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To the Bright Edge of the World deserves all the praise it has been receiving. In 1885, newly-married Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small group of men on an expedition into untamed Alaska Territory to explore the possibilities for future settlements and trade routes. He leaves his pregnant wife, Sophie, behind and they exchange letters, writing about the hardships they each face while away from the other.

It is written mainly as a series of journal entries, but photographs, drawings, newspaper articles, and official army reports are interspersed, making it seem more like memoir than a work

Antoinette Conway and her partner, Stephen Moran, are rookies and outsiders on the Dublin Murder Squad. Just as they're about to finish up their night shift, the boss gives them another dud case: Aislinn Murray has been reported dead via an anonymous call to a local police station. It was obviously her boyfriend, with whom she had a dinner date planned. Open-and-closed. So why does the boss put a senior detective, Breslin, on the case to watch over them? And why does his help seem more like obstruction?

While mysteries, Tana French's novels defy the most basic genre conventions. For example

Isabelle comes back to her family home after the death of her sister to find an autistic savant growing up in her sister's home. She teaches the girl, Karen, how to function in the world. Karen learns how to interact with the whole, not only through her aunt's patience, but also through the animals with whom she shares a special connection. Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World is Karen's story. She goes out into the world to gain the knowledge to, eventually, take over the family's failing tuna cannery. Her intelligence and her connection with animals leads her to create the first "humane"

When Jason Amundsen drops an egg farm bomb on his wife Lucie, she understandably balks at the idea. He’s already dragged her from city to city chasing his supposed dreams, but those dreams at least came with health benefits. This one? It’s too much, and Lucie successfully puts the kibosh on the idea. Until Jason gets laid off.

He gets laid off, and this silly dream of his won’t die. The rest of the story is of Lucie, Jason, and their two children, Abbie and Milo, all walking the tightrope between family and farm. Lucie must hold her home, husband, and children close to her heart, while the

In his introduction to Forever Words, Paul Muldoon says, “So ingrained in our collective unconscious is the voice of Johnny Cash that we can all but hear the boom-chicka boom-chicka of his guitar accompaniment, at once reassuring and disquieting in its very familiarity.” That was absolutely true for me as I was reading through this collection. 

Some of these poems are familiar songs by Cash, like “Don’t Take Your Gun to Town,” but the poetry expands the story beyond the recorded song, and reading it brings a new appreciation to the familiar lyrics. Others were previously unpublished works

“They lived in a house at the end of the road and were friends to mankind”- Kinneson family motto.

In 1930, in the Vermont town of Kingdom Common-- sharing a border with Canada-- lives the fiercely independent Miss Jane Hubble Kinneson, known to most as Miss Jane. On the dawn of her 50th birthday, she finds herself embroiled in a battle with her cousin, Eben Kinneson Esquire, for the preservation of her beloved land, Kingdom Mountain-- some of the last untouched wilderness and home to glacial ponds, flora and fauna, and wildlife dating  back 10,000 years. Enter Henry Satterfield, a weather

This is the first in a six book series, totaling some 3,000 pages, about a quiet man from Norway reflecting on parts of his life. It is boring and breathtaking at the same time. The author ruminates on the death of his father and his own mortality as he shuffles through memories of his childhood and then the more recent past. Day-to-day events such as making breakfast, working at a computer, and making phone calls take center stage. We all do things like this every day and then forget about them. Somehow, Karl Ove Knausgaard makes them memorable.

Happy December and welcome to our year-end edition of the new releases that will be hitting the shelves – and your hold lists – this month.

December is a time to look back and see what happened this year. It’s easy to get caught up in the rush to keep up with the hot new releases, but forget the books that took a while to find their audience. In this edition, instead of looking forward to see what is coming out this month, we’ll look backward to see the best books of the year. Here in Johnson County, we’ve had an exceptionally mild fall, but recently the temperature is finally dripping and

"After their English aunt dies, listless American twins Julia and Valentina travel to London to live in their aunt's now empty flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery. There they become embroiled in the day-to-day sagas of their eccentric neighbors. But soon they discover that something is alive in Highgate--something unable to move on."

A haunted, aging apartment in north London, bordering one of the most famous cemeteries in the world, complete with an unusual set of inhabitants and a bit of London's darker history sprinkled throughout . . . no one had to convince me to pick this one up. 

Un

This consists of four stories--"quarters," Sedgwick calls them--from four different eras. Each is a compelling, haunting meditation on human nature. Each has horror undertones, confronts suffering and misery. Each is distinct in style, tone, setting, and action. Each involves philosophical musings about the meaning of spirals in the way of Jungian archetypes (universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct; Wikipedia).

There is the girl who watches as her prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribe is ambushed and hunted by

Crosstalk is categorized as science fiction and yet, if it wasn’t for the telepathy, I could easily see the events in the book becoming reality in the near future.

Gossip, in this case workplace gossip, has always moved at the speed light. Between gossip and the omnipresence of social media, it’s nearly impossible to keep anything secret. Briddey Flannigan does her best, however, to keep her coworkers and her family from finding out that she and her boyfriend (and coworker) Trent are about to undergo an outpatient procedure designed to increase empathy between partners, the newest rage.

It’s

At 360 pages, with no recollection of when or why I requested it, I lugged Warrior Pose home thinking I would skim a little bit and move on to something a little less daunting. That didn’t happen. The story is engaging and despite many opportunities for editing, I forgave Willis and read the book cover to cover.

The first two thirds tells of Willis’ experience as a war correspondent. Both how he got into the business, and how he worked while hiding a very serious back injury in order to continue covering international stories. In my younger years, I was never one to follow news closely and

An open-and-shut domestic murder case turns out to be much more than Antionette Conway or Stephan Moran bargained for when assigned Aislinn Murray’s case. Beautiful Aislinn is found dead in her perfectly decorated home, alone, with the doors locked. Her boyfriend Rory Fallon has a dinner date at Aislinn’s that night but she never answers the door or his many calls.

Each of French's books revolve around a different detective in the Dublin Murder Squad. The Trespasser is told from Conway’s point-of-view. As the only woman, and therefore an outsider in the squad room, it is hard to gain respect

In The Butterfly Hours, Dann uses “one-word memory triggers like ‘table’ or ‘car’ . . . as a way” for students, and eventually herself, “to stitch together the patches of [their lives].” Some of the stories shared are those of her students, some are her own. All are beautiful.

The reading could have gone quickly, but I saved and savored the chapters. Assignments are listed at the end of the book and a photocopy of them now rests in the cover of my journal.

Much like Abigail Thomas’ Thinking About Memoir, Dann illustrates how surprising we can be to ourselves. But we don’t have to take her

Told mostly in reverse order, But I Love Him chronicles the relationship between Anna and Connor. The reader is introduced to Anna, a high school senior, who has spent the past year focused on Connor, and has slowly given up the people and things that were important to her prior to meeting him.

Through Anna’s accounts of her interactions with Connor and people in their lives, the reader gets a sense of the conflicted feelings Anna has toward him. The story being told from end to beginning is similar to viewing a mess being picked up—it starts off as a disaster, but piece by piece, things get

Welcome to a quick look at some new releases that will be hitting the bookshelves of a library near you!

Zadie Smith’s deep, enriching novels have been mainstays of book clubs for years, and her newest, Swing Time, follows that very same course charted in novels like White Teeth and On Beauty. Here, a young mixed-race girl in 1980s underclass London meets another brown girl and they bond over their shared love of dancing and obsession over the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The novel follows our unnamed narrator through her teen years and twenties as the two friends drift apart

If you knew the world was going to end, but you had the power to stop it, would you?

A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

~ Stephen Crane

Does an ant's life matter to you when you step on it?

Does your life matter to the universe when it steps on you?

Henry certainly doesn't think so. He doesn't think anyone's life matters. And he sees no reason to push the button that would save the world from destruction. Our lives are as meaningless as ants' lives

I’m of two minds about The Hopefuls. On the one hand, it is a thought-provoking look at a marriage under stress. On the other hand, I found the main character to be a bit lackluster.

Beth Kelly is a writer who loves her husband, Matt, enough to leave her beloved New York and move to an alien place – Washington D.C. Matt is an aspiring politician who joins the Obama campaign and gets a job in the administration after Obama’s victory. Beth finds a job that is definitely not her dream job, but it’s writing, and it keeps her occupied.

She has trouble acclimating to her new environment until

I’ve been obsessed with Abigail Thomas’s work, and I've been reading everything she’s written one after the other. I decided I wanted to read something else, not only to cleanse my palate, but so I would have a book I already know I’ll love waiting for me at some time in the future when I really, really need a good book to read. So I compromised and read an author whom Thomas had thanked in her acknowledgments. It worked out beautifully. Stephen Dobyns is a poet with a large body of work, but the only title readily available was The Burn Palace. I’m not typically drawn to police procedurals

In Zeroes we were introduced to a group of teens with unusual, mostly subtle superpowers who find themselves in an increasing amount of trouble with both drug dealers and the police, using the very powers that got them into trouble in the first place to get them out again. I liked the novel a lot, so when I found out about the sequel, I was very excited.

My excitement was not misplaced. Like Zeroes, Swarm gets into the action quickly, but unlike the first book, we don't need to get to know the main characters, so the plot moves even faster, the tension ratcheted up. It's also nice to see the

I suffered through this book! (I know what you're thinking, "Why? Life is too short to read books you don't like! Yada yada . . . .") Well I finished it because I had to lead the discussion at book club. (Spoiler! I'm the only one who finished it! Everyone else quit.)

Allan Karlson climbs out the widow because he doesn't want to go to his 100th birthday party. He then manages to steal 50 thousand dollars and forms a group of unlikely friends (which includes an elephant.) They precede to run and hide from both a police detective and the criminal gang he stole from. Through mostly good luck

British consul, Geoffrey Firmin, is living in Mexico in self-imposed exile, solitary and saturated with liquor.  He was once happy, or maybe ne never was.  He isn’t sure now that he’s too riddled by alcoholism to even put on his socks.  But on this day, The Day of the Dead, 1938, he has a visitor.  His wife Yvonne has come to rescue the consul from himself.  Maybe she can persuade him to leave Mexico behind and start over with her.  Maybe she can salvage their marriage, left in ruins by her string of affairs with Geoffrey’s two best friends – both of whom are there with him in Mexico.  They

When I dive, I dive deep! I checked out all the books about dinner parties. Here are 3 that stood out:

How to Host a Dinner Party by Corey Mintz

All the other books seem fluffy next to this one, which is small but densely packed. When it arrived I was filled with dismay; it looked – well, boring. It was not! This man knows his stuff, and writes with a convincing wryness. He covers it all! And he takes a realistic approach. I mean, take this advice: “…whom you invite to dinner is more important than what you cook. It would be more fun to eat microwave popcorn with your best friend than a

Now, as I read it all over again, I wonder . . .

They call that literary analysis, Stella, and I'm not particularly good at it. My job is to write. Your job is to figure out the deep stuff.

And there is deep stuff going on here, isn't there? For the love of Luna, I hope so.

Oh, there is. There definitely is deep stuff going on here. You know because you feel it. Sometimes, though, feelings are hard to pinpoint. Hard to analyze. That's how this is. It doesn't necessarily need the literary analysis because it creates a depth of feeling not dependent on explicit definition.

That's been

Through a series of short essays, Thomas lovingly paints a picture of her best friend Chuck, a heartbreaking portrait of her daughter’s cancer, eloquently wrangles her addictions, and throws in all the other stuff that makes a life a life. Somehow she makes the whole mess look beautiful.

Each page can be read independently, and I’ve revisited certain sections. For example, in “Painting, Not Writing,” Thomas says, “instead of not-writing, I am painting. I’m not a painter, but I make paintings anyway.” While this perfect little sample is representative of what you’ll find in What Comes Next

I wonder if I have a problem. I definitely have a tendency to seek spiritual inspiration from super-rational thinkers rather than from rabbis and priests and theologians.

Now in his twilight years, Klein has formed this book from a notebook he started as a young college student and abandoned in midlife. He titled that notebook "Pithies," and it contained short quotes from major thinkers he was studying, followed by his reactions to each. He abandoned the project at the time as naive and futile, yet in revisiting the notebook more recently found value in it, and so emerged this book.

I

First up, we'll take a look at Today Will be Different, a followup to 2013’s brilliant Where'd You Go Bernadette, Semple, a former writer for the TV show Arrested Development, continues her unique blend of scattershot, witty skewerings of the domestic world. Following one day in the life of Seattle wife and mother, Eleanor, who wishes she could be someone else – someone who can navigate through the world with ease and confidence instead of teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The plot, involving family and marriage secrets, isn’t as important as how Semple goes about telling it, and

The title of Love, Loss and What We Ate is what sparked my interest: what could be more relatable? I knew nothing about Padma Lakshmi and didn’t even recognize her name. But it doesn’t matter; anyone can find aspects of her story engaging. She writes with honesty and simplicity about the events of her life. Although she has been a model, actress, foodie, and was even married to the likes of Salman Rushdie, we can relate to her tales of cooking, childhood, career moves, relationships, and motherhood. She writes with a curious blend of candor and self-consciousness, which is both endearing and a

Lindy West’s Shrill is cataloged in the humor section of the library and three of its five subject headings use the word “humor.” So it’s no surprise that while reading chapter 1 I scared my own dog. He looked at me sideways while West describes the role models who looked like her young self: Lady Kluck, Baloo dressed as a sexy fortune teller, and Miss Piggy to name a few.

She then spends a chapter or two talking about her early awareness that she is too big, and pondering what to “do when you’re too big, in a world where bigness is cast not only as aesthetically objectionable, but also as a

Ah, if only I'd read this last summer or fall, sometime before my five-month-old was born, because I'm quite drawn to many of the ideas. Some I'd already claimed as my own, some were vague notions that have now been articulated and solidified for me, and some still feel rather surprising and foreign. I'm not one to unquestioningly adopt any model--parenting, leadership, eating, or what you will--without tweaking it and making it my own, but I believe considering and practicing these ideas will make me a more effective parent.

"Model" seems the best word I can think of to describe what