Top 10 of 2009 - PW's list

Between now and the new year all sorts of magazines, newspapers, book reviewers and TV shows will be announcing their own personal takes on the best books of 2009. Publishers Weekly, on 10/28/2009 was an early entrant in the lists (pun intended!) with its Top 10 choice of adult books of the year. Said PW: "While PW has long done an annual best books list, this is the first year it has anointed a Top 10 list, which was chosen from more than 50,000 books submitted for review."

The Top 10, which include both fiction and nonfiction titles, are:
The Age of Wonder : how the romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science by Richard Holmes
Await Your Reply: a novel by Dan Chaon
"The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways - and with unexpected consequences - in acclaimed author Dan Chaon's gripping, brilliantly written new novel. Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can't stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed. A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy. My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself - through unconventional and precarious means. Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored." (catalog notes)
Big Machine: a novel by Victor LaValle
"A fiendishly imaginative comic novel about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us. Ricky Rice was as good as invisible: a middling hustler, recovering dope fiend, and traumatized suicide cult survivor running out the string of his life as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter appears, summoning him to the frozen woods of Vermont. There, Ricky is inducted into a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard The Voice: a mysterious murmur on the wind, a disembodied shout, or a whisper in an empty room that may or may not be from God. Evoking the disorienting wonder of writers like Haruki Murakami and Kevin Brockmeier, but driven by Victor LaValle's perfectly pitched comic sensibility BIG MACHINE is a mind-rattling literary adventure about sex, race, and the eternal struggle between faith and doubt." (catalog notes)
Cheever: a life by Blake Bailey
"From the acclaimed author of "A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates" comes the unforgettable life of John Cheever, one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America." (catalog notes)
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War by Neil Sheehan
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
" Mueenuddin's collection of linked stories illuminates a place and a people through an examination of the entwined lives of landowners and their retainers on the Gurmani family farm in Lahore, Pakistan." (catalog notes)
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
"A haunting, if frequently hilarious, meditation on love and art, life and music . . . all reflected in the twinned mirror pools of Venice and Varanasi." (catalog notes)
Lost City of Z by David Grann
"After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed "New Yorker" writer Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century: what happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?" (catalog notes)
Shop Class as Soulcraft: an inquiry into the value of work by Matthew B. Crawford
" A philosopher/mechanic destroys the pretensions of the high- prestige workplace and makes an irresistible case for working with one's hands." catalog notes)
Stitches: a memoir by David Small
"One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die. In Stitches , Small, the award-winning children's illustrator and author, re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. (catalog notes)

World Fantasy Awards

Winners of the 2009 World Fantasy Awards have been announced. Read more...

These are some of the awards. The books are available at Harford County Public Library.

• Life Achievement: Ellen Asher and Jane Yolen
  
• Novels: The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford ("An award-winning author turns his talents to nostalgia and youth, bringing the optimism and dark underbelly of 1960s small-town suburbia to life.")
  
• Tender Morsels by Margo Flanagan ("Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. Liga lives modestly in her own personal heaven, a world given to her in exchange for her earthly life. Her two daughters grow up in this soft place, protected from the violence that once harmed their mother. But the real world cannot be denied forever—magicked men and wild bears break down the borders of Liga’s refuge. Now, having known Heaven, how will these three women survive in a world where beauty and brutality lie side by side?")

Vampire Poems

Just in time for Halloween, the Academy of American Poets has published on their website a list of Vampire Poems. Read more...

Maryland Has New Poet Laureate

From Maryland At A Glance, part of the Maryland Manual Online:

"POET LAUREATE
Stanley Plumly, Poet Laureate of Maryland, 2009-.
On October 1, 2009, Stanley Plumly was named Poet Laureate of Maryland by the Governor. A Maryland Distinguished University Professor since 1998, Mr. Plumly founded the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, College Park.
He has written nine books of poetry, including Old Heart (2008); Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000 (2000); The Marriage in the Trees (1997); Boy on the Step (1989); Summer Celestial (1983); Out-of-the-Body Travel (1977); Giraffe (1974); How the Plains Indians Got Horses (1973); and In the Outer Dark (1970). His work also includes Argument and Song: Sources and Silences in Poetry (2003), a collection of essays, and Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008).
Born in Barnesville, Ohio, May 23, 1939, Stanley Plumly received his B.A. in 1962 from Wilmington College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Ohio University. "

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

We tend to think of small-town living as idyllic and serene, certainly better than big-city living, with all its pollution and poverty. Think again. Since the late 20th century, rural, small-town America has been changing, in part due to the loss of family farms to agribusiness, and changing not for the better. Poverty is rampant, with families moving from farms to town life and with local manufacturing declining. Into this void has stepped a trade consistently profitable – the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine.

Author Nick Reding grew up in the Midwest, and for him, the decline in quality of life has been heartbreaking and alarming. He has seen good-paying jobs in small towns systematically evaporate, as corporate giants have gobbled up companies and either closed them or lowered wages for employees by two-thirds. He has seen how the local folks have coped with the changes, as more people have become users of this cheap and highly-addictive drug. From using to manufacturing and distributing has been one small step out of poverty but deeper into despair.

Reding follows the decline of one town, Oelwein in Iowa, once a reasonably prosperous place, where farms and a meat-packing plant supported nearly everyone. But agribusiness put an end to all that, and the result has been a disaster. Reding follows meth users in their trajectory from prosperity to poverty, looking at causes and effects. He also allows readers to see the complicated network of makers and distributors of meth, from Mexico to the house next door.

Meth is easy to make, with ingredients in plentiful supply and easy to access. A small-town resident is especially able to get the necessary ingredients and make the drug, not in a big, fancy lab, but in a garage, a basement, or a backyard tool shed. While drug enforcement agencies have proposed changes to laws to create more effective barriers to drug manufacturing, pharmaceutical companies and chain pharmacies have done their best to block those reforms and regulations. Reding traces the on-going battle with Wal-Mart and Warner-Lambert. He reveals which members of Congress have been the most obstructive in reform, and readers will be surprised perhaps, when those members are often the very ones in favor of tougher sentences for drug-users.

More than anything, Reding reveals the devastation meth has had on the average small-town resident, whether a user or a person who witnesses the closing of nearly every shop in town as misery and poverty spread. He also shows what it takes to rebuild a town, and sometimes that depends on just one person, a tenacious visionary.

All in all, Oelwein survives, thanks to the persistence of a handful of people, both residents of the town and drug agents who continue to fight for reform of drug laws and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Ultimately, Oelwein may once again revive and prosper to become that which we envision when we think of the glories of small-town life.

D. L. S.

Bright Star - the True-life Romance Behind the Movie

Bright star : love letters and poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne. (Find this book in our catalog)

If you have seen the movie, which came out in September, you will be intrigued to read Keat's actual romantic poems and letters to Fanny. This is what it says in our catalog about Keats' writing for the love of his life:

"... Keats died at the young age of twenty-five, leaving behind some of the most exquisite and moving verse and letters ever written, inspired by his deep love for Fanny. Bright Star is a collection of Keat's romantic poems and correspondence in the heat of his passion, and is a dazzling display of a talent cut cruelly short."

Man Booker Prize - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel won the 2009 Man Booker Prize with Wolf Hall, set in the 1520s in the court of Henry VIII. (Find this book in our catalog)
The judges described Wolf Hall as "a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century" with "a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail." They also said the novel, "probes the mysteries of power by examining and describing the meticulous dealings in Henry VIII's court, revealing in thrilling prose how politics and history is made by men and women. In the words of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, whose story this is, 'the fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes'."