Lost in the Stacks

Amy Meyerson's first novel, The Bookshop of Yesterdays explores family secrets and the difficultly of running a profitable book store.

It's every writer's favorite time of year, National Novel Writing Month! That means it's officially time to get cracking on that novel you've always wanted to write. This month, our Shapiro display features books about writing of various kinds, including novels, short stories, screenplays, and more! There's surely something here to help motivate you, or help you out if you get a bad case of writer's block. Good luck to everyone participating in NaNoWriMo 2018!

In Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf discusses the impact of reading digital content on the neural processing in the brain, deep reading, and empathy, among other topics.

In this action-packed thriller, former Justice Department agent turned rare book dealer Cotton Malone searches for a cure for HIV and the lost tomb of Alexander the Great and seeks to outwit a power-mad Central Asian dictator along the way. As is usual in the series, this novel is full of exciting plot twists and turns.

This World War II mystery is the latest in a series featuring spy and cryptographer Maggie Hope. Maggie is imprisoned in a castle on a remote island off the coast of Scotland because she knows too much about the plans for the Allied invasion of Normandy and her bosses are afraid she'll reveal them if she's ever captured. Her fellow prisoners, also agents who know too much, are being killed off, one by one. Will Maggie be able to catch the killer before she becomes the next victim?

The Big Year was an intentional find in the stacks for me. When reading for pleasure I often browse and hope to simply alight upon a good title; sometimes something else leads me to a particular volume.

It all started this summer when I decided to feed the birds...

It didn’t matter that I can just barely describe bird watching as a newfound hobby and can probably identify only a dozen bird species—you don’t need to be a birder yourself to be swept into the drama of the Big Year adventure. Obmascik traces the stories of Komito, Harris, and Levantin back to their childhood roots, to investigate what drives someone to devote an entire year of their lives to birding. The lengths that these men go to in order to chase down birds are incredible.

The Fire is the sequel to The Eight, one of my favorite books of all time (see my previous review). Both books tell the story of the quest for a legendary chess set that once belonged to Charlemagne, and which holds a secret of enormous power. The quest is played out as a chess game with the characters as pieces. The Fire takes place thirty years after The Eight, when the daughter of the heroine of The Eight finds out that the deadly game has begun again.

This fascinating adventure-fantasy tells the story of the quest for a legendary chess set once owned by Charlemagne, which contains the key to a dangerous and powerful secret. The quest is carried out by two brave, intelligent heroines in two different time periods: the French Revolution and the 1970s, and the novel is told in alternating chapters so it is structured like a spiral or figure 8. The Eight can be considered a predecessor of The Da Vinci Code, but in my opinion it is much better written. In fact, it is one of my favorite novels of all time.

Lewis Barnavelt, a ten-year-old orphan, comes to live with his Uncle Jonathan in a 19th century house in a town which is a fictionalized version of Marshall, Michigan. He finds that his uncle and his next-door neighbor, Mrs. Zimmermann, are wizards, and that the house has a clock buried in its walls, counting down the minutes until the end of the world. Will Lewis, his uncle, and their friend be able to stop the clock in time? This mystery/horror story is perfect for children and people of all ages.

Venetian policeman Guido Brunetti investigates a series of suspicious deaths at a nursing home run by an order of nuns. At first he can't find any evidence that the deaths were anything but natural, but when the former nun who first told him about her suspicions is severely injured in a hit and run accident, he knows that the patients must have been murdered. But how will he prove it?