Love and the Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese

Love and the Turning Year: One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, 140 pages.
This book was added to the library's collection in January of 1971, just a little over a year after the Delmar location opened. Linda Ballard was a librarian then, as was Shirley Goldberg. I wonder if they were happy when this book came in. I wonder who ordered it. It's a beautiful collection of poems. Rexroth translated these poems of love, longing and loss, written
Many of them are short, unadorned, and cutting, like Ch'ang Ch'u Ling's poem, "Since you left" which was written in the late 600s or early 700s, during the T'ang Dynasty:

Since you left, my lover,
I can't take care of myself.
I do nothing but think of you.
I fade like the waning of the moon.

and an anonymous poem from the time of the Six Dynasties (whenever that might have been, Rexroth assumes we know some things here).

What is the matter with me?
With all the men in the world,
Why can I think only of you?

Others in the collection are longer, lyrical but just as mournful.
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Improbable Libraries: A Visual Journey to the World's Most Unusual Libraries

Improbable Libraries: A Visual Journey to the World's Most Unusual Libraries by Alex Johnson, 240 pages.
Pictures of mobile libraries, some on wheels, and some on the backs of pack-animals form one part of this interesting books. Libraries found on boats, in resorts, and in trees are also found throughout. This was inspirational and a lot of fun to read.
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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, 266 pages.
Michael Lewis does an excellent job explaining Credit Default Swaps, Collateralized Debt Obligations, and how, in part, the financial and housing markets melted down in 2008. He tells the story, and explains the terms by talking to the people who saw the melt-down coming, and the people who did not. These were the money men, the ones who received millions of dollars per year to steer clear of this kind of disaster. Kind of bleak in the end, since the post-2008 reforms were cosmetic, and we're left with an unstable system that could easily melt again.
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Dreams by Sigmund Freud

Dreams by Sigmund Freud, 120 pages.
Five lectures by Freud, all part of Freud's larger work, The Interpretation of Dreams. It's difficult for anyone who has watched too much Bugs Bunny, Gilligan's Island, or any of countless other cartoons and crappy comedies to take Freud or his sexy, sexy interpretation of the dreams we all have too seriously. Houses, ladders, repetitive motion, forests, caves and snakes are all obviously sexual to the founder of psychoanalysis, with no room for a fish-dream just being a fish-dream.
Freud's lecture style, with his "you would say, about this dream something obvious and rather stupid. I would counter with something so devastatingly inspired that you must admit, once again, that I am correct." gets old quick.

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Get in Trouble

Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link, 336 pages.
Kelly Link's stories are so imaginative, so fully formed, and so engrossing that I found myself wishing this was a far longer work. The stories are so different, all in their own complete world, each exploring themes of our relationships with the world and with others, but each looking from a different angle, skewed in such a way that you see something that you hadn't imagined before "Secret Identity" has a twist that I won't discuss, but it's told by a young woman ("almost sixteen!") who may have misled her thirty-two year-old online boyfriend ("he's not a pervert"). He may have misled her, too though, and not about his age.
"Origin Story" unfolds with a super-hero returning to his small-town home and reconnecting with his high-school sweetheart who was also his first sidekick. Again, everyone has their secrets.
I listened to over half of this on downloadable audio. The stories are each read by a different narrator and they are uniformly excellently done.
Great reading, great listening, great fun.
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Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe, 61 pages.
Randall Munroe, best know for his online comic XKCD, expands on one his most popular of those, "Up Goer Five" with this series of drawings explaining plate tectonics, skyscrapers, the human body, and datacenters, all with the explanations given using only the most commonly used one-thousand words.Fun and informative.
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The Art of War by Sun Tzu

The Art of War by Sun Tzu, 178 pages.
Our Overdrive catalog has an audio version of this (presumed) 5th Century BCE work by "Master Sun."
This classic work, laying out military theory in 13 parts, from planning, tactics and maneuvering and marching an army, through the use of spies has inspired despots, freedom fighters, generals and angry teens throughout the ages.
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Olympic Butter Gold

Olympic Butter Gold by Jonathan Moody, 94 pages.

Award-winning poet and high-school teacher Moody has published a collection of fun, lyrical, and engaging poems thematically linked by references to superheroes, Eighties Hip-Hop, popular culture and its intersection with B-Boy culture (or the other way around) all melded with his life. He brings in references to his military upbringing in many of the poems, like "Operation Just Cause, 1989" and "Deployed."
Later, in the section entitled ""Lovelust a la Mode" he reminisces about a former girlfriend;

"At Elgin Air Force Base, rumors
about my frist girlfriend traveled
at the speed of sound. . .

She doesn't know who her real
folks are. It's a toss-up
 between Bessie Smith
& Charlie Parker, but she has more
Godfathers Than the Zulu nation."

His poems in the last section, "Ronda Final (Already)," express Moody's thoughts about, among other things, race, rap, and the fault-lines in America around these topics. Poems like "Gothic Barkley," and "2084 (from Ghetto Fabulous to Ghetto Facsist)" give this collection a strong finish.