And happy first Friday of winter, beloved patrons! It looks like winter has finally remembered us, and it’s going to be rough going this weekend. So this seemed as good a time as any to remind you about our Winter Weather Policies. If you have any questions about Library Hours during the wintry season, just give us a call. The answering message will be updated to reflect any changes in our hours (this includes holiday closings).
Main Library: (978) 531-0100
South Branch: (978) 531-3380
West Branch: (978) 535-3354
Also, we would also like to make you aware of the new Parking Advisory in Peabody, which you can access via this link here. This should help in the case of parking bans and emergency closures.
But, in advance of any climactic unpleasantness, why not come into the Library and check out a few films, audiobooks, or books to help while away the long winter evenings? Here are just a few of the titles that have braved the elements to make it onto our shelves this week, and would love a chance to spend the holiday season with you!
The Emerald Circus: Multiple-award winning author Jane Yolen’s first full collection in more than ten years is a vibrant, wondrous, and thought-provoking journey through some of the best-known fairy tales and children’s stories. Her characters may be familiar, but these stories are all refreshingly unique: Edgar Allan Poe’s young bride is beguiled by a most unusual bird. Dorothy, lifted from Kansas, returns as a gymnastic sophisticate. Emily Dickinson dwells in possibility and sails away in a starship made of light. Wendy leads a labor strike against the Lost Boys. Beauty sneaks out to get a Christmas gift for the Beast, with…interesting results. Like fun house mirrors, these stories flip the tales you know upside down, stretch them and skew them, but always create something that is wholly unique and simply delightful. Library Journal agrees, giving this collection a starred review and saying, “These delightful retellings of favorite stories will captivate newcomers and fans of Yolen as she once again delivers the magic, humor, and lovely prose that has attracted readers for years.”
Improv Nation: How We Make Great American Art: At the height of the McCarthy era, an experimental theater troupe set up shop in a bar near the University of Chicago. Via word-of-mouth, astonished crowds packed the ad-hoc venue to see its unscripted, interactive, consciousness-raising style. From this unlikely seed grew the Second City, the massively influential comedy theater troupe, and its offshoots—the Groundlings, Upright Citizens Brigade, SNL, and a slew of others. Sam Wasson charts the meteoric rise of improv in this richly reported, scene-driven narrative that, like its subject, moves fast and digs deep. He revels in the anecdotal stories of the now-famous improv artists and comedians who have made this genre great, from the chance meeting at a train station between Mike Nichols and Elaine May to the after-hours bar Dan Aykroyd opened so that friends like John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner would always have a home. This is a fast-paced book full of nostalgic photos and fun stories that The Seattle Times called “A fast-paced, thoroughly engaging road map of how improv — that rapid-fire art of entirely unscripted performance — came to infiltrate and shape the American pop-culture landscape . . . A whirlwind of quick, sharp anecdotes, never lingering too long yet still giving the reader a full sense of the people and the history shaping improv into what it is today.”
Signal Loss: Readers looking for a bit of an escape this holiday season might want to consider Garry Disher’s Australian noir series featuring Inspector Hal Challis. Although there are six books in the series to date, this mystery can certainly be read as a stand-alone–and may be the perfect way to get into this gritty, gripping series. A pair of hit men working a job for a meth kingpin have a very bad day, and the resulting bushfire draws attention to a drug lab and two burned bodies in a Mercedes. With meth-related crime on the rise, interdepartmental tensions mount, and Challis soon finds himself fighting to keep control of his case. Meanwhile, Sergeant Ellen Destry—newly minted head of her department’s sex crime unit and Challis’ partner— is hunting for a serial rapist who is extremely adept at not leaving clues. Darkly funny and compulsively readable, this series installment earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, who called it “Excellent . . . A searing commentary on the meth crisis and its tremendous toll on users and communities alike.”
One of Us Will Be Dead By Morning: Fans of David Moody’s Hater trilogy will be delighted to know that it isn’t over yet. Returning to his near-apocalyptic world, this psychological thriller is one that longtime readers–and newcomers, too!–will be on the edge of their seat to finish. Fourteen people are trapped on Skek, a barren island in the middle of the North Sea somewhere between the coasts of the UK and Denmark. Over the years this place has served many purposes―a fishing settlement, a military outpost, a scientific base―but one by one its inhabitants have abandoned its inhospitable shores. Today it’s home to Hazleton Adventure Experiences, an extreme sports company specializing in corporate team building events. Life there is fragile and tough. One slip is all it takes; and when the body count quickly begins to rise after a single seemingly tragic accident, questions are inevitably asked. Are the deaths coincidental, or something else entirely? Those people you thought you knew, can you really trust them? Is the person standing next to you a killer? Will you be their next victim? This isn’t a tale for the faint of heart, but horror and slasher aficionados shouldn’t miss this winner of a series. Booklist gave it a starred review, gushing that “Moody really knows how to write creeping, claustrophobic terror, effectively sneaking up on his readers and, finally, scaring the life out of them. Top-drawer horror.”
London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City: For most, England in the sixteenth century was the era of the Tudors, from Henry VII and VIII to Elizabeth I. But as their dramas played out at court, England was being transformed economically by the astonishing discoveries on the American continents and of direct sea routes to Asia. At the start of the century, England was hardly involved in the wider world and London remained a gloomy, introverted medieval city. But as the century progressed something extraordinary happened, which placed London at the center of the world stage forever. In this fascinating story, Stephen Alford neatly side-steps the “rise of the West” histories that are typically invoked to explain this period of history, and instead describes the network of merchants, visionaries, crooks, and sailors who traded with Russia and the Levant, explored areas now known as Virginia and the Arctic, and searched the Indian Ocean for exotic spices and new flavors. This is an intriguing tale about big personalities, wondrous discoveries, and the growth of the human world that continues to have echoes in our lives to this day. Kirkus Reviews wrote a glowing report of this book, saying “Alford makes expert use of individual lives to bring London’s various stages to life…These and many other stories bring the past to life in warmly human terms, as do Alford’s evocative descriptions of the city’s changing landscape and architecture…Solid scholarly history written with an accessible verve that will appeal to general readers.”
Until next week, beloved patrons–happy reading!