Library Loot—December 14-20

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

It's been a month since I've been to the library, but I'm back with a vengeance. I'm leaving to go home for Christmas tomorrow, so I need a ton of books to get me through 10 days and two 12-hour car rides. I know this is why ebooks were created, but I can't bring myself to read everything off of a soulless screen.

Anyway, here's what I've picked up:

The Last Spymaster, by Gayle Lynds. It's an espionage thriller and I'm thrilled that it's written by a woman. Disgraced CIA operative Elaine Cunningham is brought back from limbo to find Jay Tice, a Cold War spy who has broken out of prison. Shouldn't be too much trouble for a seasoned hunter like Cunningham. Oh, except that Tice was a legendary operative himself. And the situation turns out to be much more complicated than it first appeared (naturally).

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is another classic that I've somehow never read. It's a sprawling multigenerational epic and I'm eager to jump in. These types of books inspire passionate hatred in some readers and equally passionate appreciation from rest—there doesn't appear to be a middle ground. I don't expect this to be one of the books I keep on my shelf and lovingly reread on rainy days, but I hope I'll enjoy it.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez. I love the idea of this book—a quartet of sisters caught between two cultures struggle to define their identities.

The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki. Four sisters struggle to define their identities amid the shifting landscape of pre-WWII Osaka. My love for sister stories started with Little Women and The Makioka Sisters is considered a modern classic.

That's it for my library loot, but I'm packing a few other books for the ride. First, Anchee Min's Empress Orchid, which tells the story of a concubine in the Forbidden City during the tumultuous mid-nineteenth century. I read one of Min's earlier books, Wild Ginger, earlier this year and wasn't overly impressed. Part of it had to do with fact that the subject matter—the Cultural Revolution—is much more powerful when it's presented in a memoir like Wild Swans. I don't know as much about imperial China, so I'm hoping that will make this book more interesting. Second, I'm also bringing Donna Napoli's Beast, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast story set in Persia.

And just to make my bag a little heavier, I'm taking Operation Mincemeat and Flyboys, which I think my parents will enjoy as much as I did, and John Adams and A Christmas Carol, which I borrowed from them last year.

Finally, an update on my last Library Loot post: I'm still reading The Invisible Bridge. It's due tomorrow (and I've already renewed it once), and I'm thisclose to finishing it. I love all of it—the characters, the story, the storytelling—everything. But. I'm fifty pages from the end and as much as I want Raoul Wallenberg to materialize with his magical Swedish papers, I don't think there's enough time for a heroic, happy ending. But I can still hope. And that's why I haven't finished the book yet.