My next Must Read Recommend: Rides of the Midway  by  Lee Durkee.  This book actually came out in 2002, but I just found out about it from a co-worker, Carly Akers at MPL.  (She actually knows the author).  This is a coming of age novel about Noel Weatherspoon, whose life-changing moment comes at age 10, when he plows into a boy named Ross Altman at a Little League game (Ross was the catcher) and has the bad luck to put the boy into a coma. This happens in small-town Mississippi, excarbated by his stepfather being a Baptist preacher and Billy Graham wannabe, and, as the NYT reviewer put it, the kind of person who eats pizza with a fork. (His mother's first husband, his father, is presumed dead in Viet Nam. Last seen boarding a ride at the carnival). By his junior year of high school, Noel is a Lynnrd Skynnrd-listening, drug dealing borderline dropout, with a dropout in waiting younger brother Matt, and a stepbrother named Ben who everybody loves. The book is packed with drugs, start to finish, and includes a truly Portnoyesque encounter with a watermelon. At some point someone gives Noel a Nikon camera, which may provide a clue to his rescue, fate-wise.

   Two new books very worth reading  -- The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie and All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. It's hard to express, but they're both books about family life where the heros are not the "stars" - they're the women who keep things going despite the troubles. A change of pace.

     New in Southern fiction; The Headmaster's Darlings : A Mountain Brook Novel  by Katherine Clark. Forward by Pat Conroy. This book deserves a fanfare! Katherine Clark is the author of  the Eugene Walter biography Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet.
Now she's written a comedy of manners about Mountain Brook, the one-percenter neighborhood of Birmingham, and Mountain Brook Academy, starring its larger than life headmaster Norman Laney. The darlings in the title are his students, but also the society ladies who support and finance his dreams of defeating "the barbarians" and turning Mountain Brook into a temple of civilization. Truman Capote's hold on his "swans" was small potatoes compared to the way Headmaster Laney handles these ladies. Of course, his whole raison d'etre is to get as many of his students into Ivy League or Ivy-League level colleges as possible.
To top it all off, it's a series! The forthcoming titles are: All the Governor's Men, The Harvard Bride, and The Ex-Suicide. All from University of South Carolina Press. If you live down here you've got to read these books.

The Improbability of Love by Hannah Rothschild . Great new book in the traditional novel mold. Sweeping scope, lots of characters, mystery, art world glamour/satire and a sympathetic main character. The title is from a (fictional) painting by Watteau which narrates part of the story.  Needless to say all comes out well in the end.

   Day after day after MLK day - went to LWV luncheon with featured speaker Noah Price Oliver, warden of Mobile Metro Jail,  talking about prisoners, parole, etc.. Was VERY interesting. 5 C's - Care, Custody, Control while Controlling Costs. They actually have high school graduation for the GED program in Metro Jail. (some of their inmates are there for a VERY long time!). Also; lots of overlap with our homeless population - our everyday people at the library.  Best idea; donate books to the Metro Jail library. It is woefully underserved, esp the women's.

   Have been in two car accidents in the last two months, both of which totalled my car, so that's the main reason I'm way behind on blogging. (My new nickname at work is "Crash").

   Tried to read Michel Houellebecq's  Submission, it is quite well written, but I couldn't get into it. The premise is France being taken over by its Muslim population, imposing sharia law, etc. I'll try again later, it's a quality book.

   Another light book  Unbecoming by  Rebecca Scherm,  along the lines of the Tom Piccarilli books; a girl from a poor family and a boy from a local-gentry family fall in love; far from being the cliche'd monster the boy's mother is amazingly nice to her, almost regards her as her own child. But, life happens. Read it to find out the rest.

  The Wilds by Julia Elliott.   This collection of short stories had me with the first line;

                          "Brunell Hair lived in a lopsided mill house with her mama and her uncle and her little withered-up critter of a   grandmaw."

        I went to a public school in a small town in Missouri and I knew several girls who lived in lopsided mill-type houses, and a couple of them had what could fairly be described as a little withered-up critter of a grandmaw. Aside from that these are imaginative and broad-ranging, very well written stories with a dash of Southern Gothic in all.