The Night Bookmobile / Audrey Niffenegger

I stumbled across this graphic novel from 2010 quite by accident-- one of those serendipitous discoveries that happen when you work in a library. The Night Bookmobile is written (and illustrated--who knew?) by Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, and the title, The Night Bookmobile, was rather intriguing to this librarian. It was first serialized in the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Alexandra wanders the streets of Chicago in the hours before dawn after an argument with her partner. She stumbles upon a Winnebago camper parked on the roadside which she learns is the Night Bookmobile, "open dusk to dawn". Upon entering she discovers the shelves lined with every book she’s ever read in her lifetime. Her bookmobile is elusive, however, and only appears to her several times during her life. Understanding the premise of its existence and how the collection expands, she reads voraciously to fill the shelves of her own library of record with suitable titles, is motivated to become a librarian, but yearns to reconnect with her memories and her reading legacy by working in the Night Bookmobile herself.

The Night Bookmobile is not truly of the world of the living and only living people can be readers, so fill the shelves of your own personal bookmobile while you can. Is this book meant to be an admonishment to nonreaders, or a warning to obsessive readers not to forget to live life, and not just read about it? Whatever the message, read this thought-provoking book and add it to your own personal night bookmobile!

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Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

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