My Italian Bulldozer / Alexander McCall Smith

A food writer is on the rebound after a broken relationship (she ran off with her personal trainer). A working trip to Montalcino, a hill town in Italy, is the kind of restorative getaway that he needs to put his life and career back on track. Except the start of the trip seems to go so wrong. After finding himself in an Italian jail after a rental car agent tries to hoodwink him, and due to an undersupply of available cars owing to a holiday weekend, he has no other option than to drive a bulldozer from Pisa to his hilltop pension. It’s a humorous prologue which nearly hijacks the entire story, but luckily there’s much more to the novel once the bulldozer is parked in the municipal lot at Montalcino. As with most McCall Smith’s novels, there’s a lot of talk about life and about nothing, but human relationships are front and center, and by the end of it, Paul has things sorted out satisfactorily.

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So Much for That / Lionel Shriver

This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating / Elisabeth Tova Bailey

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This Book Is Overdue! : How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All / Marilyn Johnson Click here to check availability in AFPLS This book is an interesting collection of essays that offer glimpses into the brave new world of librarianship. It’s sort of the antithesis of Nicholson Baker’s grumpy dissing of librarians in his 2001 book Doublefold . If you thought that librarians are still the be-bunned shushing ladies in wool skirts with reading glasses dangling around their necks on slender gold chains, then this book certainly is overdue for you. The author shows how librarians are morphing and adapting to the new information landscape, meeting new challenges with fewer resources and a public that wants instant gratification in clicks-and-mortar libraries. Meet librarians who offer triage reference services in streets filled with protesters and others who assume alternate identities and inhabit virtual libraries in the cyber universe called Second Life. Learn about how the venerable N...

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