Heard Any Good Books Lately? November 2022 edition - Transcript

The content of this program is intended for people who are blind and print impaired. Hello and welcome to our November 2022 edition of Heard Any Good Books Lately? A program from the North Carolina Reading Service. I'm George Douglas. This program is brought to you by the friends of the North Carolina Library for the Blind, an organization of citizens, volunteers and patrons all interested in supporting the library and the services it provides.

The Friends Group was founded in 1989 and now has more than 300 members across North Carolina. If you'd like to join the Friends Group yourself, we'll have information on how to do that later in this program. This program is all about books, with emphasis on those available from the State Library of North Carolina Accessible Book and Library Services.

The Library has more than 86,000 titles in its collection. Books and magazines are available in large print, braille and talking books as well. The library also has more than 11,000 patrons across the street, across the state. And if you're not one and are interested in becoming a patron, I'll have more information about that at the end of this program as well.

This month, we take a look at some of the most popular books checked out in the month of October at the State Library of North Carolina. Accessible Book and Library Services. We begin with one of the most popular books last month. It's called The Secrets They Left Behind by Lisa Marie Redmond.

Now, here's the plot. A Buffalo cop who's gone undercover for the FBI finds herself in a world of hurt. Shea O'Connor is 23 but looks 18. That's why the FBI used her to pose as a high school student to catch a serial killer case that left her scared, both physically and emotionally. The case is still under a gag order, and Shea is back on boring patrol duty when FBI Agent Bill Walters ask her to work another case for him.

Three freshman college friends all went missing the same night in the little town of Kellys Falls, New York. Now, against her better judgment, she accepts and is set up as Shea Anderson transferred to Harris Community College, whose parents were killed in a car accident and whose uncle is the town chief police, Roy Bishop. Since her fake uncle is youngish, unmarried and unhappy, she's interfering in his case.

She puts up in a boarding house. Emma Lansing and Olivia Stanfield two of the missing girls came from a nice area. The wilder Skyler Santana lived in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother while her drug dealing boyfriend, Joe Stiles, worked on a G.E.D. at Harris. She immediately becomes friends with the missing girls buds. Kayla, Jenna and Maddie.

She fends off passes from Joe while recognizing his bad boy appeal to young girls. She has no trouble fitting in and easily gains her new friends confidence, but she still suspects that they're hiding information. That could be the key to breaking the case. Even worse, she and Nick Stansfield, the brother who refuses to go back to all right until Olivia is found fall for each other and she hates herself for deceiving him.

Redmen A Means to an end 2019 shows tensions mounting as Shea struggles for answers, along with the town united in its resolve to find the missing girls. Paige Turner, whose puzzling mystery and psychological drama are rooted in plausible descriptions of teenage angst. Once again, the book is called The Secrets They Left Behind by Lisa Marie Redmond. Now let's take a look at a book by Christopher Moore.

This one is entitled Razzmatazz. It's a repeat. New York Times best selling author Christopher Moore is and he returns to the mean streets of San Francisco in this outrageous follow up to his madcap novel noir. San Francisco, 1947. Bartender, Sammy, Two Toes, Tiffin and the rest of the cookies, coffee, irregulars, a ragtag bunch of working mugs. The last scene in Noir are on the hustle.

They're trying to open a driving school. Shanghai, an abusive Swedish stevedore. Get Mable the local madam and her girls to a Christmas party at the state hospital without alerting the overzealous head of the S.F. P.D. Vice Squad. All while Sammy's girlfriend, Stilton, and her Wendie, the welder gal pals, are using their wartime shipbuilding skills on a secret project that might be attracting the attention of some government men in black.

And oh, yeah. Someone is murdering this city's drag kings and club owner Jimmy Vasco is sure she is next on the list and wants Sammy to find the killer. Meanwhile, Eddie must, whose shoe has been summoned by his Uncle Ho to help save his opium den from squid kid Tang, a vicious gangster who is determined to retrieve a priceless relic, an ancient statue of the powerful Rain Dragon that hos stole from one of the fighting tongs 40 years earlier.

And if Eddie blows it, he just might call down the wrath of that powerful, magical creature on all of Thug City. Strap yourselves in for a bit of old razzmatazz. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Christopher Moore time that sounds a little bit confusing to me, but I tell you, this book has been on the top ten list for the last couple of months.

So I think it's really a great read. It's called Razzmatazz, and it's by Christopher Moore.

Now let's turn to a book called Small Things Like These is and this was written by Claire Keegan. Here's the plot for this one. A tiny thing itself. A slice of life. Novella Chica, repackaged as a full scale novel. Claire Keegan's small things like these is set in a small village in Ireland just before Christmas in 1985. Here, the friendly mundanity is of a working man's daily routine.

Meet the grim shadow cast out by the country's Magdalene Laundries at those secretive institutions which lasted from the 1700s through the 1900s and were typically run by Catholic nuns with the support of the Irish government. So-called fallen girls and women were imprisoned, worked and abused their children, often taken from them and neglected or even killed. In 2014, a mass grave containing the remains of some 800 babies and children was uncovered in a septic tank in the county Galway town of Tomb.

Only in the past decade have the Catholic Church and Irish society begun to confront the horrors of the laundries. Then incarcerated approximately 30,000 women for the fictional villagers in small things like these. As for its readers, the specter of these laundries is fleeting. At first, a shock of cold. You pass through quickly with a reflexive shiver before emerging into the next patch of sun.

The protagonist, a coal and timber merchant named Bill Furlong, is himself the son of an unmarried Catholic mother who had fallen pregnant at 16 and avoided the torment of a Magdalen home. Through the charity of her Protestant employer, now an adult with daughters of her own, furlong is going about his coal delivery rounds one day when he finds one of the nuns abject charges locked inside a freezing shed.

He takes the girl into the convent and shares a fraught cup of tea with a tyrannical mother superior. It's clear that eventually he'll have to decide whether to rescue the girl or leave her to her fate, turning a blind eye as the rest of the community would doubtless prefer, there's little modernity in Keegan's Irish town, except for passing mentions of jeeps and airports and 1980s British TV shows like all Creatures, Great and Small.

We barely see evidence of technologies, idioms or trends more recent than the Industrial Revolution. Reading this story, I felt immersed in a 19th century landscape rather than one set in the years of my own teens, says the reviewer here. Instead of Pac-Man and Purple Rain and Madonna, the references are to shipyards and Dickens anthracite homemade fruitcakes and becomes powder, a constipation remedy that dates from 1842.

Such homey quantification of Irishness is a fairly familiar trope, but there it's likely accurate enough. The country was still sunk in the past. In 1985, when a doctor's prescription was required to buy condoms. And Keegan's prose, as she describes this trapped in amber world, is both nostalgic and practical. The scope of village life may be small, but its texture is rich.

Neighbors are welcoming customers who give Fern long gifts. Moments of interpersonal contact shimmer like the dimming jewels of a sense of community that for many of us has vanished into bygones. But the quaintness, Keegan implies, is a veneer over rot beneath the charming give and take lurks steely warnings and a sociopathic lack of empathy. Even Furlong's wife, Eileen, a proper middle class mother of five, refuses to entertain the reality of others suffering.

And so the town allows vicious crimes against its most vulnerable residents to go on unobstructed. Curiously, by casting Furlong as a reluctant but goodhearted hero and the women around him as largely enablers and cowards protective of their own children. But otherwise, seeing no evil, Keegan almost seems to suggest that in this community it was the women who were most keenly implicated in perpetuating the suffering of their own not only the nuns themselves, but the gossips and bystanders and repressed and fearful bourgeois like Eileen, who knew of the crimes and stubbornly turned their faces away.

As in Ursula K Le Guin's story, the ones who walk away from all my lies. This Ireland is a place whose cheeriness depends on the misery of its scapegoats. Sounds like a fascinating story. It's entitled Small Things Like These, and it was written by Clare Keegan.

Now let's turn to a book by the very popular writer Anne Lamott. This is called Dusk Night and Dawn on Revival and Courage, another helping of pop philosophy from this prolific writer. Here we are, older, scared, numb on some days, enraged on others with even less trust than we had a year ago. Lamott writes of such challenges as the pandemic and threatens to America and threats to American democracy and to the planet in general.

Where on earth do we start again? Our world and joy and hope and our faith in life itself. Back in these short essays, similar in style and tone as almost everything. Hallelujah. Anyway, small victories and the author's other works of nonfiction, she ventures some answers mixed in with details of her personal life, including her first marriage at age 65, to a man who, unlike her, is not Christian.

Her struggles with alcoholism and the Sunday school classes she teaches near her California home. The book addresses such topics as forgiveness, repentance, climate change and more. Though the book will appeal to her longtime fans, the essays are marred by observations that are trite or just plain obvious. For example, maturity is retaining a modicum of grace when you do not get your own way.

Growing up is hard. You make the plan, but you don't plan the result. Other statements will be open to debate. For example, darkness can be so soothing when you know it won't last forever. Love is being with a person, wherever they are. However they are acting. It says something about this book that its best line is a misquote of Kurt Vonnegut, who in a 1994 Syracuse University commencement speech, said he told his grandchildren.

Lamott says it was his children when they complained about the state of the planet. Don't look at me. I just got here myself. For Lamont devotees, his final alongside the aforementioned books, others can take a past, a simplistic attempt at hope in troubled times. Nonetheless, a very popular book this past month at the State Library for the Blind, and it is entitled Dusk Night and Dawn on Revival and Courage by Anne Lamott.

And you're listening to Heard Any Good Books Lately? An original production from the North Carolina Reading Service signed. George Douglas, thanks so much for joining me today. Let's turn now to a novel entitled The Old Man by Thomas Perry. Perry drives deep into Jack Reacher territory in this standalone. About a long ago, Army intelligence officer whose less than grateful nation just won't let him be dispatched to Libya.

A generation ago to deliver $20 million to Faris Hamza for distribution to rebel fighters. Michael Cutler watched as Hamza sat on the money, purchasing a Rolls Royce, financing a cadre of personal bodyguards and doing everything except pass the bundle to the intended recipients. So Cutler grabbed the rest of the money and hightailed it back to the USA. His offers to return the money to the National Security Agency fell on the deaf ears of bureaucrats who informed him that he was a wanted criminal who'd better turn himself in and face the music.

So Cutler went off the grid as Dan Chase of Northwich, Vermont, invested the money cautiously and set up several false identities just in case. Ten years after his wife died, his past catches up with him in the shape of two Arab looking men who break into his house while he's supposed to be asleep after taking care of business with brutal efficiency.

He goes on the lam once more as Peter Caldwell. He drives to Chicago, where he meets Zoe MacDonald, who's quickly drawn to him. They make some sweet memories together as Henry and Marcia Dixon. Then it's time once more for Henry to leave Julian CARSEN, the special ops contractor assigned to locate Dixon and set him up for the kill.

Ends up sympathizing with him instead, especially after he helps arrange the return of the $20 million and sees that it doesn't lessen the pressure on Dixon and passes on the information that allows the Dixons to escape. Though it doesn't exactly feel like an escape to Marcia, they retreat to an isolated cabin in Big Bear. Carson quits the assignment and marries his Arkansas sweetheart.

Both men wait for the inevitable, and in the fullness of time, it arrives with guns ablaze. Swift. Unsentimental and deeply satisfying. Liam Neeson would be perfect in this title role. It's a Jack Reacher novel. The old Man by Thomas Terror. Now, before I move on to the next novel, I want to make one correction here. That was not a Jack Reacher novel.

That was a novel that reaches into the Jack Reacher type territory. And it sounds like an equally exciting one. Once again, it's called The Old Man, and it was written by Thomas Perry. Sorry for that little misunderstanding there. Let's move on to the next book. This is one entitled Lincoln and the Fight for Peace. And it's by John P Avion, a ground breaking, a revelatory history of Abraham Lincoln's plan to secure a just and lasting peace after the Civil War, a vision that inspired future presidents, as well as the world's most famous peacemakers, including Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

It is a story of war and peace, race and reconciliation. As the tide of the Civil War turned in the spring of 1865. Abraham Lincoln took a dangerous two week trip to visit the troops on the front lines, accompanied by his young son, seeing combat up close, meeting liberated slaves in the ruins of Richmond and comforting wounded union and Confederate soldiers.

The power of Lincoln's personal example in the closing days of the war offers a portrait of a peacemaker. He did not demonize people. He disagreed with. He used humor, logic and scripture to depolarize bitter debates. Balancing moral courage with moderation. Lincoln believed that decency could be the most practical form of politics, but he understood that people were more inclined to listen to reason when greeted from a position of strength.

Ulysses S Grant's famously generous terms of surrender to General Robert E Lee, an Appomattox that April were a direct expression of the president's belief that a soft peace should follow a hard war. While his assassination sent the country careening off course, Lincoln's vision would be vindicated long after his death, inspiring future generations in their own quests to secure a just and lasting peace.

As U.S. General Lucius Clay, architect of the post-World War two German occupation, said when asked what guided his decisions, I tried to think of the kind of occupation the South would have had if Abraham Lincoln had lived. Lincoln and the Fight for Peace reveals how Lincoln's character informed his commitment to unconditional surrender, followed by a magnanimous peace. Even during the Civil War, surrounded by reactionaries and radicals, he refused to back down from his belief that there is more that unites us than divides us.

But he also understood that peace needs to be waged with as much intensity as war. Lincoln's plan to win the peace is his unfinished symphony. But in its existing notes, we can find an anthem that can begin to bridge our divisions today. Once again, a book that sounds like a wonderful book. It's entitled Lincoln and the Fight for Peace by John P, Avignon.

Now let's talk about a very popular book by Simon St James. It's called Silence for the Dead. And this is a review of this book. Where was this book a few years ago when I watched Crimson Peak and was dying for a book similar? If you saw a Crimson Peak and loved it, then I think you will really enjoy this book, says the writer.

One of the things that I liked about that film was how the House and Ghosts both haunted the characters. And this book does something similar, and the effect is memorable and so wonderfully suspenseful. This is my final Simon St James book and I really wanted to end her books on a high note. And that's exactly what I did.

I think this one was one of my favorites by her in 1919. Kitty Weekes, pretty resourceful and on the run, falsifies her background to obtain a nursing position at Portis house, a remote hospital for soldiers left shell shocked by the horrors of the Great War. Hiding the shame of their men. Mental instability and what was once a magnificent private estate, the patients suffer from nervous attacks and tormenting dreams.

But something more is going on at Porteous house. Its plaster is crumbling. Its plumbing makes eerie noises and strange breaths of cold waft through the empty rooms. It's known that the former occupants left abruptly, but where did they go? And why do the patients all seem to share the same nightmare one so horrific that they dare not speak of it?

Kitty finds a dangerous ally in Jack Yates, an inmate who may be a war hero, a mad man, or maybe both. But even as Kitty and Jack create a secret, intimate alliance to uncover the truth, disturbing revelations suggest the presence of powerful spectral forces. And when a medical catastrophe leaves them even more isolated, they must battle the menace on their own.

Caught in the heart of a mystery that could destroy them both. This book was different in some ways than her other books. I love that the house itself was a big part of the ghost story. There were other ghosts, but the house was like this sinister presence that truly added a lot of horror to the book itself. Again, her books are paranormal boarding on horror, but not to the point of terrifying.

I would say more like spine tingling and creepy. This one was a little more horror, but again, not overdone where it would only appeal to certain readers. I really like that the ghosts and house in this book weren't your usual. Help put me to rest. Ghosts. One of the ghosts and sinister in the extreme. And I like how it keeps readers scared, but yet pushes them to want to know why the ghost and the house are so dangerous.

Also, the idea of madness was much more the main gothic element than ghosts. Turn of the century or Victorian era man houses really appealed to me when it comes to gothic elements. There's something about the setting which really makes me as a reader, feel uneasy. Are the patients really crazy or are they made crazy from the treatments? That's exactly what I got in this book, and I was on edge and wasn't sure if I could trust the characters.

I loved how that worked together with ghosts to create a memorable and extra suspenseful Gothic read. That alone earned five stars for me, the complexity of the romance really hit them high. Mark. Jack. As a patient in the manor house by his own choice, which makes readers wonder how the romance will work. Kitty was equally flawed and not your normal heroine.

She's a liar with a checkered past, and she has zero scruples when it comes to saving herself. You don't want to like her, but yet you do. She's sympathetic. And you can see how putting her and Jack together quickly develop into a romance. They are both flawed and complex, which makes the romance work for me. Overall, this is one of my favorite books by her and I absolutely loved it.

I read it in a day and was sad when it ended. I feel like I've really gotten to read something special when I read one of her books. A pretty amazing review of a book called Silence for the Dead by Simon St James.

And that's all the time we have for this month's edition of Heard Any Good Books Lately? I'm George Douglas. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like more information about how to become a patron of the State Library of North Carolina Accessible Books and Library Services. Simply Google or Search for accessible books North Carolina library or call toll free 888-388-2460.

You can also use the same numbers and website to join the Friends of the North Carolina Library for the Blind. It's that wonderful organization that sponsors this monthly feature on books. This program is intended for people who are blind or print impaired. Heard any good books lately will be available right after the broadcast at our website. NC Reading Service dot org. So long until next time.