Water Moon

 Water Moon by Samantha Sotto Yambao, 384 pages.

In Hana's world, your fate is inked onto your skin for your whole life. Hers is to inherit a pawnshop where people from our world go to sell their greatest regrets, a tiny bridge between Tokyo and her own world of magic. On the day that she inherits the shop she instead wakes to find it ransacked and her father gone. She and a young physicist who wandered in from Tokyo (the first to find the shop with no regrets to sell) go on a desperate journey to the furthest corners of Hana's world to find her father before it's too late and Hana loses her destiny forever. 

This book was amazing. There's something very mythic about Hana's world, where travel can be by puddle, song, rumor, the bridge between midnight and morning, and many other ways beside. The plentiful details of the world somehow felt to me both comfortable and fresh, old and new. I was expecting something much simpler from this book than what I got, and I found the philosophy mixed with adventure very compelling. This novel is beautiful, heartbreaking, and immersive. I would highly recommend it. 

Falling

 

Falling / T. J Newman, read by Steven Weber, 290 pages

This book has a thrill a minute.  Maybe even MORE per minute.  Captain Bill Hoffman's family has been kidnapped, he is instructed to crash his commercial flight into a yet unnamed, but we KNOW, iconic location.  If he tells anyone, his family will be killed.  If he doesn't cooperate, they will be killed.  He is flying a plane with 140+ people on it.  He tries to negotiate.  He tells his good friend and fellow airline employee and head flight attendant Jo, she starts making plans.  She happens to have a nephew in the F.B.I. so gets them involved pretty quickly.  From the start to the finish there is action! Unfortunately almost nothing here makes much sense...but who cares, you can't stop reading (or listening).  Steven Weber did a good job with this thriller.

Upstream

 

Upstream : the quest to solve problems before they happen / Dan Heath, 317 pgs. read by the author

A nice look at what it takes to solve problems...first by truly understanding what the problem is. Not surprising to any reference librarian who often spends quite a bit of time figuring out what the question is from a patron.  If you step back and take a look at the bigger picture, you may be able to see the origin of the problem(s) you are trying to solve. That doesn't necessarily make the solution any easier but at least you can spend your time working on a real solution instead of spinning your wheels treating a symptom.