December already? Impossible! That means only twenty more shopping days until Christmas! Or you could just relax with a cup of coffee/tea/cocoa and a good book. And speaking of good books, Finley Library has so many that I cannot keep up with reading and reviewing them so YOU will know how great they are! But remember! You have the ability to go online and check out what we have posted at finleypl.org . Right now what we have listed are all the books on the inventory. That includes large print and regular print hardcover books and also paperbacks--the ones in the Paperback Room. Many of the western paperbacks in the Reference Room are on there as well. Speaking of the Reference Room, there are so many interesting books in there. We have true crime, cookbooks, biographies of many well-known folks--dead and alive, western hard covers from an earlier age with authors like Luke Short, Max Brand, William MacLeod Raine and Ernest Haycox, plus many in paperback with authors like Zane Gray and Louis L'Amour. (We have all of Zane Gray's books in the front room in hard cover.) To me the real bonanza in the Reference Room, however, are all the great books we have about North Dakota, Minnesota and "the Dakotas" before North and South Dakota were separated. Personally, I think think there are many of you out there that don't know very much about your home state and the people who settled it except what you may have learned in school. The problem there, though, is that those folks are probably not reading this article anyway!!! Go online and take a look at the books we have available--you will wonder how there can be so many in this little building--we wonder also, so come in and check us out!
Here's a couple reviews:
Gray Mountain by John Grisham. (HC/RP) Samantha Kafer's job has just been "down-sized" at a large Wall Street law firm in the financial mess of 2008. But, if she works for a legal aid clinic for a year she might be given her job back with no loss of seniority--that is if the financial situation changes for the better in New York City. So, she takes her chances and begins work in Brady, Virginia, (population 2200) in Appalachia. In working there she finds out what it is like to work for "real" people in the court room--something she has not done in her three years of work in Manhattan. While there she also realizes that many of the folks there have been "left for dead" by the "big coal" companies. The beautiful hardwood trees that need to be removed for strip mining are not harvested; they are bull-dozed to get at the coal just under the ground and pushed--with the dirt they are growing in--into valleys that had clear-running streams. Now the streams are either blocked or full of the chemicals needed to help extract the coal. Men who were miners have lungs filled with coal dust. They are so weak they can no longer work, but then they can no longer get medical help either. "Big Coal," Big Law," and "Big Money" will not be stopped it seems, and that is what the legal aid clinic Kafer works for is up against. Good book!!
The Wanderer by Sharon Creech. (PB) (Young Adult) (Now don't turn your nose up at reading this review because it is young adult! The Hunger Games series is considered "young adult" as is the Twilight series!) Sophie is thirteen, but beyond her years in her ability to learn and do new things. She loves the sea, so when her three uncles and two boy cousins decide to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a sixty-five foot sailboat, she wants to go as well! Given the opportunity to go, she finds she is very good at helping out on the boat--doing her share, but as they sail south of Greenland they run into a storm of epic proportions. Battling their way east, Sophie learns so much about herself--and she is not the only one. Being so close to death, the entire crew finds the way they have been living/behaving is not as wonderful, caring and loving as it could be. Very nice book--full of exciting adventure, character-building and growing up--even for the adults. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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