Friends of the Roosevelt Library Facebook page

I finally posted something on the Friends of the Roosevelt Library page. In fact, I got carried away and posted two things at once.  That second one is a share of an event sponsored by the parent group, Friends of the Hennepin County Library The links below are to three authors we read in the Adult Mystery Book Club.

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Roosevelt Library Book Club

I have been appointed to the board of the Friends of the Roosevelt Library. There has not been an election of board members because we are the first one. The group just got started this spring, in time to host the Grand Re-opening on June 1st. We just held our first Book Sale last Saturday and made $550 with a five hour sale, which is not too bad for just starting out. Our next project is to get some book clubs going. We may have Teen Book Clubs later on, but we're starting out with two Adult Book Clubs. Mine is just called Adult Book Club and it is being kicked off as a follow-up to the One Minneapolis, One Read event, which is October 3rd. Everyone in Minneapolis who wants to take part reads the same book - A Choice of Weapons, by Gordon Parks. Then your local library or your school if you're a student will be holding a discussion session. At Roosevelt we will announce that one month hence will be the first Adult Book Club meeting. The first book is The March by E. L. Doctorow (reviewed way down below) and the meeting will be November 7 at 6 pm. The second book will be Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and that one will meet the first Thursday in December, also at 6 pm.  The other book club starting out in November at Roosevelt will be the Mystery Book Club. It will meet the first Saturday of the month, and you can find out more details in the library.

Launch of Always a New Leaf

On Sunday, the 7th of July, 2013, I launched this blog as a successor to my previous book blog Deborama's Book Reviews and Store.  I am moving most of the stuff from the old blog to here, with its original publication dates (mostly). But the reason I need a new blog is that the old one was an Amazon Affiliate, but it was a UK Amazon Affiliate. It hasn't earned any money in several years, and I no longer have access to the email address the Amazon Associates account was linked to.
Just a navigational point and a style point : below this launch post are my copied blogposts from Deborama's Book Reviews and Store, but without the graphics of the books or the monetized links. Just above this post will be one or more posts with loads of book links if you want to buy the books from whatever US store is my new affiliate. That's the navigational point. The style point has to do with English spelling. The posts I wrote in England have all British spellings. The ones I wrote after repatriating to America have all American spellings. That's just how it has to be; deal with it.
Another style point, but blogging style rather than writing style is that the relaunch blog will be more closely tied into Bookcrossing, Goodreads, Facebook and other social media. Also the Hennepin County Library system, my position on Friends of the Roosevelt Library, the Little Free Libraries that cover my neighborhood, and my condominium-based book club and writing club. Follow me if you love reading.

Nordic Noir: From Wallander to Borkmann's Point

Editor's Note: This is the last of my "old" blogposts. Since this post, I have discovered, here in the US, cable channel MhzWorldview which has an international mystery series every night of the week. Swedish Wallander and Van Veeteren are both on there, and the older Wallander, before Krister Henriksson (above), before Yellow Bird Productions. Yellow Bird produced Henriksson's Wallander and the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo films (Swedish, that is) and the Swedish-Danish crime miniseries The Bridge, which is too recent to be on MhzWorldview but which I saw on Hulu. I tried but failed to get my condo book club to like Nordic Noir. However, the Roosevelt Library Book Club mostly loves it too. 
I have been on a Nordic Noir kick ever since the British Wallander debuted on the BBC, which led me to the Swedish Wallander, which I liked better, which led me to the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it just sort of went on from there. Håkan Nesser is Swedish but I think his main character, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, is of some indeterminate northern European country, which could be Sweden or Holland or Poland, according to Wikipedia. He seems to use British police titles and ranks, which makes sense because he has lived in London for the past couple of decades. Van Veeteren is a popular character, and some of the early novels have been made into TV series in Sweden. In the first five, VV is still on the police force, and in the next five, he is retired and running an antiquarian bookshop but still getting involved in cases. He is something like a halfway mark between Sherlock Holmes and Wallander, with some of the wry and negative self-awareness that Holmes lacks and also some of the mysterious methodology, a mix of genius, showmanship and intuition, that Wallander lacks. Borkmann's Point is about a serial axe-murderer with exactly three victims, at least until he kidnaps a female police detective and no one is sure why or if he has killed her. The Point in the title is a point in time defined by Borkmann, a well-remembered mentor from VV's early days as a detective. He taught that there is always a point in the investigation where you have all the information you need to solve it, and all the information that comes in after that point will slow you down rather than help you. So if one can learn to discern that point, one can ignore all the extraneous information and just sit at ones desk and think. Unfortunately, you can only recognize Borkmann's Point after you have solved the crime, so it's more of a thought experiment than a tactic.