Since Christmas is coming up, if you're looking for books, esp for "tweens" that don't rush sexuality, two new good ones are: "Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World" by Vicki Myron and "Wesley The Owl" by Stacey O'Brien. Both titles fairly self-explanatory.

Just finished an interesting novel, Real World by Natsuo Kirino, about a Japanese high school boy who murders his mother; the book minutely follows every moment and feeling of the boy and the people he comes into contact with until he is caught in a typical Japanese fashion. This author is very popular in Japan. She wrote a previous novel called Out, that also concerned a murder.

Finally, "Death Makes a Holiday" by David J. Skal, who has written several other books on spooky-type subjects. He starts out by debunking the Halloween-candy-poisoner urban legend, pointing out that the only proven time this happened it turned out to be a daddy in financial trouble trying to collect his children's life insurance. (Skal goes into a little true-crime detour on this story, ending with the father getting the death penalty in Illinois. Shows the difference between imagined or suggested horror and real-life horror).

Also, "A Carnivore's Inquiry" by Sabina Murray. Told in the first person & has the kind of semi-European sensibility popular now, so that it takes a while to see what is really going on. (Hint: think Hannibal Lecter).

Now that Halloween has come and gone I'll go ahead and post the seasonal rec's :<. John Updike's sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, "The Widows of Eastwick" is out now and is well worth reading, although not quite as good as the first one, which they made a movie out of with Jack Nicholson. Haven't seen it on network TV on Halloween in ages either. For some reason on Halloween weekend afternoon they always show The Amityville Horror with Josh Brolin, which must be the most boring horror film ever made.

Haven Kimmel has a new book out!! Title is "Iodine". The story arc falls a little short but the action and language more than make up for it.