Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Preview Shelf -- More About The Library's Art Collection

The Crawfordsville District Public Library's permanent art brightens walls up and down the stairs. Paul Mielke's photograph of Sky Valley Ranch in Hillsboro, Rob O'Dell's watercolor Barn with a Snow Fence, and Jerry Smith's watercolor Sugar Creek Shadows enhance upper walls, along with Peg Shearer's oil called Landscape With Weeds. It's a pleasant refresher to walk along, viewing these solid and splendid works of art.

Here's a reminder: On Saturday beginning at 9 the monthly Friends of the Library book sale offers (probably) thousands of choices for good reading. The library is receiving lots of new Young Adult fiction. Tithe by Holly Black is a modern faerie tale involving a present-day 16-year-old in an ancient power struggle. Midnight Predator by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes takes a girl hunter into a fabled Vampire realm as a human slave. In Across the Wall Garth Nix continues to explore the magical world of The Abhorsen Trilogy. Her new title Demon in My View comes from the end of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Alone," while her Shattered Mirror refers to W. B. Yeats' "The Two Trees." A boarding school student walks into a mythology textbook about Mount Olympus in Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief. The Lake of Souls is Darren Shan's 10th book in his Cirque Du Freak horror series. There is also fantasy in Annette Klause's Freaks Alive, on the Inside! about an 1899 sideshow. Nightmares plague an 18-year-old who turns to folk magic in Laurie Stolarz' Red is for Remembrance. Only in Your Dreams by Cecily von Ziegesar is a Gossip Girl novel. South Beach by Aimee Friedman is about spring break. Do you love a mystery? M. C. Beaton's Death of a Dreamer is her 21st Hamnish Macbeth story in which the northern Scotland constable is distracted by old flames while evils close in on him following a supposed suicide he knows is murder. On to St. Louis, where Shirley Kennett's P. J. Gray novel Time of Death is concerned with baffling murders by the Metro Mangler. In San Francisco The Hunt Club by John Lescroart concerns the murder of a federal judge. Steeplechase is one of Jane Langton's old fashioned Homer Kelly stories pursuing a mysterious lost church in a plot intertwined with famous poems, nonsense rhymes of Mother Goose, and New England lore. Jayne Krentz' All Night Long takes us to northern California years after a high school student finds her parents' bodies, ruled murder-suicide; her reporter's instinct summons her back to sort out the truth. The 5th Horseman by James Patterson is the latest in his series of crises the Women's Murder Club must solve, this time merciless killings by someone on a hospital's medical staff. Are you seeking a new novel? Jackie Collins offers Lovers & Players with two murders in one reckless New York week in high-powered settings from Park Avenue to Brooklyn. The Little Lady Agency by Hester Browne is a debut romantic comedy about a Mary Poppins of love who likes men, makeovers, and multitasking in London. Halfway House by Katharine Noel shows reactive changes in family members when a crisis hits their New Hampshire home life. The Templar Legacy by Steve Berry concerns a legendary cache of wealth and forbidden knowledge that could rock the civilized world, a cache thought lost when the order was exterminated in the 14th century. Lalique Glass by Nicholas Dawes includes 250 illustrations of the work of Rene Lalique (1860-1945). Antiques 101 is a crash course in everything old by Frank Loomis IV. Quilting Among Friends is a manual with lots of ideas and 55 friendship blocks. Two new memoirs are Ellen Hiltebrand's When I Was Elena about her sojourn in the guerrilla-infested mountains of Guatemala and Gail Caldwell's A Strong West Wind describing her coming of age in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle.

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