Sweet Tooth

Serena Frome wants to study English at university however she bows to parental pressure and goes to Cambridge to study mathematics. In her final year she has a brief affair with an older man who encourages her to apply for a job at MI5. Ian McEwan has set the book in the early 1970s at the end of the Cold War. It is also the time of IRA bombings, petrol shortages, an economic crisis and industrial unrest in Britain. Serena, who has maintained her interest in reading, particularly modern literature, is seconded to the project, Sweet Tooth, where her mission is to encourage a young novelist to accept a grant from a literary agency funded by MI5. It is believed that the writings of the targeted novelist along with other authors in the program will promote the MI5 message.

Books and writing are a major thread of the book. It is the short stories of Tom Haley that have brought him to the attention of MI5 and some of these are included throughout the book along with literary discussion between Tom and Serena. Serena soon discovers that working undercover is not always easy, especially as her relationship with Tom develops. Should she tell him about her real role and risk losing her job and his love or should she continue with the situation as it it in the hope that he will not discover the truth. The book, although set within a spy agency, is not a thriller but  is about truth, trust and betrayal. It also investigates the relationship between authors and readers.

Bury your dead

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his wife are on holiday in Quebec visiting Emile Comeau, the former police officer who had been the initial supervisor of Gamache and who had greatly influenced the future decision making of the young policeman. A recent event had resulted in the death of four officers and serious injuries to others including Gamache and his friend and fellow officer, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Memories that haunt both Gamache and Beauvoir reveal the details of the past horrors as the two men are investigating two other incidents. While Armand is in Quebec there is a murder at the Literary and Historical Society library, the organisation that he frequently visits to research early Canadian history, and reluctantly he agrees to act as a consultant on the case. Meanwhile Inspector Gamache has asked Beauvoir to go back to Three Pines on holiday but in reality to reinvestigate a previous murder investigation as doubts have arisen about the guilt of the man arrested.

Burying the dead, by Louise Penny, therefore contains three interwoven plots to intrigue the reader. The author also provides an insite into the history of the city and its founders resulting in the tensions between the English and French that can surface in Quebec - a city with many cultures. Throughout the book the feelings of guilt about decisions made in his attempts to save his kidnapped officer haunt Gamarche and it is not until the end that he finally comes to terms with the realisation that he and his team need to 'bury their dead'.

Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel has just won the 2012 Man Booker prize for her novel, Bring up the bodies. She won the same award for her first novel in this trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, in 2009. Short reviews for both these books appear in this blog. Now we await the third volume in the series.

Say you're sorry

Clinical psychologist Joe O'Loughlin, in Oxford to give a lecture at a conference, becomes involved in the investigation of double murder that occurred at a near-by farmhouse. On the the same day the body of a young woman is found frozen in the lake. As it becomes obvious that the deaths are related, the unravelling of the story is conveyed by Joe and also by Piper Hadley, one of two girls kidnapped three years earlier, who keeps notes of her experiences. Joe convinces the police that they are not only investigating a murder but also need to discover the fate of the missing Bingham girls. Australian author, Michael Robotham, provides the reader with a well written psychological crime novel that is difficult to put down.

Bones are forever

Dr Temperance Brennan is asked to investigate the the discovery of the bodies of three babies found in the room of a house in Quebec. The quest to locate the mother leads Brennan and Andrew Ryan, along with Ollie Hastie, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to Yellowknife, a diamond mining community near the Arctic Circle. I did not know about diamond mining in Canada but as the plot unwinds and is finally resolved, Kathy Reichs provides a detailed description of the area where the book is set including the history and issues affecting this far-flung region of Canada. The relationship between Temperance and Andrew has also been under strain with the resulting tension between them acting as an underlying feature of the book. Another exciting Temperance Brennan book.
(A Temperance Brennan Novel no 15) 

The 26-storey treehouse

In March this year children's author,  Andy Griffiths,  visited Nunawading Library where he entertained  200 children. His latest book is The 26-storey treehouse, a follow up to an earlier work, The 13-storey treehouse. Illustrated by Terry Denton the reader is invited to explore the treehouse's  recent extensions including the dodgem car rink, a skate ramp with a crocodile-pit hazard, a mud fighting arena, an anti-gravity chamber etc., etc. You get the picture. When their publisher wants to know when the next book will be ready, a young Andy and Terry describe how they met and recount adventures with the pirate, Captain Woodenhead. A mix of text and pictures encourages young readers to explore and enjoy these humorous tales. Of course, this is not the end of the tree house. When last seen, Andy and Terry were adding another 13 stories to their creation.

Assessing library displays

The final display for Front Line was to be tried and assessed over a period of three weeks. Each Monday the display shelves were filled with selected books and a note was kept of the titles on display. Over the week, when books were borrowed, additional books were added by staff but notes of items added to the display were not kept. The sample used for the assessment was therefore the original books on display at the beginning of each week.

The books chosen were those that may be of interest to older users of the library - Baby Boomers and older.

Depending on the size of the books there were usually twelve or thirteen titles in a display.

Nine (9) of the original books in Display no. 1 were borrowed during the week. The books in this display were  only non-fiction titles.

Eight (8) of the original books in Display no. 2 were borrowed during the week. The books in this display were primarily non-fiction with a few fiction titles.

Eleven (11) of the original books in Display no. 3 were borrowed during the week. The books on display were a mixture of fiction and non-fiction titles.

The types of books borrowed from the display can be divided into the following categories:

·     using computers, the Internet including Picasa, Office 2010 and digital photography (7)

·     recreation books (8) including playing golf and fishing and also knitting (2 each) as well as genealogy and writing a memoir (2)

·    lifestyle books (5) including health, aging and finance (one each) plus two travel books

·    fiction titles (7) (mixture of large print and general fiction) plus one memoir made up the rest of the books

A check of the borrower information for items borrowed showed that the items were primarily borrowed by members of the target group.

The experiment was continued into a fourth week but this time only three rows of shelves were used as it was considered that the bottom shelf was too low. The display was extended to end of an adjoining bay as well. The end of one bay contained nine (9) non-fiction books while the end of the other bay held nine (9) fiction titles. Hopefully these two bays will routinely be used to display a mixture of fiction and non-fiction items of interest to older readers.

Displaying selected titles from the general non-fiction collection in an area where fiction books are primarily located would appear, from this experiment, to be a useful way of broadening selection choices for library users.