Library Notes for the week of February 4

We had such excitement here at the library when First Gentleman Mike came to visit on his literacy tour of the State. Reading is so important and it was nice to see is it valued by the highest levels of our state government as well.

Have you picked up your reading record for the Winter Reading Program? Read three books and get a Literary Latte from The Next Chapter as well as a chance for a Booklover’s Bag of goodies. Maybe one of the following titles will end up on your reading record.

Fire in the Blood by Irene Nemirovsky. When she was writing Suite Française in 1940, Némirovsky, who died in Auschwitz in 1942 before turning 40, was also reworking this novel, newly discovered among her papers. In a leisurely narrative, middle-aged narrator Silvio recounts three interlocking stories of love and betrayal over two decades. These secret affairs, he says, can be explained only by fire in the blood, the intense passion that can overtake men and women when they are young, highly sexed and vulnerable.

A Free Life by Ha Jin. Nan Wu, a Chinese graduate student in Boston, drops out after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He would like to abandon his marriage, too, but his sense of duty toward Pingping and their young son is stronger than his desire for passion and the freedom to write poetry. So Nan laboriously progresses from busboy to chef, and purchases a small Chinese restaurant outside Atlanta, Georgia. He and Pingping work hard, live frugally, and strive to understand their baffling new world, including white friends who adopt a Chinese daughter.

The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett. In the fall of 1916, as the U.S. involvement in WWI looms, the Adirondack town of Tamarack Lake houses a public sanitarium and private cure cottages for TB patients. Gossip about roommate changes, cliques and romantic connections dominate relations among the sick—mostly poor European immigrants—when they're not on their porches taking their rest cure. Intrigue increases with the arrival of Leo Marburg, an attractive former chemist who has spent his years in New York slaving away at a sugar refinery, and of Miles Fairchild, a pompous and wealthy resident who decides to start a discussion group, despite his inability to understand many of his fellow patients.