Annie Bloom's Books

Utterly amazing! Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey is a gripping story set in the future, where the world is ruled based on a class system of color and one's ability to perceive it. And where devolution of technology is purposely making life harder and harder for the population. All to keep the people from adapting and learning about what? Follow the adventures of young Eddie as he risks everything to find out. Just an outstanding read!!! -Evan

Mesmerized and somewhat unnerved by his 97-year-old father's vitality and optimism, Shields undertakes an original investigation of our flesh-and-blood existence through personal anecdote, biological fact, philosophical doubt, cultural criticism, and the wisdom of an eclectic range of writers and thinkers, from Lucretius to Woody Allen. The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead is now out in paperback.

Mary calls this book: Part science, part memoir, entirely engaging!

Seventeen year old Lark and her mute half-brother, Termite, live in West Virginia in the 1950s. Their mother is absent, while their aunt raises them as her own, and Termite's father is caught up in the early days of the Korean War. In Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips intertwines family secrets, dreams, and ghosts in a story about the love that unites us all. Now out in paperback, this novel is a staff favorite.

Maaza Mengiste's tale of family and revolution, Beneath the Lion's Gaze, begins in Ethiopia, 1974. Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. One of Hailu's sons has joined an underground resistance movement, while the other prays for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country.

Set in 19th century coastal England, Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures is about a woman, Mary Anning, who's struck by lightning as a baby and acquires the ability to see what others cannot. When Mary uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton, she's ostracized by the conservative community she lives in. Luckily, Mary finds an unlikely champion in prickly Elizabeth Philpot, a recent exile from London, who also loves scouring the beaches.

In Elizabeth Eslami's Bone Worship, Iranian-American Jasmine Fahroodhi fails out of college and returns home without any idea where her life is headed. Her father offers a solution: an arranged marriage. Confused, furious, but intrigued, Jasmine meets suitor after suitor with increasingly disastrous (and humorous) results. As she begins to open herself up to the mysteries of familial and romantic love, Jasmine discovers the truth about her father and herself.

Picking up where Eat, Pray, Love left off, Elizabeth Gilbert details the extraordinary circumstances that surround her love with Felipe, the man she swore never to marry. She combines breezy travelogue (as the couple roam around Thailand) with deep research into global rites and ideals surrounding marriage and commitment. Told with Gilbert's trademark wit, Committed is a celebration of love with all the complexity and consequence that real love, in the real world, actually entails.

John Lanchester's I.O.U. is the story of how we came to experience our current financial implosion, and how the decisions and actions of a select group of individuals had profound consequences for America, Europe, and the global economy overall. Weaving together firsthand research and superbly written reportage, Lanchester delivers a shrewd perspective and a digestible, comprehensive analysis that connects the dots for the expert and casual reader alike.

The Ticking Is the Bomb, by Nick Flynn, is about becoming a father in the age of terror. His growing outrage and obsession with torture led him to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos. Flynn interweaves memoir passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, the imminent birth of his daughter, and his growing obsession -- a questioning of terror, torture, and the political crimes we can neither see nor understand in post-9/11 American life.

Journalism -- the counterbalance to corporate and political power, the lifeblood of American democracy -- is in meltdown. In The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols investigate the crisis. They propose a bold strategy for saving journalism and saving democracy, one that looks back to how the Founding Fathers ensured free press protection with the First Amendment and provided subsidies to the burgeoning print press of the young nation.

Children's Picture Books

Poet Alastair Reid's Ounce Dice Trice is a wildly unexpected exploration of sound and sense and nonsense that is like nothing else. In Wink, by J.C. Phillipps, a young ninja in training finds it very hard to be silent and stealthy, because then no one notices him at all. Brenda Guiberson's Life in the Boreal Forest teaches readers about this unique ecosystem of animals and plants and reminds them that it's up to us to make sure the beauty and bounty survive.

New for Grade Schoolers

Olugbemisola Perkovich's 8th Grade Superzero is about an under-confident middle schooler who gets involved with a homeless shelter and reconsiders running for class president. In Cynthia Kadohata's A Million Shades of Gray, a boy and his elephant escape into the jungle when the Viet Cong attack his village immediately after the Vietnam war. 11 Birthdays, by Wendy Mass, is about a girl who struggles through a difficult birthday, only to wake up the next morning to find that her birthday is repeating itself.

The Latest for Tweens 'n' Teens

In Need, by Carrie Jones, a teenage girl is sent to live with her grandmother in Maine, but she's trailed by a creepy guy who leaves a trail of gold glitter and who has dreadful, uncontrollable needs. In James Dashner's The Maze Runner, teens find themselves stripped of their memories and living in a glade before a giant stone maze. Laini Taylor's staff recommended Lips Touch Three Times presents three stories of supernatural love -- tales about the deliciousness of wanting and waiting for that moment when lips touch.

In Science as a Contact Sport, Stephen Schneider reveals how special interest groups blocked effective responses to early warnings about global climate change. He persuasively outlines a plan to develop a practical policy to combat global warming, help the economy with a new generation of green energy jobs, and reduce the dependence on oil, ensuring a future for ourselves and our planet that's as rich with promise as our past.

Every day we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Companies like Yahoo! and Google are harvesting an average of 2,500 details about each of us every month. Who is looking at this data and what are they doing with it? Stephen Baker's The Numerati shows how a powerful new endeavor -- the mathematical modeling of humanity -- will transform every aspect of our lives.

Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1 offers a behind-the-scenes look at the extraordinary people, meticulous research, and driving passions that make London's Natural History Museum one of the world's greatest institutions. Replete with fossils, jewels, rare plants, and exotic species, Fortey's walk-through provides an intimate view of many of the premiere scientific accomplishments of the last two-hundred years.

In The Fatal Strain, Alan Sipress details how socioeconomic and political realities in Asia make it the perfect petri dish in which the fast-mutating avian flu can become easily communicable among humans. Once it does, the ease and speed of international travel and worldwide economic interdependence could make it as destructive as the flu pandemic of 1918.

Based on the most up-to-date research, as well as on Dr. Daniel Amen's more than twenty years of treating patients at the Amen Clinics, Magnificent Mind at Any Age shows that the true key to satisfaction and success at any age is a healthy brain. By optimizing our brain function we can all develop the qualities of a magnificent mind enjoyed by the world's most successful and happiest people.

In a career that has spanned four decades, choreographer Twyla Tharp has collaborated with great musicians, designers, thousands of dancers, and almost a hundred companies. In The Collaborative Habit, she explains why collaboration is important to her -- and can be for you, too. Tharp shows how to recognize good candidates for partnership and how to build one successfully. What we can learn about working creatively and in harmony can transform our lives, and our world.

Richard Wiseman has been troubled by the realization that the self-help industry often promotes exercises that destroy motivation, damage relationships, and reduce creativity: the opposite of everything it promises. Now, in 59 Seconds, he fights back, bringing together the diverse scientific advice that can help you change your life in under a minute, and guides you toward becoming more decisive, more imaginative, more engaged, and altogether more happy.

The Element is the point at which natural talent meets personal passion. Drawing on the stories of a wide range of people, including Paul McCartney, Matt Groening, Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, and Bart Conner, Ken Robinson shows that age and occupation are no barrier and that this is the essential strategy for transform­ing education, business, and communities in the twenty-first century.