Oskaloosa Picks - April 27, 2014

Over on Facebook, we asked "What are you reading?" Here's a look at some of Oskaloosa's picks this week:

NOS4A2
by Joe Hill

Charles Talent Manx likes to take kids for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. He can slip onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing - and terrifying - playground of amusements he calls "Christmasland." Now, Victoria McQueen, the only kid to ever escape Manx's evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never stopped thinking about her. He's on the road again and he's picked up a new passenger: Vic's own son.

Five Days at Memorial*
by Sheri Fink

Physician and reporter Sheri Fink provides a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, and a suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice. She reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amid chaos.

Critical Mass
by Sara Paretsky

V.I. Warshawski's closest friend in Chicago is the Viennese-born doctor Lotty Herschel, who lost most of her family in the Holocaust. Lotty escaped to London in 1939 on the Kindertransport with a childhood playmate, Kitty Saginor Binder. When Kitty's daughter finds her life is in danger, she calls Lotty, who, in turn, summons V.I. to help.

Joyland
by Stephen King

Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.

Grasshopper Jungle
by Andrew Smith

Austin Szerba narrates the end of humanity as he and his best friend Robby accidentally unleash an army of giant, unstoppable bugs and uncover the secrets of a decades-old experiment gone terribly wrong.

Look Me in the Eye
by John Elder Robison

John Robison longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits had earned him the label "social deviant." No guidance came from his mother, who conversed with light fixtures, or his father, who spent evenings drunk. No wonder he gravitated to machines, which could be counted on. His savant-like ability to visualize electronic circuits landed him a gig with KISS, for whom he created their legendary fire-breathing guitars.

Long Knives*
by Charles Rosenberg

Jenna James' life has been smooth-sailing since she left the high-powered law firm of Marbury Marfan to become a professor at a prestigious law school. But things take a shocking turn one morning when a student, Primo, comes to Jenna's office seeking her advice about a treasure map he recently inherited. When Primo turns up dead and Jenna is suddenly the prime suspect in a murder investigation, everyone turns on her.

What Remains
by Carole Radziwill

A memoir about a girl from a working class town who becomes an award-winning television producer and marries a prince, Anthony Radziwill, nephew of John F. Kennedy. Carole DiFalco Radziwill grew up in a suburb with a large, eccentric cast of characters. At the age of nineteen, she struck out for New York.





If you would like to read any of these books too, you can click on the title and place a hold with your library card number in our online catalog.

Titles marked with a * are not currently available in our catalog. If you would like to request that the library purchase one, you can fill out a suggestion for purchase form on our website.

All book descriptions taken from WorldCat or our online catalog.

Blue Zones Power 9: Move Naturally

The Blue Zones Project officially kicked off in Oskaloosa on April 14, 2014. Centered around nine common denominators, The Power 9, Blue Zones promotes a lifestyle for longer, healthier, better lives. This is the first post in a nine-part series in which we'll discuss resources available at the library to help you get on track with the Blue Zones Project.

#1. Move Naturally From the Blue Zones website: "The world’s longest-lived people don’t pump iron or run marathons. Instead, their environments nudge them into moving without thinking about it." As simple as taking walking breaks at work to adopting a dog, we can increase the amount of natural movement in our lives. Here are a few titles in our collection to help get you started:

Breathwalk
Gurucharan Singh Khalsa, Ph.D. and Yogi Bhajan, Ph.D.

Breathwalk presents a series of easy to follow, transformational exercises that combine breathing and walking in very specific ways for specific benefits. You'll learn how to alleviate exhaustion, anxiety, sadness and other problems; heal physical, mental and spiritual conflict in your life; and enter a zone of total fitness within your own body and mind.

Walking Magazine's The Complete Guide to Walking
Mark Fenton

An interactive handbook that can make the difference for millions of Americans who struggle with weight loss, health and dietary concerns, stress and chronic fatigue. Fenton offers dozens of realistic solutions to help readers overcome their individual barriers to regular daily activity.

Active Living Every Day
Steven N. Blair, et al.

A 20-step program developed to help get you off the couch and onto your feet! Active Living Every Day is a self-paced program that uses checklists, charts, and four-color illustrations and photos to make the information clear and easy for you to use anytime, anywhere.

The Healthy Heart Walking Book
American Heart Association

Walk your way to health and well-being! Regardless of your level of fitness, you can improve your cardiovascular health, weight control, stress management, and overall well-being through a simple walking program.

Dogs for Dummies
Gina Spadafori

From mixes to purebreds, puppies to seniors, this friendly guide tells you what you need to know to choose, train and enjoy living with a dog.






If you'd like to check out any of these resources, click on the title to be taken to our online catalog. You can place a hold on the item using your library card number and your PIN.

Book descriptions borrowed from those printed on the books.

Staff Pick: Deja Dead

In Kathy Reichs' Deja Dead, Dr. Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist from North Carolina. After a shaky break up with her husband, she moves to Canada to work in Montreal's Laboratoire de Medecine Legale in an attempt to get a fresh start. There, it's her job to examine recovered bodies to help the police solve murders and missing persons cases.

During the course of her job, she finds the bodies of several women who appear to have been brutally murdered. In spite of the police not believing her, she thinks the cases are linked and that they have a sadistic serial killer on their hands. Determined to get justice for the women, she sets out on her own to find answers, and attracts the attention of the killer, putting herself and friends in grave danger.

I picked up Deja Dead after learning that one of my favorite TV shows, Bones, is loosely based upon this series. I wasn't sure what to think of the story at first because it was easy to see from the start just how different the book and TV series actually are, but I decided to keep reading in spite of that fact. I'm glad I did. After a couple of chapters, I found myself no longer trying to compare the book and TV series and simply reading the book for the story itself. It's very fast paced once it gets going and draws the reader in. And, because the writer is a forensic anthropologist herself, the details of the story ring true. That was one of the things I liked about the book - how real the details seemed to be.

I'm not the strongest fan of Mysteries, but the Temperance Brennan novels could easily change my mind if they are all like Deja Dead. I'm very glad that I decided to read it and would highly recommend it, especially to those who favor Bones. If you'd like to check out Deja Dead, you can place a hold on our copy with your library card number by clicking here.

-Amber

Staff Pick: The Mad Potter

The Mad Potter tells the story of George Ohr, an artist who lived in Biloxi, Mississippi during the late 1800's.  He discovered his love for pottery after working for a boyhood friend who owned a small pottery factory in New Orleans.  He took to it “like a duck in water” and was soon crafting creations of his own.

What began as a career with hopes of recognition and financial security gave way to George’s penchant for the whimsical and unusual.  Few bought his work, and like many artists, he became famous long after his death. George could not change his personality, anymore than he could  change his art to please others.  His work just didn't fit in with the times.  He was joyful and uninhibited in his creative life, truly celebrating individuality.

Retired in 1910, George told his children not to sell any of his pottery for 50 years.  Over 5,000 pieces stayed in storage until 1968, when an antiques dealer stumbled upon the collection at “Ojo’s Junk Yard and Machine Shop," Ohr’s son’s business.  Some of the newly discovered pottery sold for thousands of dollars.

This book is one of many new non-fiction selections in the children’s department of our library. If you'd like to check it out, you can place a hold on it with your library card number by clicking here.

-Nancy J

If you like Divergent...

Another young adult series that has wildly gained success, Veronica Roth's Divergent series is an action packed dystopian tale that takes place in post-apocalyptic Chicago. The population is divided into five factions based on a dedicated virtue. Beatrice - or Tris - discovers she doesn't quite fit into the molds this new society has developed, and her divergence is seen as a threat.

If you've read and loved the Divergent series, you should definitely check out some of these titles:

In the After
by Demetria Lunetta

In a post-apocalyptic world where nothing is as it seems, seventeen-year-old Amy and Baby, a child she found while scavenging, struggle to survive while vicious, predatory creatures from another planet roam the Earth.

The Program
by Suzanne Young

When suicide becomes a worldwide epidemic, the only known cure is The Program, a treatment in which painful memories are erased, a fate worse than death to seventeen-year-old Sloane who knows that The Program will steal memories of her dead brother and boyfriend.

Legend
by Marie Lu

In a dark future, when North America has split into two warring nations, fifteen-year-old Day, a famous criminal, and prodigy June, the brilliant soldier hired to capture him, discover that they have a common enemy. This is the first book in Lu's Legend trilogy.

The Giver
by Lois Lowry

Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.

The City of Ember
by Jeanne DuPrau

In the year 241, twelve-year-old Lina lives in an underground community whose infrastructure is deteriorating. She trades jobs on Assignment Day to be a Messenger to run to new places in her decaying but beloved city, perhaps even to glimpse Unknown Regions.




If you would like to read any of these books, you can click on the title and place a hold with your library card number in our online catalog.

(All book descriptions taken from our online catalog.)

Staff Pick: The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch is a 784 page tome chronicling the misadventures of a young man who gains possession of a famous Dutch masterpiece, a painting by the same name as the novel.

Captivated by the painting of a small bird tethered to a perch, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker obtains it after a bomb explodes at the New York City art gallery in which it was being displayed. This same explosion kills his mother, leaving him orphaned. Theo also receives a ring, given to him by a dying elderly man by the name of Welty. After dealing with social workers and the possibility of being shipped off to uncaring grandparents, he ends up under the temporary hospitality of the wealthy parents of a former friend from primary school.

Trying to come to terms with his mother's death, Theo delivers the ring, as promised, to an antique furniture shop and townhouse where he meets Welty's business partner, Hobie, and Welty's granddaughter, Pippa, who was also injured in the explosion. Meanwhile, Theo's estranged father shows up and whisks him off across the country to Las Vegas to live with him and his lover, Xandra with an X. There, Theo meets and befriends Boris, a Russian burnout who ends up playing a key role in Theo's misadventures. Those misadventures take him back to lavish New York, to Amsterdam, and through the criminal underworld, all for the enrapturing masterpiece that consumes him.

The Goldfinch - the novel - is a masterpiece in itself. Donna Tartt has a penchant for detail that - though leads to a lengthy story - often times provides a perfect visual for the setting. Wading through the detail, the reader comes upon scenes that are gripping and suspenseful. Anger, frustration, confusion, fear - I felt all of these while I followed Theo on his quest to come to terms with his past and set things right in his world.

If you'd like to check out a copy of The Goldfinch, it's available in our collection in both large print and regular print, as well as audio.

-William