Reviews
Featured author for January is James Patterson
The Library is celebrating DEAR-Drop Everything And Read in January by featuring author James Patterson.
James Patterson has created more enduring fictional characters than any other novelist writing today with his Alex Cross, Michael Bennett, Women’s Murder Club, Private, NYPD Red, Daniel X, Maximum Ride, and Middle School series. As of January 2016, he has sold over 350 million books worldwide and currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most #1 New York Times bestsellers. In addition to writing the thriller novels for which he is best known, he also writes children’s, middle-grade, and young-adult fiction and is also the first author to have #1 new titles simultaneously on the New York Times adult and children’s bestsellers lists. (credit:bio from author’s website)
Featured Patterson books include 1st to Die (Women’s Murder Club), Step On A Crack (Michael Bennett), Zoo (stand alone), Private, NYPD Red 4, Confessions of a Murder Suspect (Young Adult) and First Love (Young Adult) along with many many others. The Library’s collection contains over 130 James Patterson novels.
Let the Library scare you in October…
With Fantasy/Thriller authors. Laurel Hamilton, Christine Feehan, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti will keep you awake at night with thrillers and fantasy stories that will make you double-check the locks on your doors. From Stephen King Mr. Mercedes series, to Dean Koontz Odd Thomas series you will be watching your back. Don’t forget Frank Peretti’s Visitation, Ted Dekker’s The Bride Collector, and Laurel Hamilton’s vampire series.
Two Books from our hometown author, Dr. Benjamin Myers
Lapse Americana
The twin ravens, Thought and Memory, of Norse myth are reborn as American crows to fly an interweaving pattern or remembering and forgetting through the pages of Lapse Americana. Born out of the poet’s childhood during the Pax Americana and situated within the war and economic lapse of the new century, these poems explore memory and amnesia, faith and doubt, presence and absence. They are rooted in rural, working class experience as well as in the poetic traditions of America, Europe, and China. By turns formal and jazzy, confessional and coy, these poems speak of the universal by focusing on the particular, insisting with simultaneous emphasis upon the value of remembering and of embracing forgetfulness.
Elegy for Trains
Benjamin Myers’ poems range from Virgil through Shakespeare to Woody Guthrie.Just as facets in gems come to life when light strikes them, so do the themes, images, and tropes in Elegy for Trains when the brilliance of Benjamin Myers’ wit, sensitivity and intelligence illuminate his words. His poems make us see Oklahoma and the world afresh. You will read this book, then want to read it again!
About the author
Dr. Myers, a native of Chandler, OK, is the 2015/2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and the author of two books of poetry: Lapse Americana (New York Quarterly Books, 2013) and Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems may be read in The Yale Review, The New York Quarterly, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, The Christian Century and other journals, as well as on the Verse Daily website. He has been honored with an Oklahoma Book Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book and with a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Myers teaches poetry writing and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he is the Crouch-Mathis Associate Professor of Literature.
Dr. Myers and his wife Mandy live in Chandler with their children.