Spring the perfect time for reading

DISCOVER YOUR PUBLIC LIBRARY

“For me, I prefer a book with a few stains of varied sorts, perhaps a

dog-eared page or two, a lovingly caressed cover. Such a book has at

some time found friends and been welcomed to peoples’ hearths.”

Carl Purington Rollins, Yale typographer, 1880-1960

Certainly your public library can claim to have more than a few

gently stained, dog-eared tomes. We even add sand-filled pages for

good measure! But, most importantly, so many of our books have been

-- and continue to be -- welcomed to your hearths, and in that we are

immeasurably pleased.

Each year, spring is an especially active publishing season and

your library’s staff highly recommends to our readers the following

new fiction they have recently enjoyed.

“Atonement,” winner of this year’s National Book Critics Circle

Award, is written by British author Ian McEwan. In this haunting and

thoughtful novel, a domestic crisis becomes a crime story centered

around an event that changes the lives of half a dozen people in an

upper-middle class country home on a hot English summer’s day n 1935.

The repercussions of that crime follow McEwan’s brilliantly drawn

characters from pre-war Britain to Dunkirk to a family reunion in

2001. The New York Times calls “Atonement” “a tour de force.”

Yann Martel’s imaginative and unforgettable “Life of Pi” is a

magical reading experience about adventure, survival and, ultimately,

fait. Son of a zookeeper in Pondicheery, India, 16-year-old Pi

Patel’s life is dramatically changed when his father decides to move

his family to Canada. With little money, the family hitches a ride on

an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi and a

450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker are the sole survivors in

a 26-foot lifeboat. By turns, a harrowing, cunning, despairing and

resilient tale, Martel’s potentially unbelievable plot line soon

demolishes reader’s defenses, cleverly set up by events of young Pi’s

life that almost naturally lead to his ordeal which lasts 227 days.

Post-survival, when Japanese authorities refuse to believe Pi’s

story, he tells a second story, but is it more true? “Life of Pi,”

not quite a fable or parable, is a rousing adventure.

Legal thriller author John Grisham is back this spring to

entertain as well as educate. “The King of Torts” has a somewhat

unusual plot -- a story whose hero and villain are the same, a

teenage boy who, for no apparent reason, has gunned down an

acquaintance. Enter the shadowy representative of the mega

pharmaceutical company whose bad drug caused the teen -- and others

-- to kill. The offer: the corporation will pay lawyer Clay Carter

$10 million to settle the pending cases. Readers will cling to

Grisham’s words every step of the way through this powerfully

gripping morality tale and enjoy its gentle ending.

Finally, “The Secret Life of Bees” features a hive’s worth of

appealing female characters, an offbeat plot and a lovely style. Set

on a southern bee farm in the 1960s, this story, full of universal

lessons about family and self, will enlighten and warm the heart.

Fourteen-year-old Lily Owens is on the lam with motherly servant

Rosaleen, fleeing both Lily’s abusive father, T. Ray, and the police,

who battered Rosaleen for defending her new right to vote.

On their journey, the runaways meet the “calendar sisters,” May,

June and August Boatwright, who operate a successful bee farm.

Through her work on the farm, Lily is able to examine her past and

begin to trust as she finds love again. This story is pure honey for

the soul!

Spring is a time of renewal, so we encourage our community to

renew their visits to the library. Got books? We do -- and good ones

too -- and we’d like to share them with you.

* MARIANNA HOF writes a bi-monthly column for the Coastline

Pilot. She is the Laguna Beach branch librarian.