I’m easily lured to tales of pioneers who leave the comfortable and familiar to carve out lives on the frontier. I’m also fascinated by the U.S. counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Add my interest in organic gardening and a love of the Maine Coast, and this book becomes a must-read for me. Melissa …
Continue reading “Alida Snow, Circulation Assistant, HL Library”
Let me start by saying that I’m a hopeless addict to trashy fantasy and sci-fi novels. After finishing a particularly long and embarrassingly bad series I decided that it was time to push the boundaries of my comfort zone, so I committed to reading 10 non-fiction books before returning to my usual rubbish. To start, …
Continue reading “Dan Robinson, Assistant Director of Annual Giving/Young Alumni”
I picked up Cold Mountain a few weeks ago as a partial antidote to the nonfiction that I read for research and teaching and the children’s literature I read with my daughters. Charles Frazier, the author, writes with beautifully detailed prose evoking the landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains. At one level the book tells …
After all sorts of heavy-duty readings for my classes, I often like to escape and read a fast-paced conspiracy or fantasy novel—The Amber Spyglass just happens to be a perfect combination of the two. The Amber Spyglass is actually the third book of a trilogy called His Dark Materials, and is the dramatic end to …
Often times in epic fantasy series there is an ultimate evil that people must unite against in order to defeat. Beings such as Sauron in Lord of the Rings, the Dark One in the Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones are evil in their entirety and those who are good must unite in order …
I’ve always been drawn to stories that have some sort of historical basis, whether fiction or non-fiction. The Big Burn by Timothy Egan, author of the National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time, offers up a riveting account of the 1910 forest fire that ravaged the Bitterroot Mountains in northern Idaho, western Washington, and Montana. …
My family and I do a lot of hiking in Maine, and this summer we finally made our way up to Baxter State Park and Mount Katahdin. In honor of that, I’ve read quite a few books lately about the Appalachian Trail, and Bryson’s account is one of my favorites. This book manages to combine …
In fifth grade, I was that kid who read 52 books for summer reading. I thought it was cool to try to read a book every day. Of course, most of them were short and part of a children’s series, but even so, reading was a big part of my life. And it still is. …
I am reading Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis by Sandra Steingraber. I heard about it by chance, and by now I’ve ordered all her other books. The author is a biologist and mother of two who writes about raising children in the age of chemical contamination. Our children face …
This is a biology book written like an advice column. Animals or insects write in about about a relationship problem they are having and “Dr. Tatiana” writes back explaining why that certain species has developed a specific trait of sexual evolution over the generations. Even though the book is scientific it is written in a …