Advice for Readers

Sunday, November 11, marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, the War to End All War. The armistice that ended the fighting was signed at 11 a.m., Paris time, “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.” The Great War decimated a generation in England and on the continent. More than 100,000 Americans also died of injuries or illness after we joined the conflict in April of 1917.

Readers know that the Great War’s trauma produced a legacy of great books. Many fall in the category of well-known classics; others will be less familiar to American readers. We’ll look at a handful of them here.

One of the great histories of World War I is Barbara Tuchman’s 1962  The Guns of August. She begins her story with the funeral of Edward VII in 1910 and covers the full sweep of the war.

Two memoirs of the war are worth your

Listed below are some new and not-so-new books written by trangender and gender variant authors available at Oakland Public Library. For a description of each book, just click on the title link.

 Fiction and Poetry

October ends with Halloween, favorite dress-up holiday for the young and not-so-young, season of scary movies and frights big and small. Yes, yes, for you purists, Halloween has its roots in the Celtic observance of Samhain, marking the halfway point between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, a liminal time when the unquiet souls of the dead must be appeased. A person could go on and on in this vein. But we’re here today to talk about scary books. At the library, we get asked for them a lot. All year long, but especially right around now.

Are you ready for a scary, scary read? Here’s help.

You could start chronologically. There’s agreement among scholars that Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto was the first gothic novel, precursor to horror, with its exploration of fear and the supernatural.

As gothic morphed