Library Loot

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Marg that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

It was library day for me today, although kind of all out of whack.  I did get my tacos, but my husband was hungry so we went there before the library (oh no!  a change in routine!  the horror!).  Then I had to write my freakin' paper for my Organizational Leadership class to turn it in today instead of the usual pattern which is a Monday turn-in so I didn't get to come home and immediately play with my books (most irritating).

In any event, the paper is finished and turned in so now I can play with my books and I have survived the change in my routine with minimum damage to my psyche.  Did I mention that now I get to play with my books?  Because, you know, that's a big part of it - looking at them and admiring the pretty covers and handling them.  I worked at the library when I was in high school and spent a lot of time in the cataloging department which was great fun because I got to see the new books first when they came in and I got to learn to love that new book smell (like that new car smell only better).  I think that's part of why the whole electronic reader thing just doesn't appeal to me - it's missing that tactile bookness that I like so much (yes, I know bookness isn't a real word).  Anyway.

Here's what I got:

Birthright:  The True Story that Inspired Kidnapped by A. Roger Ekirch.   For the first time, the remarkable story that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. No saga of personal hardship so captivated the British public in the eighteenth century as that of James Annesley, the presumptive heir of five aristocratic titles and scion of the mighty house of Annesley. Kidnapped at twelve years of age by his uncle, James was shipped from Dublin to America in 1728 as an indentured servant. Only after thirteen years did he finally manage to escape, returning to Ireland to bring his blood rival, the Earl of Anglesea, to justice in one of the epic trials of the century.

Thelonious Monk:  The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D.G. Kelley.  "The piano ain't got no wrong notes!" So ranted Thelonious Sphere Monk, who proved his point every time he sat down at the keyboard. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk's hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. But these labels tell us little about the man or his music.In the first book on Thelonious Monk based on exclusive access to the Monk family papers and private recordings, as well as on a decade of prodigious research, prize-winning historian Robin D. G. Kelley brings to light a startlingly different Thelonious Monk -- witty, intelligent, generous, politically engaged, brutally honest, and a devoted father and husband.

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel.   As 19th-century novelists Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens both discovered, the French Revolution makes for great drama. This lesson has not been lost on Hilary Mantel, whose A Place of Greater Safety brings a 20th-century sensibility to the stirring events of 1789. Mantel's approach is nothing if not ambitious: her three main characters, Georges-Jacques Danton, Maximilien Robespierre, and Camille Desmoulins, happen to have been major players in the early days of the revolution--men whose mix of ambition, idealism, and ego helped unleash the Terror and brought them eventually to their own tragic ends. As Mantel points out in her forward, none of these men was famous before the revolution; thus not a great deal is known about their early lives. What would constrain the biographer, however, is an open invitation to the fiction writer to let the imagination run wild; thus Mantel freely extrapolates from what is known of her protagonists' personalities and relationships with each other to construct their pasts.

Hardball by Sara Paretsky.  Chicago's unique brand of ball is sixteen-inch slow pitch, played in leagues all over the city for more than a century. But in politics, in business, and in law enforcement, the game is hardball. When V. I. Warshawski is asked to find a man who's been missing for four decades, a search that she figured would be futile becomes lethal. Old skeletons from the city's racially charged history, as well as haunting family secrets-her own and those of the elderly sisters who hired her-rise up to brush her back from the plate with a vengeance. A young cousin whom she's never met arrives from Kansas City to work on a political campaign; a nun who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. dies without revealing crucial evidence; and on the city's South Side, people spit when she shows up. Afraid to learn that her adored father might have been a bent cop, V. I. still takes the investigation all the way to its frightening end.

Invisible Boy by Cornelia Read.  The smart-mouthed but sensitive runaway socialite Madeline Dare is shocked when she discovers the skeleton of a brutalized three-year-old boy in her own weed-ridden family cemetery outside Manhattan. Determined to see that justice is served to the perpetrators, Madeline finds herself examining her own troubled personal history, and the sometimes hidden, sometimes all-too-public class and racial warfare that penetrates every level of society in the savage streets of New York City during the early 1990s.

Dreaming the Eagle by Manda Scott.   Dreaming the Eagle is the first part of the gloriously imagined epic trilogy of the life of Boudica.  Boudica means Bringer of Victory (from the early Celtic word “boudeg”). She is the last defender of the Celtic culture in Britain; the only woman openly to lead her warriors into battle and to stand successfully against the might of Imperial Rome -- and triumph.  It is 33 AD and eleven-year-old Breaca (later named Boudica), the red-haired daughter of one of the leaders of the Eceni tribe, is on the cusp between girl and womanhood. She longs to be a Dreamer, a mystical leader who can foretell the future, but having killed the man who has attacked and killed her mother, she has proven herself a warrior. Dreaming the Eagle is also the story of the two men Boudica loves most: Caradoc, outstanding warrior and inspirational leader; and Bàn, her half-brother, who longs to be a warrior, though he is manifestly a Dreamer, possibly the finest in his tribe’s history. Bàn becomes the Druid whose eventual return to the Celts is Boudica’s salvation.

Hellraisers by Robert Sellers.  Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Oliver Reed: On screen they were stars. Off screen they were legends. Hellraisers is the story of drunken binges of near biblical proportions, parties and orgies, broken marriages, riots, and wanton sexual conquests. Indeed acts so outrageous that if you or I had perpetrated them we could have ended up in jail. They got away with the kind of behaviour that today’s film stars could scarcely dream of, because of their mercurial acting talent and because the press and public loved them. They were truly the last of a breed.

Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt.  Set in Lancashire, England, during the infamous witch trials of 1612, Daughters of the Witching Hill reveals the true story of Bess Southerns, aka Old Demdike, cunning woman, healer and the most notorious of the Pendle Witches, and of Alizon Device, her granddaughter, struggling to come to terms with her family’s troubling legacy. Though the name of the Pendle Witches lives on, few know the hard-hitting details of the witch-hunt which tore apart a community. Set in an era of religious intolerance, political strife, suspicion and social inequality, this haunting story of strong women and family love and betrayal is more relevant than ever.

Whew!  What a great haul of books to look forward to!  I love the library!  Now I just have to decide which one to read first ...