Can't get enough of the entertaining and multifaceted The Help by Kathryn Stockett?
If you enjoyed this popular read, consider the following titles:

For the south & the civil rights movement of the 1960s...

Bombingham -- Anthony Grooms
The Bridge -- Doug Marlette
Five Smooth Stones -- Ann Fairbairn
Four Spirits -- Sena Jeter Naslund
Freshwater Road -- Denise Nicholas
Magic Time -- Doug Marlette
The Moon in Our Hands -- Tom Dyja
The Summer We Got Saved -- Pat Cunningham Devoto

For racism & race relations...

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian -- Sherman Alexie
To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
Tortilla Curtain -- T. Coraghessan Boyle

For female relationships & friendships, including mothers & daughters...

"...and Ladies of the Club" -- Helen Hooven Santmyer
Charms for the Easy Life -- Kaye Gibbons
The Friday Night Knitting Club -- Kate Jacobs
The Secret Life of Bees -- Sue Monk Kidd
The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart -- Alice Walker

For coming of age stories...

Ellen Foster -- Kaye Gibbons
Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel -- Jeannette Walls
The Tender Bar -- J. R. Moehringer
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn -- Betty Smith
Walking Across Egypt -- Clyde Edgerton

For the role of the African-American caregiver and the children cared for...

We Are All Welcome Here -- Elizabeth Berg

For multiple voices...

The History of Love -- Nicole Krauss
Son of a Witch -- Gregory Maguire

For classic southern writers, try...

Carson McCullers
Flannery O'Connor
Eudora Welty

And for more books featuring strong southern women, sample these authors...

Fannie Flagg
Jill McCorkle
Ann B. Ross
Lee Smith
Bailey White

(Please note: Readers will find overlapping themes within many of the titles listed above.)

And if you haven't already listened to the audio version of The Help, do!

Have any to add? Feel free to share them here.

There has been good and bad news from the world of mystery writing in the past few days. On the plus side, the 2010 Edgar Nominees were announced. These titles are selected by the Mystery Writers of America to honor "the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2009." The winners will be announced in April.

On a much sadder note, many readers were shocked to learn that best-selling author Robert B. Parker passed away Monday at the age of 77. Tributes and memories are filling the internet, such as this from the Wall Street Journal and this from the New York Times, While many enjoy his "Sunny Randall" and "Jesse Stone" series, I have always been a strict "Spenser" devotee. I still remember when I first discovered this series and how I devoured all I could find. Since then, the arrival of the newest Spenser novel was always a highlight in my reading calendar and is something I will miss.

marlise

Not knowing much about Iceland, I didn’t know what to expect when I popped White Night Wedding (DVD WHI) a movie by Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur into the DVD player. Touted as a comedy, it is the story of a professor named Jon. We first meet him teaching a class of bored students at a community college. Lecturing about moral relativism, he gazes out a window as though looking for someone—anyone---to come to his rescue. Life wasn’t supposed to be like this for Jon. Some years before, he and his artist wife had come to live on a remote island off the coast of Iceland, she to burn up the world with her art, and he, with his writing. Life dealt them harsh blows, though: her high spirits wobbled into emotional instability, then to madness, then to suicide. His writing doesn’t burn up the world; he struggles under the burden of his wife’s mental illness and her death, and he finds himself commuting by ferry to the college every day to teach. Then he meets a local island girl who is a student. She falls for the professor, and thinks she can save him from his sadness. After some plot twists and turns, they marry, and it’s happily ever after. Right? Watching this sequence of events unfold, we feel forebodings.

If you think this sounds like unpromising material for a comedy, I agree, and a big problem with this movie is its awkward mix of humor and tragedy that doesn’t gel into black comedy. We meet other islanders, including the mismatched parents of the young girl, some of the buffoonish friends of the professor, a lonely young minister, who is played for laughs, and some locals who, improbably enough, want to make the island a tourist destination, complete with golf course. The island is beautiful, gilded with the midsummer’s sun, with seascapes and soft green countryside looking like paradise to this landlocked Midwesterner. I found some of the humor rather broad, and laughed instead at the throw-away lines. For the first half hour of this movie, I was in a truly foreign world, where I didn’t know the people, the language, or their landscape, and had no point of reference, a world whose Norse heritage is thinly overlaid with European culture. This movie will pull you in, though, if you give it a chance. One test as to whether a movie is “good” or not is how it sticks with you after you’ve seen it. Some movies are like fast food: they are consumed quickly and then immediately forgotten. But a good movie will resonate in your imagination long after viewing, and the characters may haunt you. In this case, it is the character of the first wife who haunts. We think of her, on a remote island with no kindred souls, living with a husband who is decent, but emotionally remote. There was nothing or no one to slow her downward descent, and the lonely beauty of the island must have made her life all the more difficult. In my recollections of this movie, the antic humor has evanesced away, leaving only her dark image. Watch “White Night Wedding,” to see this absorbing slice of a world far away, and to have some smiles, but don’t expect a frothy comedy. (I have the feeling Icelanders just don’t do frothy comedy). Director Kormakur seems to be saying that life is a tangled mess of the horrible, the mundane, and the funny, and that we can’t lose ourselves, no matter to which island we may escape.

franm

Avid audiobook readers (listeners?) will be delighted with a new resource to help them expand their listening (reading?) pleasure. Now available at the Readers Services department, AudioFile Magazine is a trove of information devoted solely to the audiobook experience. In addition to reviews organized by genre (Mystery, Science Fiction, and so on), there are profiles of popular authors such as Nevada Barr and Diane Ackerman and essays from fan-fave narrators such as George Guidall. The current issue (Dec 2009/Jan 2010) features a review of the best headphones and lists of the Best Audiobooks of 2009.

ch

Into the Beautiful North
Luis Urrea

When 19 year-old Nayeli realizes that most of the men in her Mexican village, including her father, have gone to the US for work, she decides to go north and find 7 men to protect her home town from the villains attempting to control it. Urrea's prose is luminous, filled with memorable characters, and he includes social commentary on immigrant life along the Mexican/US border. An enjoyable, humorous story.

Below Zero
C.J. Box

This recent addition to the Joe Pickett mystery series covers the issues of global warming...Game Warden Joe Pickett is forced to relive his foster daughter April's death (six years ago) when he learns that his daughter Sheridan is currently receiving text messages from someone claiming to be April. Added to his nightmarish horror is the suspicion that the texts are being sent by someone associated with environmental terrorists.

Homer's Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat
Gwen Cooper (636.8 COO)

A tender memoir about a young woman who adopts a blind cat at a time in her life when her lover, job and housing situation are challenging to say the least. Though reluctant to add a third cat to the two previously adopted ones, Cooper gives in when kitty # 3 purrs as soon as she is picked up. Throughout the next 12 years, Cooper finds herself growing into a mature, compassionate human being as she shares some difficult life experiences with an intrepid, wonderful cat. Warm, hopeful and entertaining.

What Is the What: The Autobiograhy of Valentino Achak Deng
Dave Eggers

Though a novel, Eggers's book is a true account of the adventures of Valentino Achak Deng, one of 3,800 Lost Boys from Sudan (Lost Boys because they were unaccompanied minors) who survived years in refugee camps of Kenya and Ethiopia. We learn of the unimaginable sufferings of these children as Achak narrates his frightening, sometimes wonderful experiences of escape, rescue and hardship ...even after settling in Atlanta. What Is the What carries the emotional impact of an epic with touches of humor, poignancy and wisdom. Dion Graham's narration pulls the listener into this harrowing reality, yet the warmth of Valentino's personality plus Eggers's gift as a writer makes one reluctant to leave this world when the book ends. An unforgettable witness to the beauty and power of one individual...not to be missed!

mc