Come Help. Celebrate, and/or Discuss by Janice Clauser

Come Help. Celebrate, and/or Discuss

Janice Clauser

            The Crawfordsville Library is issuing a new pamphlet about its Homebound Services program.  Circulation staff member Dawn Bonebrake announces that helpers will be appreciated this summer to deliver books to patrons unable to visit the library.  Call 362-2242 Extension One, if you’d enjoy this work. The leaflets are available now at the circulation desk.

            The annual party honoring CDPL volunteers is scheduled for May 19^th with entertainment and refreshments from 2-4 p.m.

            Another activity to consider is one of the library’s book clubs. The Family Book Club will have its first discussion on June 25^th at 5:30; to prepare, J. K. Rowling’s book and movie “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” can be borrowed at the circulation desk starting the last week of May.

           

              

              There are many newly published stories to inspect. Barbara Taylor Bradford’s “Secrets from the Past” tells about a woman discovering a certain archive containing family secrets. Walter Mosley’s “Stepping Stone” and “Love Machine” are two separate short novels which explore life’s cosmic questions. “Damage Control” contains stories by Amber Dermont about privilege and uncertainty experienced by characters at the crossroads of their maturity. “Winesburg, Ohio,” “The Triumph of the Egg,” ”Horses and Men,” and “Death in the Woods,” written between 1919 and 1933 comprise “Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories.” 

              

              

               “Z” is Therese Fowler’s novel of Zelda Fitzgerald’s world and the legendary circles in which she moved in the Jazz Age. She met F. Scott at a country club dance in 1918 when she was 17 and he was a young army lieutenant. Susan Tekulve’s “In the Garden of Stone” is a multigenerational tale about how an impoverished family in Appalachia endures estrangement from their homeland Sicily in the 1920s. “Coup d’Etat” is alternative history by Harry Turtledove considering what might have happened if Chamberlain had chosen not to appease Hitler. Shane Jones gives a character courage to face a lifelong fear in “Daniel Fights a Hurricane.” “Alive!” by Loren Estleman is called a comedic mystery about Bela Lugosi’s lost screen test for “Frankenstein.” Someone has it and a horror magazine publisher wants to buy it. Next, a bumpy ride is promised if you read Tammy Kaehler’s mystery “Braking Points;” a lady racecar driver is the target of vicious messages as a friend’s killer hunts for her. “The Flamethrowers” by Rachel Kushner is about a young artist and the new worlds she encounters in New York and Rome in the mid-1970s, throwing her into a radical movement and then betrayal  “Criminal Enterprise” by Owen Laukkanen begins with a Minneapolis bank robbery.  

             

               The science fiction “Wool” by Hugh Howey depicts life underground meant for safety, the greatest danger being emerging to outside air. “A Map of Tulsa” by Benjamin Lytal begins when the main character is home from college and through a friend’s eyes rediscovers his hometown. “Something about Sophie” by Mary McComas is about a sleepy, idyllic hamlet upset when a newcomer arrives in town. “The Dream Merchant” by Fred Waitzkin describes a “charismatic yet morally ambiguous salesman” who becomes the father of a pyramid scheme. Jake Arnott’s “The House of Rumour” searches for connections between seeming disparate events: World War II spy intrigue, occultism, the West Coast science-fiction set, and the new-wave music scene of the 1980s. “Ordinary Grace” by William Krueger transports us 40 years after the fateful summer when a teen loses his whole family.