I Have Some Questions for You - by Rebecca Makkai

I was intrigued by the description of this book because it reminded me of Adnan's Story which I recently read. The story of Adnan Syed's arrest, trial, and life sentence for the murder of a classmate was made famous on the Serial podcast. Because of the publicity brought on by the podcast, Syed's case was re-opened and he was subsequently found innocent. 

Makkai's book is a novel with a very similar plot. A young girl is found dead in her boarding school swimming pool and suspicions are on Omar Evans, an athletic trainer at the school. Omar is found guilty and a former student, Bodie Kane (a podcaster) brings new light to the crime many years later. Bodie questions whether the wrong person has been jailed. 

Bodie has returned to Granby School to teach a winter intersession on podcasting, when some of her students decide to do a podcast on Thalia Keith's murder, they start exploring new suspects, and ask new questions.

The school library is mentioned a few times. For instance: as a place to look up the word "lusty" in a dictionary, before one could simply go to dictionary.com to discover that it meant "healthy and strong; full of vigor"; as a place to do research back in a time when students didn't all have their own computers; a place where old yearbooks can be found; or where a schoolgirl in 1995 could borrow a map of Connecticut to find the location of the street in New Canaan where her crush lived.

The library held a special place in the history of the Granby school. Started in 1814 a young woman Arsareth Gage founded the school with twelve boys as students in a small schoolhouse. Samuel Granby built the library and chapel six years later. Ultimately Samuel Granby became a sugar daddy to the entire town.

For those on the lookout for Easter Eggs regarding the Syed case, Makkai includes a reference to "the girl whose boyfriend was definitely not working at LensCrafters that day".

Who Killed the Fonz? - by James Boice

Mystery Month May continues with the gang from Happy Days. Unwilling to believe that the motorcycle crash that killed their super cool friend was an accident Richie, Potsie, and Ralph take on the Milwaukee political machine.

Set in the 1980s the paunchy, middle-aged friends start their own investigation into the accident and discover something much more sinister than they could have imagined.

There is a lot of re-hashing of individual plot lines from the old television show including the infamous jumping of the shark. For this blogger, however, the most important reminder was that Richie and Lori Beth met at their college library. So important was this detail, in fact, that it is mentioned twice in this rather short novel.

Fans of the show will likely enjoy this nostalgia trip. And you can be sure that, dead or alive, Fonzie will always save the day.

The Harder They Come - by T.C. Boyle

Sten Stenson, a Vietnam Veteran, is sure that some Mexican drug dealers have killed his friend Carey. He is devastated when he learns that his unstable son, Adam, was in fact the killer. Adam has become obsessed with John Colter, a legendary member of the Lewis and Clark team, turned mountain man. Adam begins to call himself Colter and becomes involved with Sara, a much older woman who has declared herself independent from the government and ignores state and federal laws. She refuses to wear seat belts, breaks into the pound where her dog is held, aids and abets Adam while he is on the lam, and skips her court date. When stopped by police she makes clear that she has "no contract" with the state of California. A person can do whatever she wants in her own personal car, or her own personal property. Her hostility toward the government makes it especially ironic that she uses her public library. She checked out two DVDs to watch with a friend she invited to dinner. That is the wonder of the public library, you can use the resources even if you don't support it. It is a crazy truth that if a person wanted to do research on how to organize a petition drive in order to shut down the public library, they could do it at the public library.

Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard - by Laura Bates

Last week my Facebook feed included a post from a fellow librarian about the Big Library Read - a global book club. Through the Big Library Read e-books are made available for two weeks, with no limit on the number of people who could check them out. I downloaded my copy and joined in.

Dr. Bates' memoir of her time teaching Shakespeare in the SHU (Secured Housing Unit), of the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Indiana details her relationship with inmate Larry Newman, who was sent to prison for life as a teenager. Mr. Newman not only excels as a student providing unique insights into Shakespeare's plays, he writes workbooks for other college students to use in order to help them understand the works better themselves.

It is interesting to note that a book that is essentially about reading hardly mentions libraries at all, although I expect the prisoners Bates worked with had no access to one. And the professor only includes one childhood memory of using the library herself

Our final reading assignment was The Tragedy of Macbeth. It's been a special piece of literature for me ever since I first read it at the age of ten. Well, I can't really say that I "read" it at that age, but I did check it out of my elementary school library. And I can still recall the thrill of poring over its archaic words that I knew meant something significant, that I hoped would someday mean something to me. By the time I reached high school, I was able to begin to make meaning out of the language. But it wasn't until I started teaching these plays, in prison, that their meaning would come through: beautifully crafted works of literature written hundreds of years ago that can connect with us here and now. 

I've always felt strongly that children should be able to select their own reading material from libraries. While they may pick something out that is beyond their reading or comprehension abilities, it probably won't matter. They will likely decide to put it aside, but that too is their own empowered choice. The book may serve, as young Laura Bates discovered, as a challenge, that she returned to again, and again. She could never have imagined how it would change her life.
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A few days after I posted this, I discovered this blog post on the importance of prison libraries. It is well worth the read.

Cold Case to Case Closed : Lizbeth Borden: My Story - by Rich Little and Beverly Folstad

Living in Massachusetts has piqued my interests in several things. One is the Salem witch trials, another is the Lizzie Borden ax murder case. Of course the jump rope rhyme about Lizzie Borden is well known, and I have seen at least two movies about the crime. I watched The Legend of Lizzie Borden starring Elizabeth Montgomery when it first aired on television in 1975, and more recently Lizzie Borden Took an Ax with Christina Ricci in the title role. We have also toured the Borden home in Fall River, which is now run as a (creepy) B & B. This is the first book I have read about her though. Our town's One Book One Community Committee is considering this self-published work for the spring 2015 read. Although it is subtitled "My Story" only some of the sections of this work are from Lizzie Borden's point of view. Much of it is a factual retelling of what was known, police reports, and how the trial played out. These parts of the work read like any other "true crime" book. I was, personally, much more entertained by the sections of the book that comprised the imagined words of Miss Borden. And I was especially interested in learning how important her library card was to her while she was imprisoned

In my ten months at Taunton (prison), there was seldom another woman incarcerated; the result was a very quiet environment. I spent my time reading, one of my favorite pastimes. When Emma came in on the train to visit every week, she always brought fresh reading materials. The Taunton Free library was only two blocks away; they issued me a library card which I still cherish. While shopping for jail supplies and provisions, Mrs. Wright would pick up several newly published books from the library each week.

I can only imagine that without the solace Miss Borden found in reading that her time in prison would have been akin to solitary confinement - alone with only her thoughts day after day. Books are our friends.

Shoot the Moon - by Billie Letts

The very first book I reviewed on this blog was Letts' Made in the U.S.A. I had never heard of Billie Letts before I read it; I simply picked the book up off the "leisure reading" shelf at the library where I work. I enjoyed the novel, so when I happened upon another of her books at Somethin's Brewing Book Cafe I picked it up and paid the $2 cost. As a bonus I was told that it was 2- for-1 day, so I also grabbed a copy of Blackbird by Jennifer Lauck (which I have not yet read).

Shoot the Moon is the story of Mark Albright, a Beverly Hills veterinarian, who learns after the death of his parents that he was adopted, and that his birth mother, Gaylene Harjo, is from DeClare, Oklahoma. He travels to DeClare in search of Gaylene only to discover that she was murdered shortly before he was put up for adoption, and that her baby, Nicky Jack, had also been presumed dead, at least, up until Mark showed up.

Libraries were not as important in this work as they were in Made in the U.S.A. There were a few passing mentions, Mark vomits on the lawn of the public library after reading about Gaylene's gruesome ending at the archives of the local newspaper. He also discovers a few library books, 30-years overdue, in the home of his birth grandmother, who has kept her daughter's room exactly as Gaylene left it. He also learns from his aunt that when his teenage mother learned she was pregnant she gave up her dreams of college and "checked out a bunch of books from the library on child care."

This was a good story, with a lot of places to speculate about who done it. The murder mystery is ultimately resolved, but in a way I found anti-climactic, although surprising.

By the way, I highly recommend a visit to Somethin's Brewing for anyone visiting the south shore of Massachusetts. This comfortable cafe features fair trade coffee, used books, and is housed in one of the original Carnegie libraries. In 2005, Lakeville opened a new, modern library across the street from the original.