maze of potential mates, falling in and out of what they think and hope may be true love.

With levity and high style, Cohen takes her readers into a world where screen and keyboard meet the heart, with consequences that range from wonderful to weird. The Hypothetical Girl captures all the mystery, misery, and magic of the eternal search for human connection.”

Books, Check this out:

Reading Across MN: In the Lake of the Woods

In the Lake of the Woods, by Tim O’Brien

Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes, and it also has many interesting books. In this series, we are sharing some of the books we like from Minnesota, or Minnesota authors.

We are mapping our literary journey around Minnesota, so you can see all the interesting places where our books are set. Follow our progress on our Google Map, accessible by clicking that link or searching for the title CMLE Reads Across Minnesota!

From Wikipedia’s description:

“The main storyline often branches out to flashbacks of significant trees in John Wade’s past. His childhood is constantly referred to as the advent of his persona, Sorcerer. As a child, John was frequently abused verbally and emotionally by an alcoholic father, who was admired by other children for his public persona. John often visited Karra’s Studio of Magic, where he bought the Guillotine of Death, purchased by his father. John was devastated after his father’s death and channeled his grief into magic.

Wade met his future wife Kathy during their college years, becoming intimate with her despite his secretive nature. John spied on Kathy, of which she was aware, just as he was aware of her affair with a dentist. When John was deployed to Vietnam, he and Kathy communicated through letters; some of his frightened Kathy. John became deeply absorbed in his identity as Sorcerer. He is portrayed as a member of Charlie Company, who were involved in the My Lai massacre. While working a desk job in records, John erased his involvement with the Company.

After the war, John entered politics. He was elected as lieutenant governor of Minnesota and later ran for the US Senate, with his campaign managed by the business-oriented Tony Carbo. At one point, Kathy has an abortion, despite her great wish to have a baby, because John felt that her having a child would be problematic for his political career.

After his landslide loss in the senate race, during which there was revelation of John’s role in My Lai, John and Kathy take a vacation at a cabin in Lake of the Woods. They are troubled by the revelation of John’s Vietnam secrets, but pretend to be happy. One night, John wakes up and decides to boil water for tea. He pours the boiling water over a few household plants, reciting “Kill Jesus”. He remembers climbing back into bed with Kathy, but the next morning she’s gone. Continue reading Reading Across MN: In the Lake of the Woods →

Books

Book Suggestions: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

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We love to read books, and to talk about books. Check out our entire series here! Need more book chatting and suggestions in your life? Listen to our Books and Beverages podcast!

I had never heard of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and found it on a booklist that recommended positive, upbeat books and am definitely enjoying it so far! I had it on hold at the library and the woman in line next to me got very excited when she saw the title and soon all of us at the desk were chatting about the book, so it does come highly recommended 🙂

The book takes place after World War II and is all correspondence between  the characters. The main character is an author named Juliet and her letters are funny and descriptive, and make you wish you knew her in real life. Learning about the challenges in London and Britain itself after the war is definitely interesting as well. Juliet enters into correspondence with a male book-lover who is a farmer on the island of Guernsey, and through him she learns about the The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society which began during the German occupation of the island. It is a quick, enjoyable read and I’m trying to make it last as long as I can!

“Written with warmth and humor as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written word in all its guises, and of finding connection in the most surprising ways.
January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb….

As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends—and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island—boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all.”