If you’re like me, you know that the best way to survive in the wild is to never go into the wild. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t experience the terror and peril vicariously. Instead of chasing thrills, the smart reader will turn to great lists like Book Riot’s 100 Must-Read Nonfiction Adventure Books. National […]

In Gail Honeyman’s novel, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, she has created a beautifully imagined character in Eleanor. Prudish and precise, lonely and devoid of social skills, Eleanor’s life begins to change when she becomes infatuated with a local musician.  Her touching certainty that meeting him will lead to true love leads her to tentative attempts at […]

Who’s Walter Mosley? He’s the guy with 40-plus books under his belt who wrote the hard-boiled Easy Rawlins series, to start with. Set in post-WWII Los Angeles, the first book in the series, Devil in a Blue Dress, deals with the African-American Rawlins’ experience with murder, racism, and political thuggery. He’s written science fiction, nonfiction about political […]

In Emma Flint’s compelling new crime novel,Little Deaths, Rose Malone is a complicated woman. A cocktail waitress and single mother of two, she likes booze and men and flashy clothes and lots of makeup.  This makes her unpopular with the dowdy and narrow-minded mothers in her Queens neighborhood; when her two young children go missing, and are […]

Maybe you’ve never been into poetry, but wish you could be. Now’s a good time – April is National Poetry Month, and you can celebrate with the library. Enjoy a live poetry reading on April 25, at 6:00 p.m.  on our Facebook page with L. Luis Lopez and others. Naturally, we also have some mighty fine […]

Does finishing a great book fill you with feelings of impending doom? What if you don’t have another good one lined up already? Better you should avoid the tedious sniveling that could ensue (or is that just me?), by going directly to the Book Reviews and Recommendations page on the Mesa County Libraries website. There you will find […]

Taking a break from my usual diet of treacherous-women/lecherous-men fiction, I happened on Man at the Helm, by Nina Stibbe. It was just what I needed to expel the bitter aftertaste of the psychological thrillers I habitually feast upon. A charming specimen of the eccentric-British-family-novel (see these classic examples), Man at the Helm begins with ten-year-old Lizzie and her family moving […]

A mother’s life is shattered in an instant when a speeding car runs down her five-year-old son. In  I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh, the story alternates between the police search for the driver and the stunned and heartbroken Jenna. She leaves everything behind as she escapes to a remote Welsh town by the […]

When librarians think about Carrie Fisher, who died on December 27 at age 60, we are just as likely to recall her autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writings as her movies.  She wrote with brutal honesty and humor about her struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, mental health, and Hollywood.  Starting with Postcards from the Edge, published in […]