Barbecue mystique (or is that mesquite?)

The big book of outdoor cooking and entertaining : spirited recipes and expert tips for barbecuing, charcoal and gas grilling, rotisserie roasting, smoking, deep-frying, and making merry / Cheryl and Bill Jamison
Presents the essentials of outdoor cookery, introducing more than eight hundred recipes, an array of appetizers, main courses, side dishes, drinks, and desserts, and practical advice on equipment and utensils, menu planning, and entertaining

Raichlen's indoor! grilling / by Steven Raichlen
In case it rains...
Features an array of recipes for appetizers, beef, pork, lamb, burgers, poultry, seafood, breads and sandwiches, vegetables and sides, and desserts to be cooked on grill pans, indoor smokers, built-ins, and the fireplace

A man, a can, a grill : 50 no-sweat meals you can fire up fast / by David Joachim and the editors of Men'shealth
Offers fifty simple recipes that use no more than five main ingredients and includes tips on everything from shopping and preparation to grilling and presentation

How to grill / by Steven Raichlen
A full-color, photograph-by-photograph, step-by-step technique book, "How to Grill" gets to the core of the grilling experience by showing and telling exactly how it's done. From how to set up a three-tiered fire to how to grill a prime rib, a porterhouse, a pork tenderloin, or a chicken breast. There are techniques for smoking ribs, cooking the perfect burger, rotisserieing a whole chicken, barbecuing a fish; for grilling pizza, shellfish, vegetables, tofu, fruit, and s'mores. Bringing the techniques to life are over 100 all-new recipes

Barbecue bible : sauces, rubs, and marinades, bastes, butters & glazes / by Steven Raichlen

Shellfish on the grill : more than 80 easy and delectable recipes for lobster, shrimp, scampi, scallops, oysters, clams, mussels, crab, and more

Book Club Reads

Is your group taking a summer hiatus?
Thinking about joining or forming one?
Here are some "inspirational" titles and some practical ones.

And Ladies of the Club
Before there were "book clubs" there were Women's Literary Societies. This chronicles several generations of the Waynesboro Ohio Women's Club, from just a few years after the Civil War to 1932.
At over 1000 pages, it can keep you reading all summer.The book caused a great stir when it was published 25 years ago, written by an octogenarian. The grandmother of today's book club books, it was on the 1984 bestseller for a long time.

The story behind the book is that Helen Santmyer began the novel at the age of 38, to counter the image of small town life given in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. She completed it decades later.

The Book Class
Louis Auchincloss' novel is told through the eyes of Christopher Gates, the male narrator, who reveals the secrets and stories of the 12 women of his mother's "book class", begun by them as debutantes in 1908, and meeting every month for over 60 years.

The Jane Austen Book Club
As six Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love, in a comedy of contemporary manners.

Angry Housewives Eating Bonbons
From the initial formation of The Freesia Court Book Club and over the course of the next thirty years, five women in small-town Minnesota share the events, triumphs, tragedies, hardships, joys, and sorrows of their lives.

Dinner with Anna Karenina
Six Manhattan women gather for a year to discuss great literature with great meals. But they find that the novels open up paths for discussion about the deepest and most difficult aspects of their own lives.

The Year of reading Proust: a memoir in real time A non-fiction work by Phyllis Rose describes how Proust's novels led her to understand the art of writing an autobiography, and recounts her experiences as an author, a woman, and a person in midlife.

A year of reading classics: a month by month guide to classics and crowd pleasers is a reading guide, organized around the calendar year, offers descriptions of each book, discussion questions, information about the authors, and lists of video, Internet, and bibliographical resources.

Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury a personal tour of some of the world's best books Discusses eighty essential books, including literary classics, controversial books, influential works, best sellers, and writings on art, science, politics, and psychology

Recovering your story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, MorrisonAn illuminating study explores the ways in which the works of some of the twentieth century's seminal writers helps readers understand the texture, shape, and evolution of human consciousness and the nature of our inner lives, offering critical analyses of outstanding works by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison.

Reading to heal: how to use bibliotherapy to improve your life


Thirteen Ways of looking at the novel by Jane SmileyThe author celebrates the art of fiction as she looks at one hundred very different examples of the novel, ranging from the classics to little-known gems, and discusses the evolution of the novel and the practice of novel-writing

Readers' Choice:200 book club favorites

Read it and eat from irresistible beach reads to timeless classics a month-by-month guide to scintillating book club selections and mouthwatering menus.

"Biography is the only true history"...

according to Thomas Carlyle.

Similarly, Ralph Waldo Emerson stated "There is properly no history; only biography."

More recently, writer Mark Feeney stated, "Once the implicit aim of biography was to uplift now it is to unveil."

If reading about people's lives is one of your passions, and you are looking for something else to read while waiting for a copy of the Diana Chronicles, there is a new resource that will keep you posted about all aspects of biography, through a monthly e-newsletter.

The Biographer's Craft provides news about upcoming biographies, both subjects and their authors, reviews of biographical books, and articles related to the fine art of biography.
You can view their newsletters, starting from March 2007, in the archives on the website to decide if you want to subscribe.


The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography this year is:
The Most Famous man in America: the biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate

To see a complete list of Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies:
Pulizter Prize for Biography or Autobiography

To find out about new biographies available at the library, check out the
New to the Collection List on the catalog's home page. List # 5 is for recently added biographies.

If you prefer to browse the biographies at the library, the latest additions can be found in the "New Book" section at each branch, or the full collection in the separate "Biography" collection in the adult non-fiction area.

Biographies are indicated with a "B" as the call number, and shelved according to the
person the book is about, so, for example, all the biographies about Franklin Roosevelt would be shelved together under B ROO.

Garden Reads

If gardening and nursery catalogs are some of your favority reading materials,

consider branching out to some tales of fiction, mystery, and real life, about other people and their gardens:


Consider the Lily by Elizabeth Buchan
Wild Designs by Katie Fforde
Night Gardening by E. L. Swann

Garden Club Mystery by Graham Landrum
Garden Club by Muriel Resnick Jackson
Gardening Mystery series by Ann Ripley
English Garden Mysteries by Anthony Eglin
Bretta Solomon mysteries by Janis Harrison

Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katherine White
Around the house and in the garden by Dominique Browning
Chicken Soup for the Gardener's Soul

Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air

Some of you may be familiar with the "Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air" broadcast on XM satellite radio, now newly joining up with i-tunes, and Imagination Theater.

Many of their quality productions are also becoming available for purchase on audio CD format.
Some are classics like

Captain Blood ,

some are original productions, such as Powder River.

Powder River is a western adventure series, set in the Wyoming frontier.

Join former lawman turned rancher Britt MacMasters and his son Chad as they begin a new life for themselves in Clearmont, Wyoming, but Britt's past returns to haunt him, as one of the toughest outlaw gangs in the west is headed towards Clearmont for revenge. A rousing 15 episode western adventure series that keeps true to its roots. Currently the library has Season 1 and Season 2. from this series.

For a list of Fauquier library holdings, see Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air as an author entry.
The library will continue to add titles from their productions as
they are made available.

For more information about the Colonial Theatre on the Air, and their schedule,
see http://www.colonialradio.com/

Literary Thrillers-Dante, Bronte, Byron, Poe, Rossetti et cetera

For those who like a more cerebral chase,

some of these are more literary, some are more thriller:

Rossetti Letter by Christi Phillips
Fearing that her research will be rendered useless if a Cambridge professor proves his theory about seventeenth-century Venetian courtesan Alessandra Rossetti, Ph.D. candidate Claire Donovan agrees to chaperone a troubled teen in order to gain passage to the professor's presentation in Venice.

Possession by A.S. Byatt
This tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets became a huge bookseller favorite, and then on to national bestellerdom. Winner of England's Booker Prize, a coast-to-coast bestseller, and the literary sensation of the year, Possession is a novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story.

Harvard Yard by William Martin
Harvard historian Peter Fallon investigates a university legend about an original Shakespeare manuscript that may have survived the Harvard Hall fire of 1764
In the Hand of Dante by Nick Tosches
The discovery of an original manuscript of Dante's "Inferno" in the Vatican archives finds writer Nick Tosches heading for Rome to authenticate the find.
Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
When her health begins failing, the mysterious author Vida Winter decides to let Margaret Lea, a biographer, write the truth about her life, but Margaret needs to verify the facts since Vida has a history of telling outlandish tales
Lord Byron's Novel: the Evening Land by John Crowley
A work spanning three centuries follows the stories of a lost Lord Byron novel, the writer's daughter's efforts to save the manuscript, and a woman who discovers the daughter's secret.
Bronte Project: by Jennifer Vandever
Abandoned by her fiance, Sara Frost finds herself beginning to question everything from her love life to her life's work, as she stumbles into a world populated by an amoral Frenchman, two New York eccentrics, and a Hollywood producer.
Rule of Four
Trying to decipher an ancient text that weaves a mathematical labyrinth within a love story, two researchers obtain a diary that may contain the key to the code, but when a fellow researcher is killed, they realize that the book contains a dangerous secret.
Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
In 1865, the preparations of the Dante Club--led by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes--to release the first translation of Dante's "The Divine Comedy" are threatened by a series of murders that re-create episodes from "Inferno."
Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl
In 1849 Baltimore, following the death of Edgar Allan Poe, Quentin Clark discovers that Poe's final days had been marked by a series of bizarre, unanswered questions and launches his own investigation to resolve the mystery of Poe's death.