Bridal Shops and CSI

The Magic Room: A Story about the Love We Wish for Our Daughters by Jeffrey Zaslow
Thousands of women have stepped inside Becker's Bridal in Fowler, Michigan, to try on their dream dresses in the Magic Room, a special space with soft lighting, a circular pedestal, and mirrors that carry a bride's reflection into infinity. The women bring with them their most precious expectations about romance, love, fidelity, permanence, and tradition. Each bride who passes through has a story to tell--one that carried her there, to that dress, that room, that moment. Illuminating the poignant aspects of a woman's journey to the altar, The Magic Room, tells the stories of memorable women on the brink of commitment.

Mr. CSI: How a Vegas Dreamer Made a Killing in Hollywood, One Body at a Time by Anthony Zuiker
In 1990, Anthony Zuiker was just another Hollywood wannabe--a balding, overweight guy driving a tram in Las Vegas for eight bucks an hour, telling his friends about the screenplay he was writing, dreaming of fame. He'd grown up in Vegas, where his mother worked the blackjack table at a casino, while his father flitted back and forth from investment schemes that didn't seem to go anywhere. His friends figured Anthony wouldn't either. But twenty years later, Zuiker stands as the mastermind behind the most popular television show in history, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and its spin-offs: CSI: Miami and CSI: NY. How he got there--a remarkable rise from nothing to something--is the narrative lifeblood of Mr. CSI.

Teen Pick of the Week: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
Indiana , 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother's bedside. She's been stricken with something the old-timers call "Milk Sickness." Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother's fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire. Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.

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New Fiction

Lucky Break by Esther Freud
It is their first day at Drama Arts, and the nervous students huddled in a circle are told in no uncertain terms that here, unlike at lesser drama schools, they will be taught to Act. To Be. To exist in their own world on the stage. But outside in the real world--a pitiless, alluring place in which each of them, in their most fervent dreams, hopes to flourish and excel. Nell, insecure and dumpy, wonders if she will ever be cast as anything other than the maid. She's never compete, she knows, with the multitude of confident, long-legged beauties thronging the profession--most notably Charlie, whose effortless ascendance is nothing less than she expects for herself. Meanwhile, Dan, ambitious and serious, has his sights set on the role of Hamlet, as well as on the fiery, rebellious Jemma.

Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet
An IRS bureaucrat named Hal is a man baffled by his wife's obsession with her young employer, T., and haunted by the accident that paralyzed his daughter, Casey. In a moment of drunken heroism, Hal embarks on a quest to find T. who has vanished in the jungle. On his trip to Central America, Hal embroils himself in a surreal tropical adventure, descending into strange and unpredictable terrain (and an unexpected affair with a beguiling German woman).

Something Borrowed by Emily Giffin
Rachel White is the consummate good girl. A hard-working attorney at a large Manhattan law firm and a diligent maid of honor to her charmed best friend Darcy, Rachel has always played by all the rules. Since grade school, she has watched Darcy shine, quietly accepting the sidekick role in their lopsided friendship. But that suddenly changes the night of her thirtieth birthday when Rachel finally confesses her feelings to Darcy's fiance, and is both horrified and thrilled to discover he feels the same way. As the wedding date draws near, events spiral out of control, and Rachel knows she must make a choice between her heart and conscience.

Teen Pick of the Week: Dear Bully

Dear Bully: 70 Authors Tell Their Stories edited by Megan Kelley Hall and Carrie Jones
Discover how Lauren Kate transformed the feeling of that one mean girl getting under her skin into her first novel, how Lauren Oliver learned to celebrate ambiguity in her classmates and in herself, and how R.L. Stine turned being the "funny guy" into the best defense against the bullies in his class. Today's top authors for teens come together to share their stories about bullying--as silent observers on the sidelines of high school, as victims, and as perpetrators--in a collection at turns moving and self-effacing, but always deeply personal.


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New Biographies!

Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope by Gabrielle Giffords & Mark Kelly
As individuals, congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, showed Americans how optimism, an adventurous spirit, and a call to service can help change the world. As a couple, they became a national example of the healing power found in deeply shared love and courage. Their arrival in the world spotlight came under the worst of circumstances. On January 8, 2011, while meeting with her constituents in Tucson, Arizona, Gabby was the victim of an assassination attempt that left six people dead and thirteen wounded. Gabby was shot in the head; doctors called her survival "miraculous."

No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington by Condeleezza Rice
From one of the world's most admired women, this is former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice's compelling story of eight years serving at the highest levels of government. In her position as America's chief diplomat, Rice traveled almost continuously around the globe, seeking common ground among sometimes bitter enemies, forging agreement on divisive issues, and compiling a remarkable record of achievement.

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, where thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them squalor and greed of English life and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people--through the likes of David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Little Nell, and many more. In his last years Dickens drew adoring crowds to his public appearances, had met presidents and princes and he had amassed a fortune.

Teen Pick of the Week: The Adoration of Jenna Fox

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
Seventeen-year-old Jenna has been told that is her name. She has just awoken from a year-long coma, and she's still recovering from the terrible accident that caused it. Her parents show her home movies of her life, her memories, but she has no recollection. Is she really the same girl she sees on the screen? Little by little, Jenna begins to remember. Along with the memories come questions--questions no one wants to answer for her. What really happened after the accident?

Click on the title to place it on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

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Black Friday, Midwives, and Vonnegut

Soft Target by Stephen Hunter
Black Friday. America's largest shopping mall. Suburban Minneapolis. 3:00P.M.
Ten thousand people jam the aisles, the corridors, the elevators, and the escalators of America, the Mall--a giant Rubik's Cube of a structure with its own amusement park located in the spacious center atrium. Of those people, nine thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight have come to shop. The other twelve have come to kill.

Maria by Eugenia Price
Born in Charles Town, South Carolina, Mary, a skilled midwife, accompanied her first husband, British soldier David Fenwick, when his regiment fought the Spanish in Cuba. When Spain agreed to give all of Florida in exchange for the city of Havana, Mary (who will become known as Maria) and her husband were forced to relocate to the newly British garrison town of St. Augustine, Florida.

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields
Kurt Vonnegut remains one of the most influential, controversial, and popular novelists of the twentieth century. Millions know him as a counterculture guru, antiwar activist, and satirist of American culture. But few outside his family and friends knew the full arc of his extraordinary life.

Teen Pick of the Week: The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead: Volume 14 No Way Out by Robert Kirkman
The world we knew is gone. The world of commerce and frivolous necessity has been replaced by a world of survival and responsibility. An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept the globe, causing the dead to rise and feed on the living. In a matter of months society has crumbled, no goverment, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV. In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living.

Want to start this series in the beginning? Check out The Walking Dead: Volume 1 Days Gone Bye.

Click on the titles to place them on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

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Detectives and Saints

The Drop by Michael Connelly
Harry Bosch is facing the end of the line. He's been put on the DROP -- the Deferred Retirement Option Plan -- and given three years before he must retire from the LAPD. Seeing the end of the mission coming, Bosch wants cases more fiercely than ever, and in one morning he gets two. Relentlessly pursuing both cases, which are interwoven like the double helix of a DNA strand, Bosch makes two chilling discoveries: a sadistic killer operating unknown in the city for more than two decades, and a political conspiracy going back into the dark history of the police department.

Queen of America by Luis Alberto Urrea
After the bloody Tomochic rebellion of 1892, young Teresita Urrea, beloved healer and "Saint of Cabora," escapes with her father to Arizona. But besieged by pilgrims in desperate need of her healing powers and pursued by assassins sent by Mexican dictator Porfinrio Diaz, she has no choice but to flee the borderlands and embark on an extraordinary journey into the heart of turn-of-the-century America. Teresita's passage will take her to New York, San Francisco, and St. Louis, where she will encounter European royalty, Cuban poets, beauty queens, anxious immigrants, and grand tycoons--among them, a man who will force Teresita to finally ask herself the ultimate question: is a saint allowed to fall in love?

Click on the titles to place them on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

Teen Pick of the Week: Twisted

Twisted: An Intertwined Novel by Gena Showalter
Sixteen-year-old Aden Stone has had a hell of a week. He's been: Tortured by angry witches, hypnotized by a vengeful fairy, spied on by the most powerful vampire in existence, and, oh, yea, killed--twice. His vampire girlfriend might have brought him back to life, but he's never felt more out of control. There's a darkness within him, something taking over...changing him. Worse, because he was meant to die, death now stalks him at every turn. Any day could be his last. Once upon a time, the three souls trapped inside his head could have helped him. He could have protected himself. But as the darkness grows stronger, the souls grow weaker--just like his girlfriend. The more vampire Aden becomes, the more human Victoria becomes, until everything they know and love is threatened. Life couldn't get any worse. Could it?

Check out the other books in this series! Book 1: Intertwined and Book 2: Unraveled

Click on the titles to place them on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

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Teen Pick of the Week: Glimmerglass

Glimmerglass: A Faeriewalker Novel by Jenna Black
Dana Hathaway doesn't know it yet, but she's in big trouble. When her alcoholic mom shows up at her voice recital drunk, again, Dana decides she's had enough and runs away to find her mysterious father in Avalon: the only place on Earth where the regular, everyday world and the captivating, magical world of Faerie intersect. But from the moment Dana sets foot in Avalon, everything goes wrong, for it turns out she isn't just an ordinary teenage girl--she's a Faeriewalker, a rare individual who can travel between both worlds, and the only person who can bring magic into the human world and technology into Faerie. Soon, Dana finds herself tangled up in a cutthroat game of Fae politics. Someone's trying to kill her, and everyone seems to want something from her, from her newfound friends and family to Ethan, the hot Fae guy Dana figures she'll never have a chance with...until she does. Caught between two worlds, Dana isn't sure where she'll ever fit in or who can be trusted, not to mention if her world will ever be normal again.

Read the following two books in this series with Book 2: Shadowspell and then Book 3: Sirensong!

Click on the titles to place them on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

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Teen Pick of the Week: The Scorch Trials

The Scorch Trials by James Dashner
Solving the maze was supposed to be the end. No more puzzles. No more variables. And no more running. Thomas was sure that escape meant he and the Gladers would get their lives back. But no one really knew what sort of life they were going back to. Burned by sun flares and baked by a new, brutal climate, the earth is a wasteland. Government has disintegrated--and with it, order-- and now Cranks, people covered in festering wounds and driven to murderous insanity by their infectious disease known as the Flare, roam the crumbling cities hunting for their next victim... and meal. The Gladers are far from done running. Instead of freedom, they find themselves faced with another trial. They must cross the Scorch, the most burned-out section of the world, and arrive at a safe haven in two weeks.

Be sure to read the first in the Maze Runner trilogy titled The Maze Runner by James Dashner. Also newly published is the third book The Death Cure by James Dashner.

Click on the titles to place them on hold at the Ventress Memorial Library!

New Fiction this Week

The Sisters by Nancy Jensen
Growing up in hardscrabble Kentucky in the 1920s, with their mother dead and their stepfather an ever-present threat, Bertie Fischer and her older sister, Mabel, have no one but each other--with perhaps a sweetheart for Bertie waiting in the wings. But on the day that Bertie receives her eighth-grade diploma, good intentions go terribly wrong. A choice made in desperate haste sets off a chain of misunderstandings that will divide the sisters and reverberate through three generations of women.

The River Killers by Bruce Burrows
Danny Swanson, Department of Fisheries and Oceans employee and ex-fisherman, isn't exactly upset when he's reassigned from a desk job in Ottawa to a job on the West Coast. His superiors think they're punishing him for insubordination, but Danny is pleased to be back on the Pacific, reconnecting with his old fishing buddies. Revisiting his past life, though, is trolling up some old memories, including a troubling incident from ten years ago, when Danny and his crew pulled up a deformed fish. His shipmate, Billy, reported it to the DFO in Vancouver. Billy and the fish were never seen again. Danny's buddy is on his mind when he stumbles across a photo of the fish in the DFO database, and now Danny won't let Billy's disappearance go unsolved.

The Curse by Harold Robbins
Art investigator Madison Dupre knows a fake when she sees it. When the mysterious Dr. Kaseem offers to pay her a handsome sum to "ransom" a scarab stolen from the tomb of King Tut, her gut tells her to walk away. Since she still needs to pay the rent, Madison throws caution to the wind and prepares to search for the Heart of Egypt. Before she can pack a suitcase, she finds herself framed for murder and on the run. Drawn to Egypt in search of the scarab, Madison is trapped in the land of pharaohs when her passport is seized at the airport. She knows she is being played by Kaseem, who believes the Heart has the power to galvanize the masses to support his secret cause.

True Crime and Hairdressing

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale
It is midnight on 30th June 1860 and all is quiet in the Kent family's elegant house in Road, Wiltshire. The next morning, however, they wake to find that their youngest son has been the victim of an unimaginably gruesome murder. Even worse, the guilty party is surely one of their number--the house was bolted from the inside. As Jack Whicher, the most celebrated detective of his day, arrives at Road to track down the killer, the murder provokes national hysteria at the thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class home--scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing.

Upper Cut: Highlights of My Hollywood Life by Carrie White
Behind the scenes of every Hollywood photo shoot, TV appearance, and party in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, there was Carrie White. As the "First Lady of Hairdressing," Carrie collaborated with Richard Avedon on shoots for Vogue, partied with Jim Morrison, styled Sharon Tate's hair before her wedding to Roman Polanski, and got high with Jimi Hendrix. But behind the glamorous facade, Carrie's world was in perpetual disarray and always had been.

Teen Pick of the Week: Heist Society

Uncommon Criminals: A Heist Society Novel by Ally Carter
Katarina Bishop has worn a lot of labels in her short life: Friend. Niece. Daughter. Thief. But for the last two months she's simply been known as the girl who ran the crew that robbed the greatest museum in the world. That's why Kat isn't surprised when she's asked to steal the infamous Cleopatra Emerald so it can be returned to its rightful owners. There are only three problems. First, the gem hasn't been seen in public in thirty years. Second, since the fall of the Egyptian empire and the suicide of Cleopatra, no one who holds the emerald keeps it for long--and in Kat's world, history almost always repeats itself. But it's the third problem that makes Kat's crew the most nervous, and that is... the emerald is cursed. Kat might be in way over her head, but she's not going down without a fight. After all, she has her best friend--the gorgeous Hale--and the rest of her crew with her as they chase the Cleopatra around the globe dodging curses and realizing that the same tricks and cons her family has used for centuries are useless this time. Which means, this time, Katarina Bishop is making up her own rules.

England, Spain, Ireland, and France

Tides of War by Stella Tillyard
Tides of War opens in England in 1812 with the recently married, charmingly unconventional Harriet prepared to say good-bye to her husband, James, as he leaves to join the Duke of Wellington's troops in Spain. Their interwoven stories of love and betrayal propel this sweeping and panoramic novel as it moves between Regency London on the cusp of modernity--a city in love with science, the machine, money--and the shocking violence of the Peninsular War. When Harriet befriends the older and protective Kitty, Lady Wellington, her life begins to change in unexpected ways.

The Chisellers by Brendan O'Carroll
Mother. Father. Business consultant. Cop. To her seven high-spirited "chisellers," Agnes Browne is all of these, and more. In the Dublin working-class neighborhood known as The Jarro, it's the Browne clan against the world--and against the backstreet villains and white-collar emissaris of market forces that threaten to tear this upwardly aspiring family apart. The Browne brood is about to be relocated to the wilds of suburban Finglas when their tenement is demolished as part of an "Inner City Renewal Plan." With the help of her ambitious eldest boy and her persistant French suitor, Agnes copes with the ups and downs of "rural" life, one unscrupulous gangster, and the son who is well on his way to breaking his mother's heart.

Obedience by Jacqueline Yallop
Sister Bernard has lived in a grey-stone convent in rural France for more than seventy years. In that time, a once youthful and lively cloister has gradually emptied, until only Bernard and two other nuns remain, a knot of survivors facing the creeping challenges of old age--ailing bodies and worn-thin friendships, slips of minds and, in their most secret moments, slips of faith. Now, the halls will fall silent as the three women pack away their few possessions into wooden boxes, preparing to leave the building that has been their home for decades.

Teen Pick of the Week: Soul Surfer

Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Fighting to Get Back on the Board by Bethany Hamilton
They say Bethany Hamilton has saltwater in her veins. How else could one explain the passion that drives her to surf? Or that nothing--not even the loss of her arm--could come between her and the waves? That Halloween morning in Kauai, Hawaii, Bethany responded to the shark's stealth attack with the calm of a teenage girl with God on her side, resolutely pushing aside her pain and panic while being rescued and brought back to shore. "When can I surf again?" was the first thing Bethany asked after her emergency surgery, leaving no doubt that her spirit and determination were part of a greater story--a tale of personal empowerment and spiritual grit that shows the body is no more essential to surfign, perhaps even less so, than the soul.

Place this item on hold by clicking on the title! Also feel free to email me with your teen pick of the week suggestions and/or reviews.

Reality and Amnesia

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True by Richard Dawkins
Magic takes many forms. Supernatural magic is what our ancestors used in order to explain the world before they developed the scientific method. The ancient Egyptians explained the night by suggesting the goddess Nut swallowed the sun. The Vikings believed a rainbow was the gods' bridge to earth. The Japanese used to explain earthquakes by conjuring a gigantic catfish that carried the world on its back--earthquakes occurred each time it flipped its tail. These are magical, extraordinary tales. But there is another kind of magic, and it lies in the exhilaration of discovering the real answers to these questions. It is the magic of reality---and science. This book is packed with clever thought experiments, dazzling illustrations, and jaw-dropping facts.

My Life, Deleted: A Memoir by Scott Bolzan
Awakening in a hospital with no memory of who he was or how he got there, the forty-six year old didn't know that the petite blonde at his side was his wife of twenty-four years , Joan-- or even what a wife was. He couldn't remember the births of his two young-adult children, the daughter he'd lost, his time as an offensive lineman for the NFL's Cleveland Browns, or his flourishing aviation career. Scott's life and the lives of everyone who loved him were forever changed when he slipped, hit his head, and lost consciousness in his office bathroom, suffering one of the most severe cases of permanent retrograde amnesia on record.

Teen Picks: Series The Looking Glass Wars

Our first Teen Pick of the week is the third book in the series The Looking Glass Wars: Archenemy by Frank Beddor
The power of imagination has been lost! Now it's all about the artillery as AD52s, crystal shooters, spikejack tumblers, and orb cannons are unleashed in a war of weapons and brute force. As Alyss searches wildly for the solution to the disaster that has engulfed her queendom, Arch declares himself King of Wonderland. The moment is desperate enough for Alyss to travel back to London for answers, where Arch's assassins are threatening Alice Liddell and her family. But after coming to the Liddell's assistance, Alyss discovers herself trapped in a conundrum of evaporating puddles. The shimmering portals that exist to transport her home through the Pool of Tears are disappearing! What is happening to Wonderland?

Want to begin this whole series? Try the first book The Looking Glass Wars and the second book The Looking Glass Wars: Seeing Redd by Frank Beddor

Any suggestions for Teen Pick of the week, for readalikes, or just overall input? Email Amy.

Coming Soon!!!

Starting this week I'll be posting a Teen Pick of the week as well as the regular weekly new book reviews.

Brave Women

Barefoot in Baghdad: A Story of Identity--My Own And What It Means to Be a Woman in Chaos by Manal Omar
An American aid worker of Arab descent, Manal Omar moves to Iraq to help as many women as she can rebuild their lives. She quickly finds herself drawn into the saga of a people determined to rise from the ashes of war and sanctions and rebuild their lives in the face of crushing chaos. This is a chronicle of Omar's friendships with several Iraqis whose lives are crumbling before her eyes. It is a tale of love, as her relationship with one Iraqi man intensifies in a country in turmoil. And it is the heartrending stories of the women in Iraq, as they grapple with what it means to be female in a homeland you no longer recognize.

The Winter Rose by Jennifer Donnelly
Every now and again, a storyteller comes along who can take us completely into her world and make us wish we never had to leave it. This is such a tale. When India Selwyn Jones, a young woman from a noble family, graduates from the London School of Medicine for Women in 1900, her professors advise her to set up her practice in London's esteemed Harley Street. Driven and idealistic, India chooses to work in the city's East End instead, serving the desperately poor. In these grim streets, India meets--and saves the life of--London's most notorious gangster, Sid Malone. A hard, wounded man, Malone is the opposite of India's aristocratic fiance, Freddie Lytton, a rising star in the House of Commons. Though Malone represents all she despises, India finds herself unwillingly drawn ever closer to him, intrigued by his hidden, mysterious past.

Try Some SciFi!

A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin
This is the third volume in George R.R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire. The first volume is A Game of Thrones and the second volume is A Clash of Kings. Of the five contenders for power, one is dead, another in disfavor, and still the wars rage as violently as ever, as alliances are made and broken. Joffrey, of House Lannister, sits on the Iron Throne, the uneasy ruler of the land of the Seven Kingdoms. His most bitter rival, Lord Stannis, stands defeated and disgraced, the victim of a jealous sorceress who holds him in her evil thrall. But young Robb, of House Stark, still rules the North from the fortress of Riverrun. Robb plots against his despised Lannister enemies, even as they hold his sister hostage at King's Landing, the seat of the Iron Throne. Meanwhile, making her way across a blood-drenched continent is the exiled queen, Daenerys, mistress of the only three dragons still left in the world...

Retribution: A Dark-Hunter Novel by Sherrilyn Kenyon
A hired gunslinger, William Jessup Brady lived his life with one foot in the grave. He believed that every life had a price, until the day when he finally found a reason to live. In one single act of brutal betrayal, he lost everything, including his life. Brought back by a Greek goddess to be one of her Dark-Hunters, Brady gave his immortal soul for vengeance and swore he'd spend eternity protecting the human he'd once considered prey. Orphaned as a toddler, Abigail Yager was taken in by a family of vampires and raised on one belief: Dark-Hunters are the evil who prey on both their people and mankind, and they must all be destroyed. While protecting her adoptive race, she has spent her life eliminating the Dark-Hunters and training for the day when she meets the man who killed her family: Jess Brady.

7th Sigma by Steven Gould
Welcome to the territory. Leave your metal behind, all of it. The bugs will eat it, and they'll go right through you to get it...Don't carry it, don't wear it, and for god's sake, don't come here if you've got a pacemaker. The bugs showed up about fifty years ago---tiny, self-replicating, solar-powered, metal-eating machines. No one knows where they came from. They don't like water, though, so they've stayed in the desert Southwest. The territory. People still live here, but they do it without metal. Log cabins, ceramics, what plastic they can get that will survive the sun and heat. Technology has adapted and so have the people. Kimble Monroe has chosen to live in the territory. He was born here, and when his father was airlifted out for emergency medical treatment, he didn't follow. Instead, Kim lives on his own, one step ahead of the law-enforcement agents who are looking for him. Kim is extraordinarily well-adapted and has an uncanny ability to work around the bugs. He's one in a million. Maybe one in a billion.

Destinations and Einstein

Destination Cortez Island: A Sailor's Life Along the BC Coast by June Cameron
June Cameron's heart and saltwater soul have been anchored in the caves along the British Columbia coast ever since she was a child. For nearly two decades, beginning in the 1930s, she and her family made the annual summer trek from Vancouver's False Creek northwest to her pioneering grandparents' homestead on Cortez Island. Of the Loumar, the family's trusty 36-foot wooden boat, June recalls, "Best of all, she was our home, filled with apple boxes full of books.. and most of the supplies we needed, except for the soft cakes of yeast Mother needed for breadmaking. Those we bought every other week at Refuge Cove." Life's events charted an eventful course for June far from Refuge and Cortez until fond memories of her beloved cruising ground were reawakened by her late father's taped reminiscences.

Einstein on the Road by Josef Eisinger
At the height of his fame, Albert Einstein traveled throughout the world, from Japan to South America and many places in between. During these voyages, between 1922 and 1933, he was in the habit of keeping travel diaries in which he recorded his impressions of people and events, as well as his musings on everything from music to politics to quantum mechanics and psychoanalysis. These fascinating records, which have never been published in their entirety, are the basis for this engaging personal portrait of Einstein the man.

Funny Memoirs

Happy Accidents by Jane Lynch
In the summer of 1974, a fourteen-year-old girl in Dolton, Illinois, had a dream. A dream to become an actress, like her idols Ron Howard and Vicki Lawrence. But it was along way from the South Side of Chicago to Hollywood, and it didn't help that she'd recently dropped out of the school play, The Ugly Duckling. Or that Hollywood casting directors she wrote to replied that "professional training was a requirement." But the funny thing is, it all came true. Through a series of Happy Accidents, Jane Lynch created an improbably--and hilarious--path to success.

My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up by Russell Brand
Russell Brand learned early on to make a joke of fear and failure. From a troubled childhood in industrial Essex, England, to his descent into addictions to alcohol, drugs, and sex in the seamy underbelly of London, Brand has seen his share of both and miraculously lived to tell the tale. He leads readers on a rollicking journey through his disastrous school career, his infamous antics on MTV, and his multifarious sexual adventures. But this irreverent memoir is a story not simply of struggle but also of redemption, a testament to the difficulty of discovering what you want from life and the remarkable power of a bloody-minded determination to get it.

Seances, Investigations, and Polar Explorations

How to Survive a Killer Seance by Penny Warner
Presley Parker's newest gig is a seance party at San Jose's famous Winchester Mystery House. Her client Jonathan Ellington plans to use the event to unveil his new holographic technology, which will appear to bring former owner Sarah Winchester back from the dead. But the stunt backfires when a disembodied voice accuses Ellington of infidelity in front of his wife and business associates, and the techie monitoring the holograph is found murdered. Suspicion falls on Ellington, but as Presley tries to get at the truth, she doesn't need a Ouija board to tell her someone wants to scare her to death!

Dark Side by Belinda Bauer
In bleak midwinter, the people of Shipcott are shocked by the murder of an elderly woman in her bed. As snow cuts off the village, local policeman Jonas Holly is torn between catching a brutal killer and protecting his vulnerable wife, Lucy. When the inquiry is commandeered by an abrasive senior detective, Jonas finds himself derided by his colleagues and ashamed to admit to Lucy that he's been sidelined. It seems his first murder investigation ma be over before it's begun. But when he receives a series of increasingly sinister anonymous notes, Jonas is thrust back into the center of the case. Someone in the village is taunting him, blaming him for the tragedy. Someone thinks he's not doing his job; someone seems to know every move he makes. And soon Jonas has to ask: Who's hunting who?

South With the Sun: Roald Amundsen, His Polar Explorations, & the Quest for Discovery by Lynne Cox
Roald Amundsen, "the last of the Vikings," left his mark on the Heroic Era as one of the most successful polar explorers ever. A powerfully built man more than six feet tall, Amundsen began his career of adventure at the age of fifteen (he was born in Norway in 1872 to a family of merchant sea captains and rich ship owners); twenty-five years later he was the first man to reach both the North and South Poles.

Jungles and Running

The Jungle by Clive Cussler
A Novel of the Oregon Files. Jungles come in many forms. There are the rainforests of the Burmese highlands. There are the lies and betrayals of the world of covert operations. And there are the dark and twisted thoughts of a man bent on near-global domination. To pull off their latest mission, Juan Cabrillo and all the crew of the Oregon must survive them all. A devastating new weapon unleashed in thirteenth-century China...a daring rescue along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border...a woman gone missing in the jungles of northern Thailand and Myanmar... all of these events will lead to the greatest threat against U.S. security ever known.

Running Blind by Lee Child
A Jack Reacher Novel. Across the country, women are being murdered, victims of a disciplined and clever killer who leaves no trace evidence, no fatal wounds, no signs of struggle, and no clues to a motive. They are, truly, perfect crimes. In fact, there's only one things that links the victims. Each of the women knew Jack Reacher--and it's got him running blind.