Summertime, and the Reading is Easy

Next to sunscreen and a beach towel, a good book may be one of the most important accessories of the summer.

So before you embark on that cruise, hop that plane for a family reunion or just head to the beach or a hammock on the porch, Roger Page and Cindy Corujo of offer the following paperbacks for your vacation enhancement.

• The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz. For fans of comic mystery and family dynamics, this is just the time of year to meet the Spellman's--a family of private investigators who prove that the family who spies together spy on each other. A light mystery that will engage and entertain.
• The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton. A young man has an extraordinary and unexpected gift--The ability to open any door of any kind. Naturally his skill draws the attention of some scurrilous folks who start pushing him toward a life of crime.  When Michael sees his chance to escape this life he risks everything to return to his former life and ultimately unlocks the secret to his strange gift.
• Ravens, by George Dawes Green.  A great psychological suspense story about family who wins the lottery but their nice day ends right there as a couple of grifters have decided to terrorize them into forfeiting half their prize. Green strikes a nice balance between dark humor and the genuine evil that only greed can beget as everybody gets a little more and a little less than they had bargained for.
• Room by Emma Donoghue.  Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games.  But Jack is different in a big way--he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor. For Jack, 'Room' is the only world he knows, but for his mother, it is a prison in which she has tried to create a normal life for her son. When their tiny world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary.
• The Napoleon of Crime, by Ben Macintyre. This is the story of the most notorious, iconic and pretty eccentric thief of the Victorian Era, Adam Worth.  The inspiration for Sherlock Holmes’s Professor Moriarty, Adam Worth ran crime operations from New York to London, Paris and even South Africa until brought to justice by an obsessed Pinkerton man.
• Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd. Climatologist Adam Kindred is trying to establish a new life in London when he inadvertently stumbles upon a botched murder and becomes the chief suspect. Boyd manages to breathe new life into the innocent-guy-under-suspicion story and at the same time create fully realized characters with intriguing back stories while crafting a first rate page-turner.
• Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson, tells the tale of a revered and eccentric old Major living in a small English town and his budding relationship with a female Pakistani shopkeeper.  The unlikely friendship sets the provincial town-dwellers all a-twitter...and not on the Internet...The relationship also opens up a funny dialogue about who and what constitutes an inappropriate "friendship" and who insists on defining it that way.

The also has summer reading programs to keep kids and teenagers occupied this summer.

For Teenagers: 2011 Read, Flip, Win.

http://www.kcls.org/teens/rfw/Read, Flip, Win

Read Three Get One Free

http://www.kcls.org/goodreads1/teen/read_three.cfm

For kids and ‘tweens’ ages 5-12 there is a summer reading program in which kids read 20 minutes per day and color the squares in their reading log as they read.  When they read 500 minutes they can bring their reading logs to the library for a prize.  They receive an additional prize when they read 1,000 minutes and a chance to put their name in a drawing for a laptop computer. http://www.kcls.org/srp/