Foul Play - the movie

 

When divorced librarian Gloria Mundy (Goldie Hawn) becomes unwittingly involved in a murder, Detective Tony Carlson (Chevy Chase) is assigned to protect her. Hilarity ensues.

Set in San Francisco this screwball comedy wouldn't be complete without a car chase scene involving steep hills. Also included at no extra charge: a domino-type collapse of bookshelves. I will say that the librarians in the film (all women) were serious about research, and I believe the film does actually pass the Bechdel test (albeit just barely).

I remember seeing this film in theaters back in 1978. I remembered virtually nothing about it except the opening scene featuring Hawn driving along the Pacific Coast Highway with the lilting tones of Barry Manilow singing "Ready to Take a Chance Again" as a soundtrack. 

The murder plot involves a group called The Tax the Churches league who plan to assassinate the Pope. While I would not advocate murder, I have to agree that it is past time to tax churches. As we see the Religious Right (and, frankly, left) trying to influence laws, and elections the IRS should seriously be looking into revoking some 501(c)(3) exemptions.

One of my husband's rowing friends mentioned that this film was what interested him in getting a houseboat (something he still dreams about).  Tony certainly has a nice one - a real '70s chick magnet with spiral staircase, dark paneling, and a bar. How could a young librarian resist?

When we decided to watch this we discovered it wasn't available on any of our streaming services (even for a fee). Our local public library to the rescue! Thanks to the Millicent Public Library in Fairhaven we were able to procure this on DVD - for free!

Mr. Harrigan's Phone - the movie

Our lives are made up of a series of "befores" and "afters". 

Mr. Harrigan's Phone takes place in the years immediately after 9/11, but before the 2016 election. This placement in time is important for the context of the story. The internet was nascent, and the first generation of iPhones were just coming out, and it was fair to be concerned about how we might be monitored electronically. 

Based on the short story by Stephen King this film tells the story of a friendship between an elderly billionaire, Mr. Harrigan (Donald Sutherland) and Craig (Jaeden Martell) a teenager Harrigan employs to read to him. When Craig decides to gift Mr. Harrigan a new iPhone Harrigan is reluctant to accept it for a variety of reasons. However, Craig convinces him that the real-time information he can get on the stock market makes the phone a gold mine. Mr. Harrigan is immediately impressed with the internet, and subsequently predicts a variety of misuses and misunderstandings of it, all of which, eventually, came to pass.

In addition to the Harrigan's lesson on information literacy there are two scenes inside a library. One early scene demonstrates how essential libraries are to accessing information for those who may not have technology available to them otherwise.

The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections - by Eva Jurczyk

A missing manuscript, a missing librarian, and a desperately ill department head are all concerning aspects of this story. The most concerning of all, however, was that Liesl Weiss had to abort her sabbatical in order to sift through it all.  And of course, through it all she is berated and undermined by the pompous University president. 

Things in this novel that were absolutely believable: The University President asks Liesl to keep quiet about the missing books, and the missing librarian (no need for bad press, and what would the donor's think?); the male library director could count on his (mostly) female staff to cover for him, while he always got the credit; when a woman is put in charge of the library she is constantly questioned by those she supervises who also point out that the previous (male) director did not do it that way. 

This was road-trip listening for our recent mid-west adventure. While I don't typically enjoy mysteries,  this one eventually grew on me, although when it started neither my husband nor I thought that we would be especially interested.

Spells & Shelves - by Elle Adams

 

May is Mystery Month, and I don't really like mysteries. Often people tell that they think I will like a certain mystery book, or mystery series mostly because they take place in a library, or have a librarian in them. They are almost always wrong, because really I just don't like mysteries. Each May I read one to blog about just so I can include the genre, but (and I can't say this enough) I really don't like mysteries.

I chose this one because it had a witch librarian in it, and I do like witches. For those who like books about orphans who don't know they're magical this one also fills that bill.

When Aurora (Rory) discovers that her late father was a magical person, and that she is being pursued by vampires, she moves in with her three aunts and two cousins who live and work in the library for paranormals. The women are biblio-witches they "weave spell from words". 

One thing Rory learns from her Aunt Adelaide is that the library is "semi-sentient" and I was reminded of Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science the fifth one of which is "A library is a growing organism". Ranganathan knew that all libraries are semi-sentient?

Of course libraries are also magical, regardless of whether they are for "normals" or "paranormals".

The Midnight Library - by Matt Haig

Full of regrets, recently unemployed, and grieving the death of her cat Volts,  Nora Seed decides to take her own life. In the twilight world between the life and death Nora is surprised to find herself in a library and face-to-face with Mrs Elm, her school librarian from many years before, the person who had told her that her father had died when she was fourteen years old.

The Midnight Library is filled with green books, each one represents a life Nora didn't live in the multiverse. She can pick out any book and find out what her life would have been like if she had made different choices at each of her turning points. There are many possible lives that Nora is given the opportunity to visit. Would she like to be a rock star? a pub owner? a glaciologist? a vintner? What if she had married Dan rather than canceling at the last minute? What if she had just gone on that coffee date with Ash, where would she be now? Is there any world in which Volts is still alive?

Nora also meets other "sliders" - those like her who are moving between lives not lived. Each "slider" has their own guide and space in which to explore their lives. Not all sliders travel via library books - Hugo travels through old VHS tapes in a video store, with his deceased uncle as a guide, for instance. 

In the aptly titled chapter "God and other Librarians" the omniscience of Mrs Elm as Nora's guide is made abundantly clear, as is her role as a librarian. She explains to Nora that "The library has strict rules. Books are precious. You have to treat them carefully." 

The librarian stereotype is on display as well when Mrs Elm admonishes Nora to "Please be quiet...This is a library".

Ultimately Nora wishes to escape the Midnight Library, especially when she realizes that it is about to self destruct, but how does one do that when there are no doors? Mrs Elm to the rescue: "Who needs a door when you have a book?" she asks.

A new spin on an old theme. Anyone who grew up watching The Wizard of Oz won't be surprised by the ending.

The Book of M - by Peng Shepherd

May is Mystery Month and I don't really like mysteries. I especially don't like the serial mysteries that involve some amateur sleuth in a small town with a disproportionate number of murders. It seems like a lot of library mysteries are of this type. People keep recommending them to me, and I keep not liking them. However, I do like to have a variety of genres on this blog, so I googled library mysteries and found this title. The description appealed to me because it looked supernatural, surreal, and, most decidedly, not part of a murder series. If you are a person who likes this genre I do have some posts which you can find here and here.

It turned out that much of what takes place in this dystopian novel is rather prescient. A mysterious disease causes people to lose their shadows, and eventually their memories. Quarantines, food shortages, suspicion and fear abound. Shadowless people not only lose their own memories, but memories of virtually everything. Some don't remember how to eat, to read, or to talk. Women don't understand what their periods are (and as a bonus have no idea that they'd been taught to be ashamed of them). Shadowless also eventually forget that there are laws of physics, and once they forget that, they can simply ignore those laws. People can mutate themselves and others; prison cells become their own means of escape.

I read quite a bit of this without seeing anything about a library, so I naturally grew concerned that I'd been duped. Fortunately, I was reading an e-version of the book which allowed me to search easily for the word library to find out if indeed this were a library-centric book. Although the first instance of the word doesn't show up until about 40% in, it then becomes quite important. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC is the location of a battle for books between the shadowed and the shadowless. Of no surprise to this librarian the books ultimately prove to be the salvation of all. 

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.

Everything I Never Told You - by Celeste Ng

Lydia Lee has a lot of pressure on her. Her mother (Marilyn) wants her to be a doctor (a dream she did not fulfill herself) and her Chinese-American father (James) wants her to be popular and to fit in (a dream he never realized). When their daughter's body is discovered at the bottom of  Middlewood Lake the Lees must come to grips with her death. The omniscient narrator gives the reader insight into each of the other members of the family and their histories, as well  as Jack, a classmate, and a person of interest in Lydia's disappearance. Readers eventually know for sure what happened. The Lees, however, are never convinced.

The story takes place during the late spring and summer of 1977. A time when Nath Lee, Lydia's older brother, is looking forward to starting Harvard. Harvard played an important role in the Lee family history; it is where Marilyn and James met in 1957 (in the history department which "had the peaceful quiet of a library"); and it was where James, notoriously, did not get hired once he earned his Ph.D.

Just before his sister's death Nath visited the Harvard campus where he

wandered awestruck, trying to take it all in: the fluted pillars of the enormous library, the red brick of the buildings against the bright green of the lawns, the sweet chalk smell that lingered in each lecture hall.

It is clear that James also remains in awe of Harvard. And that perhaps his son's acceptance is a vindication for him.

James' upbringing in Iowa, where he was the only person of Asian descent at the elite boarding school where his parents worked as a groundskeeper and kitchen worker made him long to be like everyone else. He surprised everyone at Lloyd Academy by passing the admission test, which allowed him to attend the school for free as the child of employees. He had no trouble answering the exam questions having learned so much from reading "all the books his father had bought, a nickel a bag, at library book sales."

Nath also took advantage of the library growing up. As a child he managed to get the librarian to allow him to borrow books from the adult section, and remained engrossed in learning about outer space, physics, and flight mechanics throughout his high school years.

And, finally, on a non-library note I feel compelled, as the wife of a geographer, to snark about this bit of undeserved Harvard fascination:

James' teaching assistant Louisa is less than impressed with some of the responses she found on student exams and tells him

I hope the summer students will be better... A few people insisted that that the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad was in Europe. For college students, they have surprising trouble with geography.

To which James responds:

Well, this isn't Harvard, that's for sure.

Except that it appears that where geography is concerned Middlewood College may indeed be able to hold a candle to our friends in Cambridge. Harvard, in fact, infamously got rid of its Geography department in 1948 when University President, and homophobe, James Conant declared geography "not an academic department".

This YouTube video give us some insight about the current state of geographic understanding at Harvard.

Death Overdue-by Allison Brook

It's Mystery Month May and so, although I don't really like mystery novels, I read one. Of course I picked one about a librarian.

This is a rather light mystery about a young librarian, Carrie, who with the help of a friendly ghost, Evelyn Havens (former library employee, and aunt to Carrie's nemisis "prune-faced" Dorothy), solves the 15-year old murder of Laura (another library employee) in the fictional town of Clover Ridge, Connecticut.

Some interesting tidbits worthy of comment here (besides the fact that Evelyn "shushes" Carrie when she first meets her).

Dorothy is quite an unpleasant sort and furthermore had been envious of Laura back in the day "because all the patrons liked her and wanted her to help them". Evelyn had tried to explain to Dorothy that she should smile more and speak in a "pleasant manner" so that patrons would like her too. Dorothy's response had been that

her job was to answer questions and look up information. She wasn't paid to be an entertainer as well 

And here I must give some acknowledgement to Dorothy's point of view. The expectation that we smile, and that part of our work must involve getting people to like us is a burden demanded heavily upon women. Somehow I doubt that if Dorothy had been a man anyone would have made the same suggestion. In fact, I expect that the opposite would have been true. Her serious manner would have instead have been seen as a sign that she knew what she was talking about.

Meanwhile, Carrie endures a bit of "mansplaining" from police Lieutenant Mathers who suggests that she can find out more about Laura's murder from the newspaper articles online, which she can read at the library.

I think the best line though (and what obviously makes this fiction is) when Carrie is offered the job of head of programs and events and is informed that while the work is demanding "the salary's quite good" LOL.

Twelve Angry Librarians - by Miranda James

Baltimore County Public Library's #BWellRead 2018 Challenge for the month of May is to read a book recommended by a friend. My friend Fran recommended this one to me. And in a first for this blog it is a mystery novel! Honestly, friends are always recommending library-mystery books to me. The thing is, I have never liked mystery novels. Not even when I was a pre-teen was I even interested in Nancy Drew, or the Hardy Boys. I wanted to like them, all my friends did, and my big sister did, but I just could never get past how the characters in these series could get themselves into hot water so often. It's not like they are looking for trouble, but they always seemed to get tangled up into some sort of caper whether they wanted to or not.  

And so it is with Charlie Harris, interim director of the Athena College Library and his Maine Coon cat, Diesel. In this book the sleuths (human and feline) have the help of the librarians who are attending the Southern Library Association Convention to solve the mystery of who poisoned Gavin Fong, Charlie's library school nemesis. Lots of librarians in this one, and quite a bit of critical thinking, too.

I haven't been converted into a mystery lover, although I did find this to be a page-turner. I do, however, promise to read another library-mystery this time next year. It turns out that May is Mystery month!