Six Degress of the Library Collection - from J.R.R. Tolkien to Salman Rushdie

Last month, in the comments field to our Six Degrees of the Library Collection post, we were asked a question and issued a challenge. The poster wanted to know how we choose the authors that we link in our Six Degrees posts and if we would take on connecting two authors that were suggested to us. In answer to the question we usually start with an author that's in the news or that we like and then do some research into other authors they have connections with. Our posts are inspired by the Six Degrees of Separation concept but we don't start with two authors and try to connect them - we just start with one and see where we end up.

Okay, so maybe we're cheating -- but that doesn't make the connections any less interesting - and it also doesn't mean we aren't up for the challenge of connecting two randomly selected authors. The poster who asked the question and issued the challenge wondered if we could connect J.R.R. Tolkien -- author of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy -- and Salman

Rushdie -- Booker Prize winning author of Midnight's Children.

The answer was yes and more quickly than any of us expected - we were able to connect them through a single person: Queen Elizabeth II. In 1972, Tolkien was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 2007 Rushdie was given a knighthood for his services to British literature.

However, that connection doesn't seem to really follow the spirit of what we've been trying to do in our Six Degrees posts - which is show random connections through a range of authors and highlight some books and authors you maybe haven't heard of. Certainly in our past posts we could have connected two authors more quickly than through 6 steps, but that seemed to take the fun out of things. So, in that spirit - here are 6 steps you could use to connect Tolkien and Rushdie.

In addition to his writings, Tolkien was also an important member of the Faculty of English at Oxford University, holding several prestigious positions there over a more than 30 year career. Another British author of great accomplishment who is strongly associated with Oxford University is C.S. Lewis. Lewis and Tolkien were close friends and both members of a literary discussion group known as "The Inklings".

In 2002, an author by the name of Melanie Jeschke, released a book called The Inklings,in which a young American like travels to Oxford to study. The publisher describes the romantic title as "sprinkled with allusions to classic English literature, references to C.S. Lewis, and an appearance from Professor J.R.R. Tolkien himself."

Like the character in Jeschke's book, Nicci Gerrard and Sean French both studied at Oxford and although they were in the same department at the same time, they didn't actually meet and marry until years later. You may not recognize their names separately, but together they write popular suspense thriller novels under the name Nicci French. Their most recent novel together is What to Do When Someone Dies.

Husband and wife writing duos are more common than I realized. One of note is Susannah Kells - Judy and Bernard Cornwell; he being the well known author of numerous historical fiction titles, including the blockbuster series of Sharpe stories. The stories in this series feature a character named Richard Sharpe, a soldier during the Napoleonic Wars and are praised for their brisk paced, character driven plots. Some of the books have been adapted for a television series called Sharpe in the UK.

A 2006 episode in the series called Sharpe's Challenge, features Sharpe in India and stars, among others, Indian American actress Padma Lakshmi. Lakshmi is probably best know to North American audiences from television's Top Chef, which she has hosted since season 2. She is the author of two cookbooks, her most recent entitled Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet. In 2004, Lakshmi married novelist Salman Rushdie - although the two divorced in 2007.

6 Degrees of the Library Collection: From William Boyd to Hilary Mantel

This month's Six Degrees of the library collection post is contributed by guest blogger Lara.

This month, the book club that meets regularly at the Spring Garden Memorial Library will discuss William Boyd's novel, Restless. This thrilling spy novel portrays a fascinating female character who has hidden her World War II-era activities from her family. Boyd's page-turner should make for some excellent discussion on Thursday, November 12th.

Restless won the 2006 Costa Book Award, which recognizes excellent authors from Britain and Ireland, and is the only major award to consider children's literature alongside works intended for adults. The Costa Book Awards were formerly known as the Whitbread Awards, and the last book to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award before the name change was Hilary Spurling's Matisse the Master. Using material from private archives and lots of family letters, Spurling evokes a more complete portrait of the master painter than has ever been available before.

Spurling enjoys writing about the lives of creative people, and the previous biographer to win the Whitbread award also made her mark by authoring accounts of famous authors. Claire Tomalin, winner of the 2002 Whitbread, has written biographies of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Mary Wollstonecraft. It was her account of Samuel Pepys: the unequalled self, however, that garnered her the Whitbread.

Tomalin apparently studied at Newnham College at the University of Cambridge. Iris Murdoch is another alumna of the College, having studied there as a postgraduate student of philosophy, and is well remembered for many novels and writings with elements of philosophy and morality playing important roles. Several of her works have been honored with major awards, including the 1974 Whitbread for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and the 1978 Man Booker prize for The Sea, The Sea. Murdoch's writing is full of charged emotions, existential crises, and unexpected events that impact every day life. Nine years after winning the Booker, Murdoch was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, an honor she shares with fellow writers like Agatha Christie and A. S. Byatt (another alumna of Newnham College!).

Byatt won the Booker in 1990 for Possession, and her recent novel The Children's Book has been very well received. The story takes place before World War I, at a time when the concept of childhood was changing dramatically, and the several children in one family become caught up in movements like feminism and socialism. As the Great War begins, the mother of the family remains caught up in her fairytale world of writing stories during the time of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. The line between adulthood and childhood becomes blurred as the world falls apart around the characters.

The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Booker, but when the prize was announced on October 6, it was Hilary Mantel who won this year's prize, for her novel Wolf Hall. Mantel writes psychological, historical fiction with links to the occult and darkly comical themes. Her 2005 novel, Beyond Black, was also nominated for the Booker Prize as well as the Orange Prize for fiction.

Six Degrees of the Library Collection - from Sarah E. Wright to John Grisham

In the spirit of the theory of six degrees of separation - that any two people in the world can be connected to one another through six relationships - we bring you what will become a semi-regular feature called “Six Degrees of the Library Collection”. You might be surprised how your favourite book can connect you to a wide world of reading.

Browsing through a number of websites today while trying to find an interesting place to start for this month's Six Degrees of the Library Collection, I came across an obituary for Sarah E. Wright, an author who's name was unfamiliar to me, but who held an important place in American literary history. Wright was the author of one - and only one - novel. She may not have been prolific but her one title, 1969's This Child's Gonna Live, was celebrated in its own time (including being named a NY Times notable book) and remains well regarded today (reprinted as recently as 2002 by the Feminist Press). The obituary describes the book as "[portraying] the lives of an impoverished black woman and her family in a Maryland fishing village during the Depression".

Wright's book and her writing is often compared to that of another female writer of the same era - Zora Neale Hurston. Although Hurston was more prolific, the two shared the common theme of focusing on the black, female experience, while other notable authors of their time were more focused on the experiences of the African American male. Zora Neale Hurston was an author fiction, essays and plays but is best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. She was born in Alabama but moved to Eatonville, Florida as a toddler and considered Florida her home. Hurston had a happy and stable childhood, but at the age of 13 the death of her mother was a life changing event.

Hurston shares this sad fact with another celebrated female author: Virginia Woolf, whose mother also died suddenly when Woolf was 13. Woolf, a British author of essays and fiction is considered a feminist writer and her book "A Room of One's Own" is a standard text in women's study programs. Woolf was also a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of British writers, artists and intellectuals who were very influential throughout the 20th century.

In 1998, American author Michael Cunningham used Virginia Woolf and her novel Mrs Dalloway as inspiration for his novel The Hours. The book intertwines the lives of three women in three times - Woolf herself in 1920s England, Laura Brown a character who lives in 1940s California and reads a great deal of Woolf, and a present day New York City resident, Clarissa Vaughan who spends her day planning a party in a very Mrs. Dalloway fashion.

The book was a huge success, winning the Pulitzer Prize and being adapted into a film several years later. The film was directed by Stephen Daldry. Daldry has also recently adapted the film version of the book The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.

Although The Reader is an historical novel, Schlink began his writing career writing mystery novels and is the author of a series of books featuring the character Gerhard Self a former prosecutor turned private detective. The first book in the series is Self's Punishment. Schlink's professional background as a lawyer and law professor undoubtedly played a role in his early writings. This he has in common with another famous lawyer-turned-writer: John Grisham.

Perhaps the most famous name in the legal thriller genre, Grisham has a new book coming out this fall. Although the new book Ford County, shares a setting with Grisham's first thriller A Time to Kill, this book is not a legal thriller, instead it is a collection of short stories that examine the lives and experiences of people who populate the area.

originally published 2009

Six Degrees of the Library Collection: from Margaret Mitchell to Roald Dahl

It has certainly been awhile since I did my last Six Degrees of the Library Collection post (a series where we highlight random connections between the books and the authors you can find in the library's collection). These posts are a lot of fun, but a lot of work to write, so they often fall down the priority list. However, a recent radio piece gave me a bit of inspiration.

The piece I heard highlighted that this year is the 75th anniversary of Margaret Mitchell's book Gone With the Wind. First published in May 1936, the book was a best seller, a Pulitzer Prize winner and, of course, the inspiration for one of Hollywood's most enduring films. The southern US setting for the novel was a familiar one for Mitchell, who was born and raised in Atlanta. A startling fact about Mitchell that I hadn't known was that she died at the age of 48 after being struck by a car.

A grim point of inspiration, but I have to admit that it got me wondering if there were other authors who'd had similar accidental deaths. In a strange double tie to Mitchell (and her famous character Scarlet O'Hara), American poet Frank O'Hara was also killed in an automotive accident—he was struck by a dune buggy while walking on a beach. O'Hara was an American Poet of the New York School and his largely autobiographical poetry frequently focused on his New York surroundings. The website frankohara.org offers selections of his poetry (including some read by the poet) and the library owns a few collections.

Before his career as a poet, Frank O'Hara was a student and then served in the military in the Pacific during World War II. Another famous American author who was a World War II veteran was J.D. Salinger. The author of Catcher in the Rye was drafted and served in Europe beginning in 1942: he was involved in active combat, and was eventually assigned to a counter-intelligence unit. At the war's end, he returned to the US and published the books that would bring him fame. You probably know where I'm going with this, because aside from his writing, the other thing that Salinger is famous for is being reclusive: he published nothing since the 1960s and was rarely seen in public. He died at home in 2010.

Another famously reclusive author is Thomas Pynchon: in fact his reclusive nature is so similar to Salinger's that at one point there were rumors that the were the same person. Pynchon is an important author of postmodern fiction, and is cited as an influence by many acclaimed writers (both of the postmodernists and not) including T. C. Boyle, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo and Ian Rankin. Unlike Salinger, Pynchon has been actively writing over the years: his most recent novel was 2009's Inherent Vice. Hiding from public view has not entirely kept Pynchon out of pop culture: he has made cameo appearances in two episodes of the animated TV series the Simpsons. In both cases the animated likeness appears with a bag over his head.

Cameos on the Simpsons have become one of my favourite aspects of that show, and lots of famous folks (including lots of authors) have done them. In one of the Pynchon episodes—Diatribe of a Mad Housewife—Marge publishes a romance novel and among other things the Simpson family visits a book fair. Sharing the animated stage with Pynchon at that fair is Tom Clancy.

Fans of political thrillers and page turning adventures likely know Clancy's name. In fact, even if you've never read a Tom Clancy book at all, you've probably heard of him, and maybe even seen one of the film adaptations of his bestselling books, including Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger starring Harrison Ford in the lead role. Movie adaptations are standard fare for popular novels, but did you know that several of Tom Clancy's books have been made into board games? It's true! Both The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising have board game editions.

You know who else has had a book made into a board game? Ken Follett. His historical novel The Pillars of the Earth was adapted as a board game by a German company that is known for its games based on novels. Pillars of the Earth was a big change in writing style for Ken Follett. Before the 1989 historical epic was published, Follett was more known as an author of thrillers. The switch to historical fiction had a big payoff for the author, Pillars of the Earth was a huge bestseller as was its 2007 followup World Without End.

Ken Follett hails from Cardiff, Wales, a fact that links him to another famous writer, Roald Dahl. If you're like me, you probably have great memories of Dahl's children's classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but Dahl also penned short stories that were geared toward adults. The library owns a few collections of these stories (including The Best of Roald Dahl,) which wikipedia notes often feature "a dark sense of humour and a surprise ending"

There you have it: from Margaret Mitchell to Roald Dahl in six steps. Have two authors you'd like to see connected? Make a suggestion in the comments field below.

Six Degrees of the Library Collection - From Shakespeare to Omar Tyree

"Beware the ides of March" a warning to Casar in Act 1 Scene 2 of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and an apt starting point for this mid-March version of Six Degrees of the Library Collection where we highlight random connections between the books and the authors you can find in the library's collection.

Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare's tragedy plays and portrays the action and events surrounding the assassination of the Roman leader of the plays' title. Although one of the most famous of literary depictions of Ceasar's downfall, it is certainly not the only. Caesar was murdered in Rome in 44 BCE on March 15th - the Ides of March on the Roman Calendar.

It's wasn't just Shakespeare that felt that the ides of March was a catchy turn of phrase in terms of talking about Caesar, in 1948 American author Thornton Wilder chose the term as the title for his historical novel of the Roman Era. The novel tells - through a series of fictional letters - the story leading up to Caesar's assassination.

Thornton Wilder was an American Playwright and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize 3 times - once for a novel and twice for plays. An interesting fact about Wilder is that his twin brother died at birth, and some critics have pointed to twinship as a theme in his writing, mostly notably in his novel Theophilus North which publisher Harper Perennial describes as an "imagined adventure" of the brother that Wilder never knew.

Philip K. Dick is another author who was born a twin but whose twin died early in life. In this case, a sister Jane, who survived birth but died when she was only a few weeks old. As with Wilder, many have noted the influence this may have had on his writing. His official website's biography notes "the dualist (twin-poled) dilemmas that dominated his creative work." Dick was a noted Science Fiction author and many of his novels have been turned into popular movies including The Minority Report and Blade Runner (based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep). Philip K. Dick died in 1982 at the age of 53.

Another well known author who died in 1982 was Russian American novelist Ayn Rand. Rand is best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and later as a popular philosopher in the school of objectivism, which is credited to her. In 1999, when a list of the 20th Century's Best 100 novels in English was compiled by public vote (the list was in response to a list published by the Modern Library the previous year), Rand held the top two places and had four books in the top 10. The original Modern Library best novels list was widely criticized when it was released in 1998 (hence the readers list). In particular the list was noted for its lack of female writers, the inclusion of only 3 African American authors, and the lack of authors from English speaking areas other than America or Britain. The board that made the selections was made up of a number of well known authors, including A.S. Byatt (the only woman on the board).

A.S. Byatt is an award winning British author, primarily of novels, many of which are historical or have an interest in history. In 1990, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Possession, which follows the machinations of a group of academics trying to uncover the mysterious past of a well known (but fictional) British poet. In 2000, she returned to the realm of the pursuit of biography with her novel The Biographer's Tale. A.S. Byatt was born Antonia Susan Drabble in Sheffield England in 1936.

Keen fans of British fiction will likely have caught something in that last detail. A.S. Byatt is the sister of another well known novelist, Margaret Drabble, although there is reputedly a rift between the two authors and they "don't read each other's books". Like her sister, Drabble has been writing since the early 1960s and has published 17 novels. Her most recent novel was 2006's The Sea Lady, and it may well be her last. In 2009, Drabble announced she would quit writing fiction.

Retiring is something that it seems not many novelists do in such a formal way - there are certainly authors who fall out of fashion and no longer publish, and but many seem to stay in the limelight until they die. One other novelist who recently announced a retirement is bestselling urban fiction author Omar Tyree. In June of 2008, he posted an editorial explaining his reasons for quitting a genre which he is seen to have a hand in popularizing. The post was controversial, particularly with fans of urban fiction, who were insulted by Tyree's criticism of the genre, but he has thus far stuck to his guns and 2008's Pecking Order was published as his final urban fiction piece. Sure enough his website now focuses prominently on his entrepreneurial efforts, and contains an additional - if more calmly worded - explanation of his decision.

Six Degrees of the Library Collection: from J.D. Salinger to Simone de Beauvoir

It seems only fitting to begin this month's edition of Six Degrees of the Library Collection with J.D. Salinger. The author - most famously of the coming of age classic The Catcher in the Rye - died in late January at the age of 91. Known as much in the last 50 years for his reclusive lifestyle as for his earlier literary output, it seems interesting to see how we can connect this author to others in our library collection.

The first book that comes to mind is one that I've seen in the library a number of times, but never really investigated. It's the cover that makes you do a double take, as it very consciously mimics the cover style of the Little, Brown mass market paperback editions of Salinger's works. Brother Dumb by Sky Gilbert is described as "a fictionalized memoir of an American literary icon who withdraws from the public sphere". Gilbert is a Canadian author who is primarily known as a playwright but has written a few novels. One of his novels An English Gentleman won the 2005 ReLit award for novel.

The ReLit Awards were set up in 2000 to recognize great Canadian writing published by independent presses. (We did a post about the 2009 winners back in September). They have developed from a relatively small prize to one that is gaining a lot of critical attention - but not one which awards winners any money (they do get a really cool ring though). Another past winner of the ReLit Award for novel is Gil Adamson, who's 2007 novel The Outlander tells the story of a young widow (who herself is the cause of her husband's death) and her journey from the law across the Canadian west in the early 20th century. It was a contender for last year's CBC Canada Reads competition.

This year's Canada Reads competition hits the airwaves this coming March and the 5 selected titles up for debate were announced late last year. Pretty quickly after the announcement, a number of sources noted that this year's contenders are all relatively well known Canadian novels which have already won major awards or notoriety. Is that a problem? Personally, I'm not sure it is, but the National Post's book blog The Afterword seemed to think so. They set up a shadow shadow competition called Canada Also Reads to highlight the "unknown or under-appreciated" sort of book they like to see championed on Canada Reads. Their assessment of this year's Canada Reads' picks was that they contained only one such title: Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner.

French Canada might not agree with The Afterword's opinion that Nikolski is not well known: the French edition won several major book prizes and the English edition was awarded a Governor General's Award for Translation. Whether you've heard of it already or not, Nikolski is a quirky, modern tale of three young Canadians whose lives intersect in strange and wonderful ways and who all find themselves at some point living in Montreal. Among the French language awards it won was the Prix Anne-Hébert.

The Prix Anne-Hébert is named after (unsurprisingly): Anne Hébert, a talented and prolific Quebecois writer. Hébert won three Governor General's Literary awards - two for fiction, one for poetry. Hébert who grew up in Quebec, later moved to France, is remembered in part for the depictions of rural Quebec in her writing. She was also considered a pioneer for women writers in Canada, creating strong female characters in many of her books. Hébert died in 2000 in Montreal.

Another well known, well loved author who passed away in 2000 was British novelist Patrick O'Brian. O'Brian is probably best known for his Aubrey-Maturin series of historical fiction of the high seas, which follow the 19th century adventures of a sea captain and a surgeon in the Royal Navy. The series was the inspiration for the 2003 blockbuster film Master and Commander: the far side of the world.


What is perhaps less know about O'Brian, however, is that he was also fluent in French and translated a number of works from French into English, including several works of Simone de Beauvoir. The library owns a number of these translations, including the novel Les Belles Images and the memoirs A Very Easy Death and Adieux: a farewell to Sartre.

(Oh, and an aside - did you know that we actually started another Six Degrees of the Library Collection post with Salinger last year? The starting point might have been the same - but the directions were totally different...)

Six Degrees of the Library Collection - from Agatha Christie to George Eliot

In the spirit of the theory of six degrees of separation - that any two people in the world can be connected to one another through six relationships - we bring you what will become a semi-regular feature called “Six Degrees of the Library Collection”. You might be surprised how your favourite book can connect you to a wide world of reading.

September 15th is the birthday of legendary British Mystery Author Agatha Christie. Christie is considered by the Guinness Book of the World Records to be the bestselling author of all time. There are so many interesting factoids from Christie’s illustrious career it’s hard to know where to begin, but I guess I'll chose that Christie was a founding member of something called the Detection Club: a society formed in 1928 or 1930 (sources vary) by a group of British mystery authors.

The club was part social, part literary - members took an oath to follow certain rules in their writing including agreeing that their “detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?” The club still exists and in 2001 its current president Simon Brett oversaw the publication of a collection called The Detection Collection which contained new stories from living members of the club.

Simon Brett is a British mystery author who, like Christie, is well known for a few of his series characters: featuring Charles Paris, Mrs Pargeter and Fethering. On his website Brett notes that while he is an accomplished author, he is not the Simon Brett who is a well known British wood engraver.

Brett isn’t the only current author to share a name with someone else who is also famous. American author Robin Cook shares his name with a late British Noir author. The British Cook (not to be further confused with the British politician who also shares the same name) published his first few novels in the 60s and 70s under his own name, but eventually took the pseudonym Derek Raymond so as not to be confused with his American counterpart.

In the late 1970s, Derek Raymond left the UK and lived in France for a number of years and stopped writing for a period. During this time he worked in several jobs, including as a vineyard labourer. Although Raymond didn’t go down this road, other British expats living in France have made quite a career out of writing about their time living there. A modern example is that of Peter Mayle, who wrote children’s educational books before turning to memoir and documenting his time in France in the 1989 book A Year in Provence.

Mayle’s depiction of life in France was so popular that the French government honoured him with a knighthood in France’s Legion of Honour. Although such knighthoods only officially go to French citizens, those of other nationalities are frequently given honourary recognition. Mayle is not the only British author to have received such an nod. This year Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling was similarly honoured with French president Sarkozy noting that Rowling has “helped give young people back the taste for reading and writing.”

Joanne Kathleen (apparently her grandmother's name, not her own) Rowling might be a huge household name now and a face that children around the world recognize, but prior to the 1997 release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Rowling’s publisher reportedly worried that boys would not want to read a book by a woman, and so hid her gender by using her initials on book covers. The antiquated fear is a strange quirk of Rowling’s success story that ties her to some of Britian’s most famous female authors of the past including Mary Anne Evans, who is better known as George Eliot.

Six Degrees of the Library Collection: Sherman Alexie to Bill Fitzhugh

By guest blogger Lara.

Today we start out on an Indian reservation in Spokane, Washington, and pass through Arkansas on our way to Mississippi in this installment of the Six Degrees of the Library Collection series of posts.

Recently I enjoyed Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (2007), a young adult story that mixes a diary style account with lots of doodled illustrations of the thoughts and frustrations of budding cartoonist Arnold "Junior" Spirit. Junior makes the tough decision to leave the high school on the reservation where he is among his peers, in the town where every neighbour knows intimately the doings of everyone else, to attend an all-white,less poor high school outside the "Rez". Junior's struggles to fit in are heartrending, but he handles every situation with a bravery and sense of humour that captivated this reader from the first page to the last.

Alexie has also written such short story collections as The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and Ten Little Indians: stories (2003). Agatha Christie also wrote a novel with the name Ten Little Indians, published far earlier, in 1939 originally. In the UK, the same mystery novel was published as And Then There Were None.

Gilbert Morris wrote a mystery novel in 2000 with an almost identical title to Christie's 1939 work: And Then There Were Two, and I can't help but connect these works, even if Morris's is set in New Orleans, while Christie's is (coincidentally where Alexie is concerned) set in a place called Indian Island.

Morris is an alum of the University of Arkansas. Other notable alums there include Bill and Hillary Clinton, who were also faculty members at the Law School in the mid-70's. It would be too easy to mention some of the books the Clintons have written, so I'll move along to Ellen Gilchrist who is a current faculty member at the University, as well as a successful author.

Gilchrist's latest work, A Dangerous Age, came out in 2008. Rooted in a traditional southern US foundation of hospitality and family, the story also deals with current events, including 9/11 and veterans of the Iraq war. Gilchrist portrays a family struggling to deal with shared loss and the helplessness that comes with uncertain times.

Gilchrist is originally from Vicksburg, Mississippi. Also from Mississippi is Jill Conner Browne, author of the Sweet Potato Queens comedic series of books, from The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love (1999) to The Sweet Potato Queens'Wedding Planner; and, The Sweet Potato Queens' Divorce Guide (2005). Browne's website refers to the author as H.R.H. THE Sweet Potato Queen. Also on her website, Browne mentions one of her favorite authors, Bill Fitzhugh.

Fitzhugh is also from Mississippi, as it happens. His big break as a writer was his 1997 novel, Pest Control. The protagonist, Bob Dillon (not that Bob Dylan), is an unusual sort of exterminator who gets mistaken for a top notch assassin, and Fitzhugh's writing is humorous and fun. Also held at Halifax Public Libraries is Highway 61 Resurfaced (2005), which draws on Fitzhugh's history as a disc jockey, incorporating equal parts of mystery and comedy. Highway 61 Resurfaced is the sequel to Radio Activity (2004).

Thanks to guest blogger Lara.

In addition to her library work, Lara blogs on a regular basis for Re:Print, a books blog at PopMatters.com, an international magazine of cultural criticism.