Outstanding Books for the College Bound

Every five years the American Library Association comes out with an updated list of "Outstanding Books for the College Bound." The 2009 list is available here. Now, I confess that I am still working on a few titles from the 2004 lists, but that hasn't stopped me from picking up a couple books on the 2009 list. My first pick, from the Science and Technology list, was Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. It's fascinating, but disgusting.

To give myself a break from the decomposition discussions, I flew through Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters, by Mark Dunn. This is an entertaining work of fiction about the love of language. Some folks on the small island of Nollop idolize their island's namesake, who just happens to be the creator of the saying "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." When the letters of this pangram, posted over a statue of Mr. Nollop, begin to fall down, the island's high council take this as a divine sign from Nollop that those letters are no longer to be used. Thus begins the increasingly difficult task of communicating as more and more letters become illegal with each passing week. It is a tale of oppression, much in the vein of Animal Farm. A fun read, and a great vocabulary builder.

The library already had about half of the books on the 2009 list when it came out. I am happy to report that we now have nearly all of them. The few that I could not find at Chaucer's are on our amazon wish list.

Now, back to the cadavers...