American Libraries Magazine: Rousing Reads

Visiting Two Medicine Country

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:49:17 +0000

March/April 2013

By Bill Ott

In 1978, when I first read Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky, I was a librarian at Timberland Regional Library in Washington State. Doig’s memoir of growing up in the Montana high country as the third member, along with his father and grandmother, of an unconventional but loving family struck me as a very special book.

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Hot Country

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:35:17 +0000

January/February 2013

By Bill Ott

I’m a sucker for novels starring war correspondents, especially those set in tropical climes.

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The Wild and Poetic Life of Westerns

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:34:05 +0000

November / December 2012

By Bill Ott

When a Western is done well, its images can strike deep—and often subconsciously—into our imaginations, and the reverberations have the power of myth

I’m hooked on Westerns. Not the genre-blends that are popular today—the cowboy romances and the zombie Westerns—but the real thing: novels set in the Old West, featuring hard-drinking, rugged individualists who are good at doing the things that must be done and doing them with grace under pressure.

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Gregorian Chants Meet Thelonious Monk

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:39:39 +0000

September/October 2012

By Bill Ott

Somewhere, I told myself, amid shelves of long-ignored LPs, I had a recording of Gregorian chants. But where? After much foraging, the album eventually turned up, and, remarkably, my ancient turntable still worked, giving me the chance to experience—for the first time in some 40 years—the otherworldly serenity of this hypnotically alluring musical form.

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An Homage to Film Noir

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 19:23:50 +0000

July/August 2012

By Bill Ott

We all know about life imitating art, but what about novels imitating film noir?

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Translit: New Genre Collapses Time and Space

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:38:54 +0000

May/June 2012

By Bill Ott

At the recent Public Library Association conference in Philadelphia, my friend and Booklist columnist David Wright, who was giving a presentation on literary fiction, used a term I had never heard, translit, to describe that boundary-breaking kind of novel that shatters all the too-often pigeonholing categories we use to compartmentalize modern fiction.

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Science for the Nonscientist

Sanhita SinhaRoy — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:22:30 +0000

March/April 2012

By Bill Ott

I was never any good at science, whether it was dissecting a frog or—God help me—completing a science-fair project. My personal nadir came on a chemistry exam in high school. I like to think my score of eight points out of a possible 100 remains, these many decades later, the worst officially posted number in the history of the school.

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It’s That Time of Year

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:03:23 +0000

January/February 2012

By Bill Ott

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Hard-Boiled Mysteries and Soft-Boiled Poets

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:28:32 +0000

November / December 2011

By Bill Ott

The world needs more hard-boiled mysteries written by soft-boiled poets. This admittedly peculiar insight occurred to me as I was reading poet and novelist Jim Harrison’s first crime novel, The Great Leader. The book immediately reminded me of another mystery written by a poet—my favorite modern poet, as a matter of fact—Richard Hugo.

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The Problem with Sports Novels

Beverly Goldberg — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:35:37 +0000

September/October 2011

Bill Ott

Most sports novels, especially the kind that follow a team or an individual through a season of play, face a built-in problem: The drama and suspense usually rides on the team’s success or failure as it moves through the season and plays the inevitable Big Game. Thus, there can only be one of two endings.

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