Summer Reading

The Time Traveller, a mysterious and brilliant inventor, makes a journey to the year 802,701 AD. Earth is a lush paradise inhabited by two humanoid species--the Eloi and the Morlocks. But he soon realizes that this seeming utopia hides darker secrets. The Eloi are peaceful, but apathetic and frail; the monstrous Morlocks live underground and hunt the Eloi by night. This bleak glimpse of the future forces the Time Traveller to reexamine Victorian England's beliefs about progress and inequality.

Arnold Schoenberg's close involvement with many of the principal developments of 20th-century music, most importantly the break with tonality and the creation of 12-tone composition, generated controversy from the time of his earliest works to the 21st century. This collection of Schoenberg's essays, letters, literary writings, musical sketches, paintings, and drawings offers fresh insights into the composer's life, work, and thought.

At the end of his weekly news-in-review program, Moore on Sunday beloved WCCO-TV newsanchor Dave Moore often signed off by reciting a poem. These poems, composed by Moore's son Peter and collected here for the first time, offer a fresh and funny take on the common and not-so-common stuff of our everyday lives. Reminiscent of Ogden Nash and Tom Lehrer, with a dash of Dr. Seuss, Peter Moore's verse captures the essence of his father's wit, common sense, honesty, and warmth.

The poems in Manuel Paul López's The Yearning Feed, winner of the 2013 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, are embedded in the San Diego/Imperial Valley regions, communities located along the U.S.-Mexico border. López, an Imperial Valley native, considers La Frontera, or the border, as magical, worthy of Macondo-like comparisons, where contradictions are firmly rooted and ironies play out on a daily basis.

Historians have viewed England's Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 as an un-revolutionary revolution--bloodless, consensual, aristocratic, and above all, sensible. Steve Pincus refutes this traditional view. He demonstrates that England's revolution was a European event, that it took place over a number of years, and that it had repercussions in India, North America, the West Indies, and throughout continental Europe.

The Lost Garden is an eloquent portrait of the losses incurred as we struggle to hold on to our passions. The novel begins with the family of Zhu Yinghong, whose father, Zhu Zuyan, was imprisoned in the early days of Chiang Kai-shek's rule. Zhu Zuyan spends his days luxuriating in his Lotus Garden, which he builds according to his own desires. Forever under suspicion, he indulges as much as he can in circumscribed pleasures, though they drain the family fortune. Eventually the entire household is sold, including the Lotus Garden. The novel then swings to modern-day Taipei, where Zhu Yinghong falls for Lin Xigeng, a real estate tycoon and playboy.