Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

A local book ready for borrowing is the work of Franklin Vance, a retired high school science teacher and university adjunct instructor. He is also a lay speaker, Sunday school teacher, and Bible study leader who lives on a farm near Waynetown. His book is called “The Blackness of Utter Darkness” and it separates myth from reality regarding life, death, and the afterlife, designed for those confused about the traditional view of hell in Dante’s “Inferno”. The preface explains that this book has been kept short to encourage readers to study the issue that has caused much confusion and debate among Christians.

Another new religious-oriented book is Marilynne Robinson’s “Absence of Mind” which examines the tension between science and religion, and reveals how our concepts determine how we understand human civilization. Another is “The Jewish Annotated New Testament”, the new Revised Standard Version that comes from senior Jewish scholars – New Testament experts, Greco-Roman social historians, theologians, and others, annotated with essays on New Testament backgrounds. For Jews it’s a trustworthy introduction to this cultural text. For Christians it offers a new view of the Jewish contexts held by Jesus’ followers.

The Richard Castle novel, “Heat Rises” pairs a NYPD Homicide Detective with a hotshot reporter to solve the bizarre murder of a parish priest. Richard Doetsch writes “Half-Past Dawn” when a York City district attorney wakes up one morning to find a half-healed gash over an eye, a wound in a shoulder, and a tattoo down his arm, and he has no memory of them, while the day’s newspaper announces his death. ‘The Inverted Forest” by John Dalton describes a camp in rural Missouri where the counselor must quickly hire summer staff; who the personnel turn out to be is the book’s adventure. Eoin Colfer’s “Plugged” is a “wickedly funny crime caper” about a bouncer at a seedy club who has just found his girlfriend murdered.

One new novel is the thousand-page “A Dance with Dragons” by George Martin who is dubbed “the American [J.R.R.] Tolkien” by Time magazine, and this epic fantasy is the fifth in his series about a fragmented empire. “A Moment in the Sun” by John Sayles fills 950 pages with the 1897 gold rush in the Yukon just before the Spanish-American war breaks out; the book takes the whole era in its sights, history rediscovered through the lives of the people who made it happen.

Erin Morgenstern’s “The Night Circus” is heralded as a love story on a grand scale, “engrossing, beautifully written, and utterly enchanting, gorgeously imagined …poised in the high latitudes of Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde”. “The Story of Beautiful Girl” by Rachel Simon tells about her escape in 1968 from a school for the feebleminded, and her ensuing 40-year journey with a deaf man. “Man of Parts” by David Lodge examines H.G. Wells’ life by having him take a look back during the end of World War II. Elissa Schappell’s “Blueprints for Building Better Girls” maps America’s cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day in eight darkly funny, linked stories. “Ten Thousand Saints” by Eleanor Henderson features a young man with a hippy past who finds himself in New York City’s East Village where his tangle of family members exemplifies the modern age of divided generations. In “One Was a Soldier” by Julia Spencer-Fleming five veterans try to make sense of their experiences in Iraq. Each struggles with adjusting to home in a murder mystery setting.