Actor/playwright/filmmaker Ayad Akhtar is now a first-time novelist with the publication of American Dervish * last week. With rights sold to 19 countries, this might just be the first Muslim-American novel to reach commercial mainstream.

"(B)rilliantly written, nuanced, and emotionally forceful look inside the interplay of religion and modern life", the novel opens with Hayat Shah, heavy with guilt, remembering his first love, Auntie Mina - independent, beautiful and intelligent, and his mother's oldest friend from Pakistan. Her arrival enlivens their previously dour and secular household with laughter and she brings an abiding Muslim faith which she begins to share with Hayat, awakening in the 10 yr.old boy a fierce infatuation, and a new religious identity.

When Mina falls for his father's Jewish colleague Nathan, Hayat feels betrayed. A reckless scheme to set things right brings on devastating consequences for all those he loves most.

"The young teen's personal story about growing up in pre-9/11 Muslim America is both particular and universal, with intense connections of faith, sorrow, tenderness, anger, betrayal, questioning, and love."

A readalike for Leila Aboulela's The Translator (2006) and Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance (in audio), (2011).

Ayad Akhtar is an American-born, first generation Pakistani-American from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An award-winning playwright (Brown, Columbia) he starred and co-wrote The War Within (2005), which was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay and an International Press Academy Satellite Award for Best Picture - Drama.

* = starred review

We SING in Storytime. You SING in the yard ... in the car ... at the park. We sang "Two Kinds Of Seagulls ... HEgulls and SHEgulls" by Tom Chapin in Storytime with Ms. Sarah. Folks liked it and asked for more suggestions.
Here is a list of some of my favorite recording artists for young families.
These artists provide fun songs for elementary school ages,
AND the preschool siblings enjoy going along with the fun.
Cellabration! A Tribute to Ella Jenkins with various artists all singing songs written by Ella Jenkins
You'll Sing A Song And I'll Sing A Song with Ella Jenkins
Making Good Noise with Tom Chapin
Jim Gill Sings Do Re Mi on His Toe Leg Knee with Jim Gill
Daddy-O Daddy with various artists all singing songs written by Woody Guthrie
Train Songs And Other Tracks with Kevin Roth
You Are My Little Bird with Elizabeth Mitchell
All Wound Up! with Cathy Fink
Crazy Hair Day: original songs and stories with various artists
SING-on !

My reading gets downright frantic when the "Best Of" lists start showing up at the end of the year. Glad this one made the lists.

Named by both the Kirkus Reviews' as one of the Best of 2011 Mysteries, and a Library Journal Best Mystery of 2011 Stealing Mona Lisa * * was published to coincide with the 100th Anniversary of the theft of the most recognized painting in the world from the Louvre in 1911.

First-time novelist Carson Morton (professional musician, screenwriter, and playwright), "smoothly blends fact and fiction while evocatively exploring the era's seamy underbelly."

Paris, 1925. On his death bed the Marquis Eduardo de Valfierno recounts to a young reporter his audacious plan to steal the Mona Lisa, and the elaborate scheme to pass 6 forged copies off into the hands of American tycoons with insatiable appetite for the unattainable. As well orchestrated as the plan was, it was undone by nature - human and otherwise, when "love, lust, jealousy, greed, and murderous revenge come into play, along with excessive rains and the worst flooding in contemporary Paris history."

Stealing Mona Lisa is a "sophisticated, engaging caper, complete with a richly imagined group of con artists and a historical mystery that will keep you guessing until the very end." The twisty conclusion will leave you wondering about the authenticity of the art on museum walls !!

For a historical account of the famous heist and largely unsolved mystery, try R.A. Scotti's Vanished Smile: the mysterious theft of Mona Lisa (also in audio).

The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler is "part fast-paced thriller and part social history," and an unwieldy and engrossing account of life and crime in belle époque Paris, with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa serving as the centerpiece.

One last thing...do allow for the author's exercise of artistic license with the chronology of the Paris flood which actually took place the previous year, as captured in these vintage photos. You might also find fascinating Paris Under Water : how the city of light survived the great flood of 1910 by Jeffrey H. Jackson.

* * = starred reviews

Looking through the new DVDs list in the catalog, I was excited to see that AADL will soon have copies of the movie, Backbeat! As a huge Beatles fan, this is one of my favorite movies because of how funny and also fairly accurate it is in its portrayal of the early days of the group.

In general, the story follows the band's start in the seedy nightclubs of Liverpool and Hamburg. More specifically, it chronicles the close friendship between John Lennon and "Fifth Beatle," Stuart Sutcliffe. The film is touching in its honesty towards this relationship and Lennon's struggle with Sutcliffe's decision to leave the Beatles in order to pursue a promising painting career (you can view some of his art at the link above...). Sometimes with all the "peace and love" Lennon tributes and memorials out there, it's easy to forget that the icon was once an angry, smart-aleck teenager with all kinds of abandonment issues. For me, understanding this Lennon makes me appreciate all the more the person he grew into later in life.

"Backbeat" is R-rated and as gritty and raw as the streets in which it takes place. The music, of course, is great. It's well worth checking out (if only to learn all about how the group got its famous hair-cut...), along with other John Lennon videos and albums. Or you can always buff up on your Beatles history with the wide range of books and videos at the library. And, of course, there will ALWAYS be the music.

Greg and Laura will be telling and singing and clapping with goofy stories and songs on December 28 at 2 pm at the Downtown Library for a silly storytime. Can a little boy from Italy trick a big slimy ogre? Can a grumpy bachelor find his true love through magic? Join us for good old fashioned family fun!

If there is a long drive ahead of you for the holidays, why not get a great book to listen to? Here are a few that have been road tested by Ann Arbor District Library Staff (the Staff Picks shelf is downtown on the first floor) :

Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears is a wonderful thriller with a retired reporter looking back on his quest to find out what really happened to a wealthy London financier who fell or was pushed from a window in 1909. “When I read Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost years ago, I thought it was so brilliantly plotted, so compulsively entertaining, so utterly engrossing that I gave it to my father and said, 'This is the new Dickens.'Stone's Fall is better.”—Malcolm Gladwell

With more than 500,000 copies sold, Chickenhawk by Robert Mason is about his Army service as a combat pilot in Vietnam. “Very simply the best book so far out of Vietnam.” .”—St Louis Post-Dispatch

Best known for his Ladies' Detective Agency series, Alexander McCall Smith has written over 60 books. Love Over Scotland is the second in a series about the lodgers at an Edinburgh boardinghouse. “[McCall Smith] is a pro, and he delivers sharp observation, gentle satire . . . as well as the expected romantic complications. . . . [Readers will] relish McCall Smith’s depiction of this place . . . and enjoy his tolerant, good-humored company.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin interviews and profiles the justices based on interviews and covers the major issues they have before them. “A major achievement, lucid and probing.”—Bob Woodward

Anne McCaffrey, author of nearly 100 books, and best known for the Dragonriders of Pern series, died of a stroke on Monday at her home in Ireland. She was 85. She will be remembered as the writer who created magical worlds full of daring female characters whether riding dragons or navigating ships. The way women were portrayed in scifi/fantasy was transformed by her. Some of her books were written as a response to how women were unrealistically portrayed in the mostly male-dominated genre of scifi/fantasy at the time. McCaffrey was the first woman to win a Hugo Award, for her first Pern novella "Weyr Search"(in 1968) published in the magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and the first woman to win a Nebula for her 2nd Pern story, Dragonrider (in 1969). These two stories plus a third ultimately became her first Pern novel, Dragonflight. Her other book, White Dragon was the first hard cover science fiction book to make the New York Times bestseller list. She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2006. Other series she will be remembered for include the Crystal Singer series, the Petaybee series, and the Acorna series, to name a few.

If you're a Beatles fan old enough to have owned the 'White' album and fondly recall playing it backwards listening to "Turn me on, dead man" -- as well as other clues that Paul McCartney was dead -- you have Fred LaBour to thank, and you can do so at The Ark on Monday, December 5. LaBour, bassist for the fun retro-cowboy band Riders in the Sky, was a U-M student back in October of 1969 when he wrote a satirical review of the Beatles' "Abbey Road" album for the Michigan Daily that began with the headline, "McCartney dead; new evidence brought to light." In his review, LaBour invented several clues that McCartney had died and was replaced by a double named William Campbell, thereby fueling an urban legend that quickly swept America. The Ann Arbor News covered the hoax a week later in October 1969, and Alan Glenn, chronicler of Ann Arbor in the 1960s, wrote about the story in 2009.

Riders in the Sky will appear at the Ark on Monday, December 5, in which LaBour (as his stage alter ego, "Too Slim") plays a mean double bass.

The adults are nagging each other about driving. The kids are kicking each other in the back seat. The dog needs a rest stop. This is the family road trip.

If only you had picked up one of YALSA's 2011 Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults! Check out the audiobooks that the AADL owns from this list by clicking here. YALSA also announced the Top Ten audiobooks, culled from the long list. The AADL owns several BOCDs from the Top Ten list, including the following recordings.

In The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had by Kristin Levine, it's 1917, and twelve-year-old Dit hopes the new postmaster will have a son his age, but instead he meets Emma, who is black, and their friendship challenges accepted ways of thinking and leads them to save the life of a condemned man.

Patrick Ness' Knife of Never Letting Go is the dark, violent tale of 13 year old Todd Hewitt, who is the last boy in Prentisstown, a secluded settlement on New World where all of the women have died. The town has a terrible, secret history that forces Todd into exile, pursued by a demonic preacher and a rapidly growing army hunting him down. New World is plagued by "the Noise," a germ-born cloud of thoughts -- audible to the world -- that projects out from each man, leaving no one's thoughts private.

One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia, goes back to the summer of 1968, where eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters, after traveling from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to spend a month with the mother they barely know, arrive to a cold welcome as they discover that their mother, a dedicated poet and printer, is resentful of the intrusion of their visit and wants them to attend a nearby Black Panther summer camp.

YOU can access almost 1,000 digital music albums directly through our AADL.org catalog. Stream or download as much as you like, DRM free, on any device you choose. No waiting for a copy. No due dates. Hooray!

JAZZ / BLUES
Eternal Jazz Project: Gentle Jazz from Sweden
Handmade is the third Eternal Jazz Project album, mainly recorded in one of Sweden's most famous jazz studio recording facilities - the Swedish Broadcast radio. The feel is relaxed and down to earth, with a Scandinavian touch. EJP is still a fairly traditional jazz band with its roots in '50s and '60s jazz (the piano player and composer, Lars Lundell, is a big fan of Bill Evans). Compositions on this album range from the soft and beautiful "Hey June" to the swinging "Jamaican BBQ". No matter how Scandinavian, there's always room for surprises and groovy improvisation.

ALT ROCK / POP
Amycanbe: Alternative, Pop, Electronic, Rock, Trip-Hop from Italy
Being A Grown-Up Sure is Complicated is beautifully elegant. These songs are stunning journeys of indie folk pop with little twinges of minimalistic electronica. Each song tells a story, and this album is like a book with lots of little chapters waiting to unfold. From the folky bounciness of "Down Under" to the delightful beat of "The Song Of Matthew and Mark", the album sketches a picture of inner peace and happiness.

AMBIENT / ORCHESTRAL / ELECTRONIC
Emmalee Crane: Ambient, Orchestral Drone Music
Crux is the debut album from Canadian-turned-Californian musician Emmalee Crane. It is a soft yet majestic wash of instruments ranging from woodwinds and cellos to analog synthesizers and circuit-bent electronic toys. While Emmalee herself describes it as "drone", that hardly does justice to the orchestral swell and intricate melody that weaves throughout the album. This critically acclaimed work has been described as "an absolute success...built upon passion and love and emotion," and "as beautiful as it is inventive."