The February meeting of the Librarians and Friends Leisure Reading Club will be meeting on Wednesday, Feb 15. at 6pm at the Barnes & Noble on the corner of E St, NW and 12th St., NW, just down from Metro Center. We decided to skip the obvious topics of romance or red or…. that might be appropriate for Valentine’s and instead we chose to go with more of a President’s Day theme. The topic is books that focus on leaders. So this would be any fiction or non-fiction story of someone who was a major leader in their society or culture.
So any books about Horatio Nelson or Napoleon or Sulieman the Magnificent (the Crusades) or certainly any American President. It could also be someone who was a leader of a movement like Martin Luther King or Joseph Smith (founder of the Mormons) or Frank Lloyd Wright or Cesar Chavez. There are a lot of choices and we hope that if you read one and aren’t able to attend the meeting, you will still share your choice with us for inclusion on the monthly review of books read.
In January the topic for the book club was books dealing with portals or doors or gates – and there were quite a few books available on the topic. Those read by the group included:
Haunted Mesa by Louis L’Amour - The Navajo called them the Anasazi, the “ancient enemy,” and their abandoned cities haunt the canyons and plateaus of the Southwest. For centuries the sudden disappearance of these people baffled historians. Summoned to a dark desert plateau by a desperate letter from an old friend, renowned investigator Mike Raglan is drawn into a world of mystery, violence, and explosive revelations. Crossing a border beyond the laws of man and nature, he will learn of the astonishing world of the Anasazi and discover the most extraordinary frontier ever encountered
Neverwhere by Neil Gaimon - Richard Mayhew is a young man with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he stops to help a girl name Door he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. His small act of kindness propels him into a world he never dreamed existed. There are people who fall through the cracks, and Richard has become one of them. And he must learn to survive in this city of shadows and darkness, monsters and saints, murderers and angels, if he is ever to return to the London that he knew.
Hell’s Gate by David Weber - The Union of Arcana has expanded through the portals linking parallel universes for over a century and a half. In that time, its soldiers and sorcerers have laid claim to one uninhabited planet after anotherundefinedall of them Earth, and in the process, the Union has become the most powerful, most wealthy civilization in all of human history. But all of that is about to come to a screeching halt, for the Union’s scouts have just discovered a new portal, and on its far side lies a shattering revelation. Arcana is not alone, after all. There is another human society, Sharona, which has also been exploring the Multiverse, and the first contact between them did not go well. The portal which brought them together is Hell’s Gate itself!
Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War by Lonnie Speer - The first comprehensive study of all major prisons, both North and South, this chronicle analyzes the many complexities of the relationships among prisoners, guards, commandants, and government leaders.
Back Door to Richmond: the Bermuda Hundred Campaign by William Robertson - Back Door to Richmond is the first book-length study of the Bermuda Hundred Campaign of the Civil War with more than sixty unpublished accounts, and includes hundreds of sources.
The Phantom Chronicles by Lee Falk – the Phantom is the 21st in a line of crime fighters that originated in 1536, when the father of British sailor Christopher Walker was killed during a pirate attack. Swearing an oath to fight evil on the skull of his father's murderer, Christopher started the legacy of the Phantom that would be passed from father to son, leaving people to give the mysterious figure nicknames such as "The Ghost Who Walks", The Man Who Cannot Die and Guardian of the Eastern Dark, believing him to be immortal. Character comes and goes from the Skull Cave which the gateway to his hideout. This is a collection of the stories which began in 1936.
