The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, 430 pages

 The wild rush of action in this classic frontier adventure story has made The Last of the Mohicans the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Deep in the forests of upper New York State, the brave woodsman Hawkeye (Natty Bumppo) and his loyal Mohican friends Chingachgook and Uncas become embroiled in the bloody battles of the French and Indian War. The abduction of the beautiful Munro sisters by hostile savages, the treachery of the renegade brave Magua, the ambush of innocent settlers, and the thrilling events that lead to the final tragic confrontation between rival war parties create an unforgettable, spine-tingling picture of life on the frontier. And as the idyllic wilderness gives way to the forces of civilization, the novel presents a moving portrayal of a vanishing race and the end of its way of life in the great American forests.

Quiet , Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian by Scott Douglas, 330 pages

This is the August book for the Readers Without Borders Book Club and I loved this book. It was funny reading about someone else's issues with library policy and management, dealings with patrons both pleasant and problem, and why they went into library work. I do have to disagree with his belief that most library workers don't like to read. I would like to say that I am living proof that that isn't true. I'm going to suggest this book for purchase at our library.

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 353 pages

This was a book for the library book club. It was a look at Ayaan's life as a Somalian girl growing up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya as a Muslim female. She was excised (female mutilation) as a young girl, forced into marriage to a man her father knew for an hour before agreeing to the marriage, fled to the Netherlands, and was forced to move to America after multiple death threats. This was a hard book to read, knowing that this happens every day, even in this country. I had managed to convince myself that it was only a few extremist Islamics that were giving the rest of the religion a bad name, but reading this forced me to question a religion that says the testimony of women is worth half a man's, condones violence against women, and says a woman's sexuality is a dangerous thing. This book also questions allowing immigrants to retain all of their culture in a new country, without adapting any to the country's beliefs and laws. This is a situation we are dealing with here in America, not just in Europe. I will be reading her next book very soon.

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, 400 pages

This is the ReadMOre book this year and the JPL book club Readers Without Borders is reading it this month. So I read it, and I finished it only because I had to. It dealt with communism, free thought, gender roles, language, physics, and tons of other deep and serious issues in a sci-fi genre. I'm not a sci-fi fan unless it's Star Trek (I've got a thing for Q) and I could feel my eyes glaze over when the novel went into pages of physics and time theory. Maybe it's a great book that was revolutionary and shocking for it's time (published in 1974) but I just didn't like it.