Top 5 for Friday - What Warkworth are reading

It's getting really late in the day and has been incredibly busy here at Warkworth (not helped by someone's bright idea that we should take the Library to the Warkworth A & P Show tomorrow and the accompanying organisation necessary to make it happen). Which is really just me trying to make excuses for being so late with the Blog today. But never fear - inspiration is here.

Today's Top 5 centres around what the librarians of Warkworth Library are reading.

1. In Great Waters - Kit Whitfield. In a tense, divided court, a young princess watches her mother struggle to hold the throne. On a remote coastal estate, a scholar finds a child washed up on the shore. Anne. Henry. A Christian princess of the royal blood. A pagan bastard, groomed all his hidden, lonely life to make a grab for the crown. In this work of stunning imagination, Kit Whitfield has written a fictional history at once familiar and alien. Since the ninth century, when the deepsmen invaded Venice, an uneasy alliance has held between the people of the land and the sea. That alliance was brokered by the warrior queen, Angelica, half landsman, half deepsman, the mother of the royal houses of Europe. Now, centuries later, no navy can cross the seas without allies in the ocean - and without deepsmen guarding its shores, no nation can withstand invasion. The hybrid kings keep the treaty between both sides, protecting their people from the threat of war. The royal blood is the key to peace, and ferociously protected. The penalties for any landsman who tries to breed with a deepsman are severe; the fate of any 'bastard' child, born of such an illegitimate union, is terrible. But the royal house of England is staggering, collapsing under the weight of centuries of inbreeding. Anne prays for guidance, a way into the future without hatred or bloodshed. Henry holds with fierce certainty that only the strong survive. But if either of them is to outlive the coming conflict, they may need more than faith alone... Gail has just finished this and said it was fantastic.
2. The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering our place in nature - David Suzuki. This is the revised 2008 edition (we also hold the original 1997 publication). Since this title was first published, global warming has become a major challenge for humanity. In this new, extensively revised and amplified edition, David Suzuki reflects on these changes and examines what they mean for our place in the world. The basic meaasge remains the same: we are creatures of the Earth, and as such we are utterly dependent on its gifts of air, water, soil and the energy of the sun. These elements are not just external factors; we take them into our bodies, where they are incorporated into our very essence. As with any self respecting librarian, Gail has more than one book on the go and this is the second, showing up hints of a past as a science teacher.
3. The Ship of Destiny. Book 3 in the Liveship Traders series by Robin Hobb. The dragon, Tintaglia, has been released from her wizardwood coffin, only to find that the glories of her kingdom have passed into ancient memory. Meanwhile, Malta Vestrit navigates the acid flow of the Rain Wild River in a decomposing boat, accompanied by the Satrap Cosgo and his Companion Kekki. Sally is re-reading her way through some of her favourite fantasy series. (I know there are people out there who don't believe in it but I love revisiting favourite books and reading them)
4. The Secret life of words: How English became English - Henry Hitchings. Sally is our scholar and she also has more than one book on the go. Journey into the history of English and discover how words have been absorbed into our language to make it what it is today.
5. Dead Sea - Brian Keene. Julie definitely has more than one book on the go (and that's not counting the audio books she listens to driving to and from work). She told me she her plans for this weekend are to finish up her holiday reading and this book is one of them. The streets of the city are no longer safe. They are filled with zombies - the living dead, rotting predators driven only by a need to kill...and eat. Some of the living have struggled to survive, but with each passing day their odds grow worse. For Lamar Reed and a handful of others, their safe haven is an old Coast Guard ship out at sea. This is part of a series and as she has a stronger stomach than I do, she is hereby designated the reviewer of the zombie genre.

And that's us for the week. Call and say hi to myself and Gail if you are at the Warkworth Show tomorrow. Or you could just visit your local library and have a wander. If you haven't been for a while, you might be surprised at whats on offer.

Have a great weekend.