Join us Monday, Jan. 28, for the showing of the documentary movie “It’s a Girl,” 6:30 p.m. in the Backus Auditorium. In India and China and other countries, up to 200 million girls are missing, just because they were female. Learn more about the issue and find out what others in the community think.
I definitely enjoy the sunshine, but the long nights make me want to curl up with my cats and read. I do tend to get more reading done in the winter as it is very easy to settle down with the dark outside and the warmth inside. So here are some great books to borrow from the library to read and enjoy.
Murder by Vegetable by Barbara Graham had me at the title. The thought of being murdered by vegetables struck my funny bone. While the story isn’t funny, the thought of spring fever is. So read away and dream of our own spring fever.
Some want to live as long as possible, others find life frustrating and when the opportunity comes, don’t turn down the chance to live in the moment and not continue. Such is Drew Silver in One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper. Silver is divorced, plays drums in wedding bands and can’t quite bring himself to hate his ex-wife’s new fiancé. Then there is his Princeton bound daughter who reveals she is pregnant. Can he make the most of his remaining time?
I don’t know if the phrase has ever been used here but I loved the phrase “blackberry winter.” Maybe everyone else has heard of it, but I hadn’t until I encountered the book Blackberry Winter by Sarah Jio. The book is set in Seattle in 1933 and present times and follows Claire Aldridge, a newspaper reporter assigned to cover the May snowstorm, or blackberry winter and its predecessor decades earlier. Claire learns of an unsolved abduction that occurred during the first snowstorm and vows to uncover the truth.
Far Distant Echo by Fred Marks and Jay Timmerman is the story of how two men out of seven completed a journey from Lake Superior to York Factory on Hudson Bay. The journey of almost 1400 miles includes one hundred rapids and 85 portages and is definitely one of those stories with great adventure, incredible will-power and a lot of luck.
Stories about war are nothing new. We’ve probably had stories about war as long as we’ve had war. But stories about the American-Arab wars are just starting. The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers is one of the first such novels that has crossed my path. The story is simply of two soldiers trying to stay alive. Two young men cling to life as their platoon seeks to capture the city of Al Tafar.
And we’ll end with another story of the dogs of war. I first encountered dogs at war in Cracker by Cynthia Kadahota. Maria Goodavage provides a history of their service in Soldier Dogs.
