All Hallow’s Read – Day 4

Okay, I have a few books for today to get you through the long weekend.

The first book falls into the category of “Don’t Judge a Book by It’s Movie.” Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart is a fantastic suspenseful story about Meggie, whose father can read characters out of a story. When he reads out loud, characters can escape the story and exist in the real world. Unfortunately, to keep balance, someone from the real world gets sucked into the story. Now, some story escapees are trying to destroy all copies of the book from which they came so that no one can make them go back. The problem…when Meggie’s dad read them out, her mom ended up in the story. So it’s a battle between these characters and Meggie and her dad. The movie is dreadful, but the story delightful. And it’s the first in a trilogy (that’s how bad the movie was…they never bothered to make the other two).

My second book for today is Rotters by Daniel Kraus. I listened to this about two years ago when it won the Odyssey Award for best audiobook. I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about listening because I thought it was going to be another zombie book and, frankly, I’m over zombies. So, I was creepily pleased when I realized the book is really about grave robbers! Joey Crouch’s mom has died suddenly. Now he has to go live with a father he has never met. Now, not only is Joey a target for being the new kid, it turns out his father is the strangest, most despised member of the community. After a few weeks, Joey pieces together his father’s secret…that he spends his nights robbing graves, and Joey decides to get into the family business.

Finally, a creepy true story. Jeffrey Dahmer was one of the most notorious serial killers in history. Now imagine that you hung out with him in high school. In My Friend Dahmer, Derf Backderf recounts what Dahmer was like as a teenager. It’s an interesting story. (Warning, serious library geekery ahead.) And, strangely, for a graphic novel, it is incredibly well documented. Using notes at the end of the book, Backderf explains how he knew what the Dahmer’s house looked like and how he learned about things that happened when he was not around Dahmer.

Enjoy the long weekend! And read something creepy!

All Hallow’s Read – Day 3

Today I’m focusing on classic scary stories.

On this date in 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre group performed a radio drama based on H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds. Just a few months before this, radio news for the first time interrupted a broadcast to report on a breaking news story. The broadcast started out as a musical performance, when Welles and his actors broke into the performance with a story of aliens invading the US. Some listeners truly believed that the invasion was happening and panicked. Needless to say, when they learned it was a hoax, they were none too happy.

If you haven’t read this book, you can download a free copy of the ebook from Project Guttenberg. It’s a fascinating story considering how long ago it was written.

You can also try another Wells classic, The Invisible Man, about a scientist who figures out how to achieve invisibility, but goes mad trying to find a way to reverse the process. This is also available as a free ebook.

Another classic horror story is one of my favorites, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. If you have never read this book, you will probably find lots o things you weren’t expecting…. Let’s start with the fact that Mary Shelley published this when she was just 21. The story behind the story is that she, her husband-to-be Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron were hanging out together one weekend and got to talking about horror. They decided to have a little friendly competition, everyone going to their own space to write, and when they got back together, they would see who had written the scariest story. Mary beat the boys with this story.

Frankenstein, despite how he is portrayed in popular culture, is not the creature. He is the scientist who experiments with reanimation. The creature speaks French, because he runs away and hides on a French farm and learns to speak by listening to the family. It’s a fantastic story. We have both the book and the audio in the library and it is also in the public domain, so you can download the ebook from Project Guttenberg as well.

Finally, a discussion of classic horror is incomplete without the mention of good ol’ Edgar Allan Poe. In the library we have a fabulous collection of his Tales of Mystery and Madness illustrated by Gris Grimly that is just fantastic.

Happy horror reading!

All Hallow’s Read Day 2

Today’s book features something that juniors and seniors consider quite scary: college applications!

Okay, so today’s book isn’t really a scary book, exactly. But it does sound like a lot of fun. In Robin Wasserman’s Hacking Harvard, three hackers, fed up with what they see as an unfair admissions system, aim to get the biggest slacker in their class accepted into the most prestigious university in the country.

I bring this book up today to remind everyone that the Hill Top College Fair is next Wednesday, November 6th. We have about 25 colleges attending. College info stuff opens at 7. A presentation on transitioning to college starts at 6.30. If you want to stay after school, please be sure to bring a note and $5 for pizza.