Staff Picks: Carol - Youth Services

The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel By Scott, Michael 2007/05 - Delacorte Press Books for Young Readers 0385733577 Check Our Catalog According to legend, Nicholas Flamel discovered the secret of eternal life from the powerful book of Abraham the Mage--a book he has protected since his death in 1418. In the wrong hands, it will destroy the world. When the book is stolen, Sophie and Josh Newman find themselves in the middle of the greatest legend of all time. ...More

The Magician By Scott, Michael 2008/06 - Delacorte Press 0385733585 Check Our Catalog After fleeing Ojai, Nicholas, Sophie, Josh, and Scatty emerge in Paris--home for Nicholas Flamel. Only this homecoming is anything but sweet. As the second novel of this bestselling series gets underway, it becomes time for Sophie to learn the second elemental magic: Fire Magic. ...More

The Sorceress By Scott, Michael 2009/05 - Delacorte Press Books for Young Readers 0385735294 Check Our Catalog Book Three begins as Sophie and Josh Newman show every sign of being the twins of prophecy, and Flamel vows to protect them from the Dark Elders. But he must find an Elder who can teach the siblings the third elemental magic--Water Magic. The only Elder who can do that is Gilgamesh--and he is quite, quite insane. ...More

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The Professor's Daughter

When I was helping someone find a graphic novel I ran across this slim volume by Sfar and Guibert. The Professor's Daughter is a charming little story of an Egyptian Mummy coming to life in Victorian London while the Professor is away.

The mummy, prince Imhotep, instantly falls for the young and mischievous Professor's Daughter and their courtship leads to all sorts of troubles and mishaps. The story and sepia-colored illustrations are irresistible, if you are looking for a short and quick read checkout The Professor's Daughter.

My "To Read" Pile

Mine is on my Amish-carved/exploited coffee table, with a satellite in my car. These are the books which I would like to read next: Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan (I believe you can read cookbooks like novels, and I do...), Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (hailed as the brightest new thriller writer--really looking forward to that one!), Palace Circle by Rebecca Dean (British nobility soap opera, always a treat for me!), and an old Anne Rivers Siddons called Heartbreak Hotel, which is the lovely paisley buckram volume you see in the foreground. The wine you see is Two Buck Chuck Sauvignon Blanc, with a burst of sweet grassiness atop a sparkling bottom note. The books in my car are Shanghai Girls by Lisa See and Three Guys From Miami Cook Cuban by Glenn Lindgren. Who doesn't sound Cuban, and he isn't; he's a Minnesota svenska who married into a Miami Cuban family and co-authored this cookbook with his realmente cubano brothers-in-law. The book has lots of color photos, a must in a good cookbook, in my opinion. (I need to see just how badly I overcooked something...)

We want to snoop in your "To Read" pile, so send us pix! Can't wait to see 'em!

Meet the Author: Michael Lewis

Family guy

Interview by Amy Scribner

As a first-time mother trying to make sense of a colicky newborn—one who seemingly needed only a few minutes of sleep every 24 hours—only one thing saved me from running screaming from the house. It was Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott, a hilarious, self-deprecating memoir chronicling her experience as a new mom. I read it obsessively, dog-earing certain pages and taking solace in the fact that another mother, somewhere, sometime, had found parenting a newborn as frustrating, stressful and draining as I did.

If only Home Game had been around then.

Michael Lewis, probably best known for his sharply reported look at the finances of major league baseball, Moneyball, now focuses his keen wit and sharp observations on his own family. Married to former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren (who took our cover photo), and the father of three young children, he knows the challenges of parenthood and isn’t afraid to talk about them.

Unabashedly frank, hilarious and sweetly sentimental (“I am addicted to my wife,” he admits at one point), Home Game is divided into three parts—one for each of his children. Lewis spoke with BookPage from his home in Berkeley, California, where he’d just returned from a family vacation to South Beach, Miami. Family vacation, yes. Family-friendly vacation, not entirely.

“My nine- and six-year-old girls, this was more exposed flesh than they’ve ever seen in their lives,” Lewis says of the notoriously scantily clad (and surgically enhanced) South Beach crowd. “There was a man in a gold thong. There was a topless beach. Both girls were saying, ‘Don’t look Daddy! Don’t look!’ It was hard not to. These (breasts) were like looking at the seventh wonder of the world. In Berkeley, all the boobs go down to the navels.”

Bookletters: Audio

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Contaminated waste, wasted lives

When Commissario Guido Brunetti sat across from Franca Marinello at an elegant dinner party at the home of Count Falier, his titled father-in-law, he had no idea that this charming woman, married to a much older, wheeler-dealer businessman, would become a major figure in one of his nastier cases. At the time, he just enjoyed their shared love of Cicero and Virgil and wondered at her mangled face-lift. That same day, an officer working for a special environmental branch of the Carabinierie had come to see Brunetti about a murder, probably linked to the illegal transport of toxic waste from the garbage-filled, Camora-controlled South to areas in the Veneto. About Face, ably read by David Colacci, Donna Leon’s 18th novel starring Commissario Brunetti, the gently determined detective with a passion for justice, begins with these two disparate threads. And when it ends, Leon has skillfully twisted them into in a nuanced tale of corruption, contamination and coercion. As always, she’s combined a good Italian police procedural (well, Brunetti would probably call it a non-procedural), set in the real Venice tourists never see, with cogent commentary on contemporary problems. Read More...

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Guest Post

Okay, I confess, I'm a reluctant reader. More specifically, I'm a reluctant fiction reader. It's just really hard for me to find a book that will fill my interest. I start reading and after a few chapters I lose interest, I start day dreaming about my next vacation or something all together different.

Several months ago I picked up the first book in the Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse series (Dead Until Dark) thinking the same would happen but was shocked to discover I couldn't get enough! Today I checked out book six, All Together Dead.

I love the books because they are filled with lots of action and dialog. I can't get enough.

What books can you not get enough of? Any specific authors?

-Robert

Grave Sight

Looking for something to read 5 minutes to 5:30 on a Friday I picked Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris. I have read her Sookie Stackhouse mysteries and I thought I would give her other mystery series a try.

Harper Connelly has a special gift, or maybe its a curse. As a teenager she was struck by lightning through the bathroom window while curling her hair for a date. This brush with the deadly voltage led to her gift, an ability to find dead bodies.

In Grave Sight Harper and her brother Tolliver find themselves in a tourist trap of a small town, Sarne, where they are hired to find the body of a young teenage girl. Harper does her job fast and without trouble, even finding another body of a dead hunter in the area, but the fear of the townspeople keep Harper and Tolliver in Sarne longer than what they bargained for.

Teen Tuesday - time to laugh out loud!

Shakespeare Shapiro has always hated his name. His parents bestowed it on him as some kind of sick joke when he was born, and his life has gone downhill from there, one embarrassing incident after another. Entering his senior year of high school, Shakespeare has never had a girlfriend, his younger brother is cooler than he is, and his best friend's favorite topic of conversation is his bowel movements.

But Shakespeare will have the last laugh. He is chronicling every mortifying detail in his memoir, the writing project each senior at Shakespeare's high school must complete. And he is doing it brilliantly. And, just maybe, a prize-winning memoir will bring him respect, admiration, and a girlfriend . . . or at least a prom date. Try Spanking Shakespeare for a hilarious reading adventure!