


| All Titles are in the Benson Library except where noted 2012 Books & AV Enjoyed (or Not) by the Librarian January 2012 Death Cloud by Andrew Lane First of the new series Sherlock Holmes: the Legend Begins, I kept wanting to go back read more even after it ended. Like Shakespeare's plays, Sherlock Holmes continues to live on in a variety of revisions, reimaginings, and rewritings (such as recent BBC creation of Sherlock which writes him in the 21st century). I am enjoying this one's take on his teenage years. How did he become the man we first officially see in A Study in Scarlet? Can hardly wait to read the sequel. Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher This was a re-read for my book group which I think I enjoyed more this time than the last. Now that I am a bit older I think I better appreciated the dynamics and interplay of relationships between parent and child. Blizzard of Glass: the Halifax Explosion of 1917 by Sally M. Walker Last year, Iread Burden of Desire by Robert MacNeil, which is a fictional story that occurs during after the Halifax explosion. This brief but detailed history follows several actual families before, during, and after the events. Fascinating read of the details of the tragedy as well as the details of life at the time. I found it ironic that only a five years before, Halifax has learned how to deal with a massive influx of corpses when the Titanic sunk and hundreds of the recovered bodies were brought there. Then just a few years later, they had to put their knowledge of an ad hoc morgue back into service for their own people. The Future of Us by Jay Asher & Carolyn Mackler It's 1996 and the internet is still pretty new to most people. A teenager girl sticks an AOL disk in her new computer and finds something unexpected: a website that is 15 years in the future - Facebook. See how the knowledge of the future can affect or not affect the present. A fun read. Highly recommend! The Hole: a novel of psychological suspense by Guy Burt This short book is taut and just when you think you have it figured out at the end, the last few pages blow up your pat answers. Then you find yourself needing to re-read it again with the new information in mind. Don't cheat and look at the epilogue first! Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre I wanted to read this before I saw the movie which is now an Oscar-nominated film in three categories. Felt like a time traveler as I returned to the Cold War era of spy, double-spy, and spy vs. spy. Yada Yada Prayer Group by Neta Jackson Read for my book group, made me do a lot of thinking about my faith. I enjoyed the read but the climax at the end seemed a bit forced. When She Woke: a novel by Hillary Jordan A thought-provoking comination of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, reminds us that sometimes the future is not that far away. I couldn't stay away from reading this and had to know what happened to the characters caught in a world where Big Brother & Sister know all. Where there is no where to hide, especially when you have been "chromed" or colored appropriate to your "crime." The Auslander by Paul Dowswell Whenever I read about ordinary people in very non-ordinary circumstances such as in the middle of Nazi Germany, I contemplate what I would have done; how would I behave, act? This young man who looked like the Nazi Aryan ideal could have gone either way when he arrived in WWII era Germany after being in an orphanage in Poland. A fabulous and frightening look at the live of ordinary people doing extraordinary deeds. 2011 Reviews 2010 Reviews |