How Do I
Bonnie's Picks
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Rowell, Rainbow Attachments Fiction |
| Lincoln is painfully shy and lives with his overbearing mother. His life lacks direction, he thinks a lot about his long lost high school sweetheart, and his only social activity is playing Dungeons and Dragons with old college buddies. He lands a night job at a newspaper reading employees' email, making sure they aren't using their work email for inappropriate purposes. He begins reading the flagged messages between two women he's never met, Jennifer and Beth. Absorbed in their funny, intelligent messages and affectionate friendship, he falls for Beth, and becomes wrapped up in her story despite misgivings and guilt for reading her email. Then he discovers through her email that she's developed a crush on him. She refers to him as MCG (My Cute Guy), but he doesn't know who she is or what she looks like! This delightful read should appeal to fans of quirky romantic comedies. Recommended July 2011 |
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| Morrell, David First Blood Fiction |
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| This is the story of Rambo, a young Green Beret/former
POW recently returned from a horrific tour in Vietnam. He travels
around the American South and though he does nothing wrong, gets kicked
out of every small town he visits. Sheriff Teasel, a veteran of the
Korean War, tries to retain order in his community, and sees Rambo
as only a vagrant long-haired hippie kid. He too drives Rambo out
of town. Rambo decides enough is enough and declares war on Teasel,
the local police, and the National Guard. The relationship between
these two ex-soldiers, hell-bent on killing each other, becomes almost
beautiful, almost filial. A brilliant psychological suspense novel
with themes that remain timely, with cases of Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder on the rise. Recommended August 2010 |
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Kerman, Piper Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison Nonfiction |
| Piper Kerman, a recent graduate of Smith College, was
looking for adventure. She got involved with a woman who was travelling
the world smuggling drugs and laundering money. After a few months,
Kerman realized that the new life she inhabited was not glamorous
but sordid and treacherous. She got out, severing all ties to her
new “friends.” Fast forward ten years, Kerman is engaged and enjoying
a high-profile job in New York City. That is, until the Feds show
up at her house and charge her with drug trafficking. With the help
of a top lawyer, she is sentenced to only one year—the minimum mandatory
time for her offense. In the Federal Correctional Institute in Danbury,
Connecticut she witnesses first-hand the effects of her crime, surrounded
by women whose lives and families have been torn apart by drugs. But
Kerman finds something else she hadn’t expected: community, acceptance
and the love of her fellow prisoners. She writes about the colorful
characters she encounters in prison: a six-foot four transsexual diva
who sings gospel songs every night before going to bed, big-mouthed
“Eminemlettes” always looking for a fight, a nun serving time for
political activism, and an ancient granny locked up for taking phone
messages for a drug-dealing relative. This heartfelt memoir could
be called a hagiography for the millions of prisoners trapped in a
justice system that isn’t always just. Bonus: a recipe for “prison
cheesecake” on page 150. Recommended July 2010 |
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McCall Smith, Alexander The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs Fiction |
| In his hilarious follow-up to Portuguese Irregular
Verbs, the delightful McCall Smith does it again. In this latest
installment, hapless German philologist and world-renowned expert
in abstruse Portuguese grammar, Professor Dr von Igelfeld gets mistaken
for a veterinarian with a particular expertise in sausage dogs. In
an attempt to live up to the expectations of his American audience,
he declares in a speech, “If a dog has short legs, we have found that
the body is almost invariably close to the ground. Yet this does not
prevent the sausage dog from making its way about its business with
considerable despatch.” He supervises a veterinary student’s amputation
of a sausage dog’s leg, then interferes, leaving the dog with only
one leg. “He can roll. He will be able to get around by rolling.”
Read this little novel when you need a good laugh and aren’t in the
mood for something too heavy or profound. Recommended July 2009 |
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Jenkins, Charles Robert with Jim Frederick The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea Nonfiction |
| This is the autobiography of an American soldier who
defected to North Korea during the Korean War and was a prisoner of
this bizarre land for 40 years. Jenkins gives a repentant account
of his desertion and the description of his time there would convince
anyone that he has paid his dues several times over. He lived a nightmarish
existence of never being able to trust anyone and was forced to memorize
propaganda, work for almost nothing, and live under the constant watch
of fake "wives" and "leaders" who observed and reported every aspect
of his life. Yet strangely, Jenkins' life is nowhere near as terrible
as the citizens of North Korea who starve and work themselves to death
in labor camps. Eventually Jenkins married Hitomi Soga, a Japanese
citizen who was kidnapped from her home country by Kim Il Sung's communist
regime, for the purpose of teaching Japanese to spies. After many
years the U.S. discovered that Jenkins was still alive. The Japanese
government confronted North Korea and Soga was returned to her home
country. Recommended May 2008 |
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Grant, Richard God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre Nonfiction |
| This is the rollicking true adventure of a British writer
with a death wish who ventures into Mexico’s Sierra Madre Mountain
range and mixes it up with mafiosos, Mormons, forgotten Indian tribes,
and finally murderous coke-crazed Mexican hillbillies bent on hunting
him for sport. Grant finds himself in a series of precarious situations
and writes a well-documented, honest look at various facets of the
sociology of the Sierra and his own inability to make sense of it.
Grant’s account is fascinating, hilarious and thought-provoking. This
rough-and-tumble read is for those seeking a great adventure who either
don’t have the guts or the vacation time to enter this forbidding
land themselves. Recommended May 2008 |
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Guo, Xiaolu A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers Fiction |
| A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers,
by Xiaolu Guo, is the story of a young Chinese woman who discovers
loneliness, love, and self-actualization for the first time in London.
“Z,” as she calls herself, since she perceives her name as too difficult
for Westerners to pronounce, is the protagonist and narrator who finds
herself completely culture shocked and isolated in a country that
makes no sense to her. She writes in disjointed, sometimes garbled
English about her thoughts on her past in China, her feelings of being
“other,” and her lover, whom she refers to as “You.” This is where
Guo seems to bite off more than she can chew: her lover is not only
of a different generation, culture, and language, but he is also a
different sexuality. “You” is bisexual and is a sculptor of the erotic
male form who seems to spend more time wallowing in depression and
introspection to notice the blossoming Z in front of him. I found
Z to be needy and even a tad unlikable in the beginning, but as the
book progresses her English gets better, as does her understanding
of her own strength, power, and identity. Recommended December 2007 |
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