Book Pics - For Adults

Big Books

La Crescenta
by Mike Lawler and Robert Newcome

Another local history “Images of America” book published by Arcadia Publishing this book, like its predessor “Early Glendale” will be a sure hit with our community!

Founding Sisters: LIfe Stories of Tujunga's Early Women Pioneers 1886-1926.

Thoroughly researched, great pictures, historically accurate, filled with personalities--these were hardy women!   By local historian Mary Lou Pozzo 

A Fine Romance: Hollywood and Broadway.

This is a must for anyone who loves musicals!  How Broadway brings them to stage and what Hollywood does to, or for, the movie version.  Lots of pictures, lots of "backstage"!

Audio Books 

Our Endangered Values.  Jimmy Carter’s newest book has been a best-seller in hardcover; he reads his book in the audio version

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Teacher Man is Frank McCourt's newest book, and some reviews have called it his best since Angela’s Ashes.  He is the reader for the audio version, with his wonderful Irish brogue.

The Narnia Chronicles CD series is not just for children! The books are read by an incredible cast including Michael York, Kenneth Branaugh, Vanessa Redgrave, and Patrick Stewart

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Adult non-fiction:

The Long Walk is the story of a small group of prisoners who escape a Soviet labor camp in 1941, crossing the Siberian artic, the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas with nothing but an ax, a knife, and a week’s worth of food.  It is gripping reading!

 Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for 2005.  Her story of her marriage and the death of her husband, author John Gregory Dunne, pulls us in from the first page.   A suggestion:  read Two Part Invention:  The Story of a Marriage, by Madeleine L’Engle, as a parallel account of the loss of a husband by another gifted author.

Without Reservations by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alice Steinbach details her journeys through Europe while using those explorations as a springboard for reflections on the landscape of her inner life.  Everyone likes this book!

Fiction: 

Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Co. has delighted OUAT readers.  The unlikely setting--a woman’s prison in Mexico--provides the backdrop for an imaginative Libertad Gonzalez to recount the tale of a former literature professor who reinvents himself as a truck driver and with a baby daughter makes the cab of his 18-wheeler their home.  TERRIFIC!

Shadow of the Wind.  A combination of mystery thriller, romance and a little gothic . Set in post-WWII Barcelona, this complex, well-developed story always has more going on just around the corner.  Highly recommended by staff, bookclub members and customers!  This is a great book

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 March by Geraldine Brooks (Year of Wonders) is about the mostly absent Mr. March of Little Women fame. Brooks has taken the character of the absent father and has added adult resonance to portray the moral complexity of war and a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism.  This is a beatufully detailed  historical fiction and one of Maureen’s favorites.

 Master of the short stor y Alice Munro has been heralded by critics and readers alike for her latest collection, Runaway. Munro has a gift for combining lovely prose with compelling characters and plot, creating stories that can be read and reread with equal pleasure.

Light From Heaven.  Jan Karon’s final volume in her very popular Mitford series has been describd as “saving the best for last.”  Mitford lovers will not be disappointed.

Jasper Fforde may be the most uniformly popular author of the OUAT staff.  His books, beginning with The Eyre Affair, combine literate story telling with off-beat humor (including  wonderful terrible puns) in an alternate world where the heroine’s job is to guard book stories and their characters--by entering into the books themselves.  Fforde’s newest novel, The Big Over Easy, continues our delight with these books.

-Last Updated March 26, 2006-