The Underdogs

The Underdogs by Mike Lupica  280 pp.

This was the last book for this season's Treehouse Book Club. Twelve year old Will Tyler is an amazing running back whose whole life is football. When the town he lives in can no longer afford to fund their team Will finds a way to get a major sponsorship for their team. Then the challenge was having enough players for the team. They manage to get the bare minimum by including one girl player and convincing his hard-working, disabled dad to be the coach. The Bulldogs are up against a season battling fully funded and manned teams while all the players do double duty on both offense and defense. Lupica includes lots of detailed game descriptions along with the personal drama going on in the players lives. This is a good one for sports fans.

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald, 394 pages

Quiet, shy bookstore clerk Sara Lindqvist has traveled from her home in Sweden to the tiny, dying town of Broken Wheel, Iowa, to meet and stay with her book-loving pen pal, Amy Harris, for two months. But when Sara gets to Broken Wheel, she discovers that Amy has died of a long illness that she'd kept hidden from Sara. While some (probably most) people would leave town and either go back home or embark on a different adventure, Sara stays, quickly falling in love with the quirky town and its residents, and sets up a pop-up bookstore, using Amy's vast book collection as her stock.

This is a cute book, and one that's just begging to be made into a romantic comedy. The characters are charming (I particularly liked Poor George and Grace, the tough broad (I think that word was made for this character) who runs the diner); the plot is full of pratfalls (Drunk guy in the bushes outside the church? Our heroine in a cheesy costume for a town event? Check and check); and you know almost from the outset how this book is going to end. But as predictable as it may be, it's a fun read. Fans of Fried Green Tomatoes, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, even Bridget Jones will want to check this one out.

The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, 399 pages, translated by Ken Liu, audio narrated by Luke Daniels.

A book that starts with the Cultural Revolution in 1960s Beijing and then spins out about four light years. Along the way there's an online game, the Three-Body. Those in the Three-Body  they have a problem, namely that the world they inhabit has a tendency to self-destruct. There are too many suns, it gets too hot, and then it gets too cold and the inhabitants have to use some extreme measures to survive.
The people who play the game start to think about it all differently when they realize that maybe it's not a game.
There are a lot of interesting characters and some convoluted storylines. It is easy to see why The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo last year.

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February totals

A hearty, Leap Day William welcome to new bloggers, Jeff and Rob!

Amy 5/2216
Christa 16/4527
Jeff 5/1316
Kara 9/3304
Karen 6/1935
Kathleen 8/2573
Linda 5/1724
Patrick 8/1435
Rob 1/144

TOTAL 63/19,174

The 6:41 to Paris

The 6:41 to Paris / Jean-Philippe Blondel  146 pgs.

Cécile and Philippe had a brief but important affair in their early 20's.  It ended poorly mostly because Philippe was a real ass.  Now, 26 years later, they find themselves sitting next to each other on the train.  Cécile, once a plain girl with an interesting personality has turned into a well put together and more beautiful woman. Philippe, who was once the stunner hasn't aged well and is doughy and could not be mistaken for any younger than his actual age.  Cécile is still pretty mad about the way their relationship ended.  Philippe feels bad about it.  Neither wants to be the first to speak on the train.  Neither is sure the other recognizes their seat mate.  The book alternates between the two characters and fills you in on their past, and lives.  Amazing for its suspense...are they going to talk or not?

Read and find out! 

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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750 Years in Paris: a Graphic Novel / Vincent Mahe, unpaged

I enjoyed this depiction of Paris history through the story of one building.  Mahe uses a limited color palette to great effect, and has a fine eye for details - posters fixed to the walls, broken bottles, etc., that illuminate.  There is a brief timeline in the back which I suspect was translated by someone, although I can't find the evidence for that...