The Librarians Are Reading...

Beginning with last year's National Library Week, we've started a tradition of posting some of the librarians' favorite reads.  Here are a few of mine from the first part of this year:

• The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon.  What if the United States established a temporary Jewish settlement in Alaska right before World War II began and it survived for several decades after the end of the war?  That's the premise of this fabulous gritty noir detective story with fascinating, well-developed characters.
  
  
• Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman.  Grossman spent most of World War II working as a journalist for the Red Army newspaper, and his wartime experiences yielded this rich and fascinating novel about the siege of Stalingrad.  Often hailed as a twentieth-century War and Peace, Life and Fate isn't always an easy read.  Some of the dialogue can seem stilted and rambling, but Grossman's compelling and unforgiving descriptions of the madness of the Stalinist regime during the Great War makes up for the novel's uneven sections.

• Almost everything by William Boyd.  It makes me tear my hair out that William Boyd's novels are not more popular.  In my view, he is one of the most gifted authors out there today.  None of his characters are particularly lovable, but they are all the more engaging because of their flaws and, at times, they are hilarious.  Boyd is fairly prolific, so if you like his stuff, you can spend weeks immersed in his novels.  You just can't go wrong with any of these books -- A Good Man in Africa, An Ice Cream War, The New Confessions, Brazzaville Beach, Any Human Heart, or Restless.

• Everyone needs a "brain candy" break from serious literature from time to time, and here are my favorite books in this category for 2008:  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Yes, I just found out what happened to Harry when I read this last installment in the series a few weeks ago, which the clerks at Green Apple found wildly amusing for some reason when I picked up my used copy.  I haven't been living under a rock, but I don't spend much time around kids, so I was able to avoid spoilers when the book was released last year.  Hands down, the best book in the series.  I devoured it in a day.  The Book of Lost Things, by John Connolly.  A demented twist on the Andersen and Grimm fairy tales that includes werewolves, an incredibly creepy Rumpelstiltskin-like "crooked man," vampiric witches, and more. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks.  What if a zombie virus broke out and transformed a large percentage of the world's population into an army of flesh-eating, virtually indestructible undead?  Starts slow, but I was enthralled and terrified by the middle of the book.  The creepiest part?  The zombies who live on the ocean floor, just waiting for some unsuspecting submarine to venture into their reach.  I had nightmares for a few days after this one.