Ray's List: New Non-Fiction at the Library

On my latest trip to , I saw a number of very interesting and diverse hardback books just itching to have their pages turned. All in all, there are over 30 new books on there new fiction shelf. Here’s my list of the ones that caught my eyes and my mind enough to share with you.

Star Wars Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber -What we have here is Star Wars, one of the most popular sci-fi movie premises of the 1980s being remixed with the most popular sci-fi movie premise of the last five years: zombies.

Schreiber offers storm troopers, rebels and Jedi who also have to battle flesh eating undead monsters. Creatively, I honestly think the idea is a bunt. However, considering the die-hard legions of fans of Star Wars and zombie movies, the book is a home run for the business of selling books and the paperback date is already scheduled for February.

The Sookie Stackhouse Companion by Charlaine Harris- The only competition zombies have for popularity in horror themed media right now comes from vampires. The champion in the post-teen vampire lit genre is writer Charlaine Harris. Ironically her main character, heroine Sookie Stackhouse is not a vampire at all. Sookie is a confident woman who can stand up to any vampire and actually falls in love and lust with a few.

The Sookie Stackhouse stories have been brought to life through the hit HBO show True Blood. The Sookie Stackhouse Companion is great for True Blood fans who want to get the fast track update to the books.

It’s a good read for regular fans of the novel who may not have read every Sookie book. Even for those who have every novel about Sookie, there is brand new material including a new Sookie story in the form of a short novella. With The Sookie Stackhouse Companion, all True Blood fans will get a good taste of some new blood.

Can’t Buy Love by Connie Briscoe- In Briscoe’s latest book we are introduced to Lenora Stone, a 38-year-old woman who has a good solid life but not the lifestyle of the rich or famous.

Unlike other books about people who are reaching for more out of life, we see that Lenora Stone is employed by and working closely with those who have the life she imagines she wants. Stone spends her days as a photojournalist, often capturing the rich and famous digitally. Then Stone herself wins a lottery and then the tables do some turning.

We see what happens when car notes and mortgage payments are no longer at the top of the list of day to day worries. From what I have read so far, Briscoe has taken the old vehicle of “getting what you wish for” and breathed some new life into it.

2030 by Albert Brooks- I have always seen Albert Brooks as a writer, actor, director with too much imagination and vision for Hollywood movies. I felt Brooks was too big for Hollywood based on his work 30 years ago. Today the idea of Brooks writing for the film industry is like asking Dickens to write the dialogue for a coloring book.

So when I saw 2030 on the shelf at the Galloway Library I was really excited. Brook’s 2030 is a story that paints a speculative fictional view of the not too distant future of America.

Like his movies, the gold is not in some brilliant break through that no one has thought about with high tech inventions, but the brilliance is in his story telling and dialogue. Brooks takes premises like cancer finally being cured that we have talked about for years and gives dialogue to the results and fall out.

In 2030, cancer has been cured and people are living longer. Brooks paints a drastic difference between the youth, the middle aged and older generations, who by 2030 are all battling for resources and attention. 2030 is not so much about changes in disease control or climate (although the environment is changing in this book) but more about how the people of America in 2011 grow into more cartoon like versions of themselves by 2030.

On one side, 2030 gives us the president of the United States, and on the other side over in a decimated California, we meet a homeless man living in a tent. Brooks also brings us several characters who are in between the president and the homeless.