One of the world’s best-known science-fiction writers and a professor of biochemistry at Boston University, Isaac Asimov was born on January 2nd, 1920 near Smolensk, Russia. Through his dedication to writing and to science he helped to elevate science fiction from pulp magazines to a more intellectual and respected genre.

One of the most prolific writers of all time, he wrote or edited more than 500 books, on subjects as varied as chemistry, biology, the Bible, Shakespeare, modern history, as well as books for preschoolers and college students. He received dozens of awards in his lifetime including six Hugo awards, 3 Nebula awards, and a posthumous induction into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. He even had an asteroid and a crater on Mars named in his honor. Asimov was also a member and Vice President of Mensa, though he found little enjoyment in it, feeling his fellow members were too arrogant about their high IQs. Asimov died in New York, New York on April 6th, 1992.

His more popular works include the Foundation trilogy, Pebble in the Sky, The Stars, Like Dust, and I, Robot, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 2004. Follow the links and you'll find them in AADL's collection!

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Lay the Favorite (MPAA Rating: R) , Rebecca Hall, Bruce Willis, Vince Vaughn star in this adaptation of Beth Raymer's Lay the favorite: a memoir of gambling who transforms from a stripper in Tallahassee to gambler's assistant in Las Vegas,working for Dink, one of the most successful sports gamblers in the business.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (MPAA Rating: PG-13), yet another adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit : or, There and back again. Martin Freeman, Ian McKellan, Richard Armitage star in this adventure of Bilbo Baggins, who is swept into an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor from the fearsome dragon Smaug.

Jack Reacher (MPAA Rating: PG-13) is based on Lee Child popular thriller series featuring Jack Reacher, a drifter and a former US Army Police major with authority issues. This feature film is adapted from the novel One Shot. The selection of Tom Cruise to play Reacher has been highly controversial, and you don't want to know what I think.

When a gunman takes five lives with six shots, all evidence points to the suspect in custody. On interrogation, the suspect offers up a single note: "Get Jack Reacher!" So begins an extraordinary chase for the truth, pitting Jack Reacher against an unexpected enemy, with a skill for violence and a secret to keep.

Needing no introduction is the highly anticipated release of Les Misérables (MPAA Rating: PG-13) based on Victor Hugo's novel. Set against the backdrop of 19th-century France, it tells an enthralling story of broken dreams and unrequited love, passion, sacrifice and redemption --- a timeless testament to the survival of the human spirit. Hugh Jackman plays ex-prisoner Jean Valjean, hunted for decades by the ruthless policeman Javert (Russell Crowe) after he breaks parole. When Valjean agrees to care for factory worker Fantine's (Anne Hathaway) young daughter, Cosette (Amanda Seyfried), their lives change forever.

Shorter days, short on time, short attention span? We've got you covered. Take a look at these fabulous short-story collections on our New Book shelves.

Award-winning, Ann Arbor's homegrown Steven Gillis gives us The Law of Strings and Other Stories which fellow author Michael Griffith called "a revelation - strange, barbed and original" - an existential yelp examining individual choices and our all-too-human response to unexpected events. Will please fans of Aimee Bender and George Saunders (BTW, don't miss his brand new SS collection coming out in January - blew me away! and that MacArthur grant is so well-deserved).

The Lives of Things : short stories collects Nobel laureate José Saramago's early short stories, infused with satire and fantastical elements and showcasing his efforts to expose the tyranny of the Salazar regime in his native Portugal.

Karen Brown leads off her SS collection (a FFF) with the titular Little Sinners - stories that capture the domestic world in all its blighted promises, a world where women's roles in housekeeping, marriage, childbirth, and sex have been all too well defined, and where the characters fashion, recklessly and passionately, their own methods of escape. This winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction will appeal to fans of Lucia Perillo's fabulous Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain (also a FFF, see blog).

This Will be Difficult to Explain : and other stories by Scotiabank Giller Prize winning author Johanna Skibsrud, is 9 loosely connected stories with an unforgettable cast of characters. A young maid at a hotel in France encounters a man who asks to paint her portrait, only to find out later that he is someone other than who she thinks. A divorced father, fearing estrangement from his thirteen-year-old daughter, allows her to take the wheel of his car before he realizes that being a grave mistake.

Based on the 80 year-old unsolved murder case of Dorothy Dexter Moormeister, City of Saints * * by debut novelist Andrew Hunt is the 2011 Tony Hillerman Prize winner.

On a cold February morning in 1930, Salt Lake City Sheriff Deputy Art Oveson is called to a gruesome crime scene where young Helen Pfalzgraf, wife of a prominent physician, lay battered and dead in an open field. As it is an election year, Art and his foul-mouthed partner Roscoe Lund are under great pressure to quickly solve this high-profile case.

Among the suspects are the victim's husband, her adoring step-daughter, and her many lovers. The investigations take Oveson and Lund into the underbelly of Salt Lake City, a place rife with blackmail and corruption, underneath a veneer of "upright Mormonism and congeniality".

This engrossing...procedural steadily builds up steam and explodes in all the right places".

"(T)his hard-edged whodunit with echoes of James Ellroy warrants a sequel."

Andrew Hunt is a professor of history in Waterloo, Ontario. He grew up in Salt Lake City.

* * = Starred reviews

A Land More Kind Than Home, the title drawn from Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again is set in Marshall, North Carolina where evil is allowed to disguise as faith.

Narrated alternately by Adelaide Lyle, an aged local midwife, the taciturn County Sheriff Clem Barefield, and young Jesse Hall, our 9 year-old protagonist, as they are drawn into the tragedy that involves Jesse's mute and autistic older brother.

"As lean and spare as a mountain ballad, Wiley Cash's (author website) debut novel resonates perfectly, so much so that it could easily have been expanded to epic proportions. An evocative work about love, fate and redemption". THIS TITLE HAS JUST BEEN PICKED BY LIBRARY JOURNAL AS ONE OF 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2012 !!! Worth a look if you didn't catch it the first time around...

Tom Wright sweeps us up in a tale of lost innocence in his debut What Dies in Summer *

Teenager James Beaudry "Biscuit" is taken in by his grandmother when home life becomes dangerous with his "Uncle" Jack. With his cousin LA (Lee Ann) they look forward to a bucolic Texas summer, until they come across the body of a girl brutally raped and murdered. Jim's recurring vision of the dead girl and the ensuring police investigation put the cousins in harm's way.

"Wright, a practicing psychologist, expertly weaves together a literary tapestry of self-discovery, brutal sadistic violence, custodial battles, and tender, burgeoning sexuality, leaving readers spellbound by a story that delivers on several levels."

Worthy additions to the Southern Gothic genre, and great YA crossovers, they will appeal to those who liked Stephen Wetta's If Jack's in Love, and Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.

* = starred review

Writing for the first time as B.A. Shapiro, Barbara Shapiro's The Art Forger is a richly-detailed and well-researched literary thriller based on the 1990 art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where 13 works of art (download the images) worth over $500 million were stolen, making it the largest unsolved art crime in history.

In this "classy and pleasurably suspenseful debut", "a cleverly plotted art-world thriller/romance with a murky moral core", Claire Roth, on the 21st anniversary of the heist, is presented by Aiden Markel, the handsome owner of a prestigious gallery with a Faustian bargain: if she agrees to forge one of the Degas masterpieces (fictional) stolen from the Gardner, he would arrange for a one-woman show of her works in his gallery. But when the Degas is delivered to her studio, Claire begins to suspect that it too, may be a forgery. Luckily for both of them, Claire is as fine a sleuth as she is an artist because their freedom (and their lives) are now hanging in the balance.

"The result is an entrancingly visual, historically rich, deliciously witty, sensuous, and smart tale of authenticity versus fakery in which Shapiro artfully turns a clever caper into a provocative meditation on what we value most".

Shapiro’s next project is a novel about the early years of the abstract expressionists, when many worked for the Works Progress Administration. Eleanor Roosevelt is a character. Can't wait.

Will appeal to fans of the popular television seriesWhite Collar (about to start its 4th season in January), Carson Morton's Stealing Mona Lisa, The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber, and Theft : a love story by Peter Carey.

Death in Breslau * * introduces to US readers Marek Krajewski, an award-winning Polish crime writer and linguist, and at the same time, the first of a stylish and moody historic detective series featuring Inspector Eberhard Mock.

Breslau (present-day Wroclaw),1933. The city is in the grip of the Gestapo. Two young women are found murdered on a train, scorpions writhing on their bodies, and a bloody indecipherable note on the wall. Police Inspector Eberhard Mock is roused from his weekly assignation at a house of ill-repute to investigate. The urgency is heightened as one of the victim is the daughter of a powerful Breslau baron.

As Mock and his young troubled assistant Herbert Anwaldt plunge into the city's squalid underbelly for clues, the case takes on a dark twist of the occult when the mysterious note indicates a ritual killing with roots in the Crusades.

"Mock is a compelling protagonist, part Hercule Poirot and part thug, who uses blackmail as a standard investigative tool. He also has a weakness for nubile young Jewish women and chess-playing prostitutes. Krajewski's characterization of the prewar Nazis as a murderous lot who spend most of their time scheming against each other and indulging their various libidinous kinks is intriguing, but what makes this novel a stunner is the detailed portrait of Breslau in the otherworldly, uberdecadent, interwar years."

"(I)ntelligent, atmospheric... with a distinctly European, Kafkaesque sensibility", it will appeal to international and historic crime fiction fans, especially those who follow the Bernie Gunther series by Philip Kerr; and the The Liebermann Papers series by Frank Tallis, set in Freud's dangerous, dazzling Vienna.

* * = starred reviews

In late 18th century Sweden, the Octavo is a form of fortune-telling (cartomancy) with playing cards that reveals the 8 persons when identified, could influence favorably, a significant event in one's life.

In Karen Engelmann's debut novel The Stockholm Octavo * * * Emil Larsson, a low-level bureaucrat is under pressure to marry. His sight is set on Carlotta Vingstrom, a voluptuous woman of means and connection. Mrs. Sparrow who runs a gaming establishment uses the Octavo to weave a special fortune for Emil, charging him with finding the eight people in his life who can make or break his future - a search that becomes dangerous when his ambitions become enmeshed in a larger scenario involving a plot against King Gustav himself. As 8 characters emerges, they each have their own story to tell, from Fredrik Lind, the gregarious calligrapher, to the Nordéns, refugees from France. In the midst of the intrigue is the folding fan owned by a lady known simply as the Uzanne.

"Mysterious, suspenseful, and, at times, action-packed, ...Engelmann has crafted a magnificent story set against the vibrant society of Sweden's zenith, with a cast of colorful characters balanced at a crux of history."

Literary entertainment at its best, and "a stylish work by an author of real promise". For fans of Andrew Miller, especially Pure (2012); and David Liss.

* * * = starred reviews

Three Times Lucky is one Philip Marlowe away from being a full-fledged crime noir for young readers. Miss Mo LoBeau is a quick tongued, rising sixth grade orphan living in tiny modern-day southern town, Tupelo Landing, with her adopted parents, The Colonel and Miss Lana, who own and operate a cafe attached to their home. When big-city Detective Starr comes to Tupelo investigating a murder, secrets about everyone's past begin to surface, and Mo and her best friend Dale race against time to solve the mystery and save the only family Mo has ever known.

This debut novel from Sheila Turnage is packed with humor, deception, wit, and colorful characters, and it's buzzing on many year-end must-read lists.

One of the best books I have read recently is Wonder by R.J. Palacio. A recommendation by youth librarians, the book champions kindness in a way that somehow manages not to be preachy. It also reflects the value of loving one's family and not judging people by appearance.

The star of the novel is August ("Auggie") Pullman, age 10, who was born with extreme facial abnormalities. His mother homeschooled him until fifth grade; as the novel opens he is about to enter a private middle school in Manhattan. The novel covers Auggie's turbulent first year, as he struggles to be seen as just another kid. He is gentle and bright, but faces heartbreaking challenges to fit in.

Written for readers in about fourth through seventh grades, the book is entirely believable in its presentation of various personalities and challenges faced by middle-school kids. As the story moves along, the characters develop and grow. Multiple narrators -- Auggie, two new friends at school, Auggie's sister (struggling as she starts high school), and his sister's one-time best friend -- add richness and balance to the story. Auggie's parents are unforgettable, as are his friends, which he does make, one by one.