A mother has missed getting back on her train, leaving her sleeping child alone onboard. Now someone has taken the child off of the train near Stockholm, snatched from under the nose of the train staff, who were supposed to be looking out for her. What caused the mother to leave the train for so long in the first place, and how could the staff have missed the girl leaving?
The Read Local Committee is pleased to announce Anna Francesca has won our Faster, Higher, Stronger Poetry Contest with her poem Citius, Altius Fortius. We love the poem, especially so close to this time of new year's resolutions, for Francesca's focus on herself and her own strength.
It Was Me All Along is a memoir about a young girl that turned to food for comfort, parenting, homework help, and to fill the empty hole she had deep inside herself. Andie Mitchell's struggle is not just with food, but also with turning her unbalanced childhood world into one she could live in normally.
The Good Life Lab is the kind of book that makes me suffer, torn between skepticism and hope. It’s the kind of title that draws my interest yet repels me at the same time. My biggest fear was that the author would come across as self-righteous: she does not. The thing I should have feared was the “radical” part. This book has the capacity to cause a watershed (or at least make you want to build a shed out of papercrete). There were times I wanted to run away and start a llama farm: I did not.
Taylor Greer has just graduated from high school in rural Kentucky. Born to a poor, single mother and without many of life’s advantages, Taylor manages to talk her way into a lab technician’s job at the hospital, save enough money to buy a beat up Volkswagen Bug, and get out of town before she winds up pregnant or as some tobacco farmer’s wife. Most of Taylor’s pluckiness can be attributed to the roots her mother has provided her—encouragement and faith in her daughter’s abilities that are worth far more than the money she doesn’t have to offer.
Haruki Murakami is not for everyone, but he’s one of my favorite authors. His indescribable blend of post modernism, magic realism, and surrealism set in his native Japan never fail to provoke rumination on topics ranging from existential to mundane. This novel is translated by the prize-winning J. Philip Gabriel.
Say what you will about David Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Dr., the film is a puzzle of strange, overlapping characters and storylines that at once confound and intrigue. Is it a portrayal of Hollywood as a Machiavellian embodiment of sinister control and corruption masquerading as entertainment? A knotty and deliberately confusing mishmash of pointless narratives and characters lost in some Californian noir fever dream? One of the best films of the last twenty or thirty years?
If you've read Jenny Lawson's first book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, or if you follow her online, you know that her head is a very, very strange place--in all the best ways, assuming your head is also a very strange place. I don't generally think my head is a strange place, but I do love the way Jenny Lawson's mind works and the way she writes about it, so maybe I'm stranger than I think I am.
My Dog Skip is a rollicking jaunt through Willie Morris’ memories of his adventures with Skip, his boyhood dog and constant companion. Skip is no ordinary dog, nor is the bond that Skip and Willie share. In this playful and beautifully written memoir Willie writes about the years he spent with Skip, each page bursting with hilarious shenanigans, canine loyalty and ferocious exuberance.
When the Empire threatens Luke, the galaxies last remaining Jedi knight, he, Han, and Leia become the only hope for survival.
Hans’s mission is to track down the rebel spy from the Empire and Leia knows she can trust Han to get the job done. She knows he’ll do whatever it takes because this is the only thing they actually agree on. Han thinks this job sounds simple enough; he’s done this kind of stuff before. What he doesn’t know is that he’s got a bounty on his head.
