Book Buzz: Scottish Fantasy Islands, Commuting, the Weather, Old West Crime, Seafaring Tales, and Housewife Thrillers

Every month, we’re profiling new-ish releases that are getting critical and commercial buzz. For August, we’re looking at an atmospheric fantasy romance set in Scotland, a celebration of friendship among commuters, a cute romance set at a news station, an engrossing anthology of Westerns with a side of mystery, two fascinating tales of real-life adventure on the high seas, and an audiobook thriller about catty rich housewives.

Movie Review: Ride The High Country (1962)

As I’ve written about several times on this blog, I have a great love for Westerns (books, movies, and TV). And recently when I noticed that the library didn’t have Ride The High Country, which is one of my absolute favorite movies in the genre, I remedied the situation by requesting we add it to the collection. Thanks so much to Julie for buying it!

In the early 20th century, stalwart but aging lawman Steve (Joel McCrea) is tasked with transporting gold from a rough mining town in the High Sierras. Accompanied by his irascible friend Gil (Randolph Scott), a green youngster (Ron Starr), and a feisty but sheltered bride-to-be (Mariette Hartley), the ragtag group quickly winds up with more trouble than they bargained for when they meet the girl’s future husband (James Drury) and his rough brothers. (You know they’re bad news when they include a young Warren Oates and L.Q. Jones.) Complications ensue. . . .

Cookbook Corner: Back to Culinary School

In honor of our Books, Spice, and Everything Nice theme (and spice club!), we’ll be doing a monthly round-up of our cookbooks. We have a really nice and extensive collection, but it’s easy to get lost in the sheer number of them. Hopefully these posts help! Not so much due to our monthly spice fenugreek as our local kids going back to school this month, for August, we’ll be focusing on comprehensive cookbooks that you can use as your own personal culinary textbooks.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

As we’ve done the past two summers, we hosted a fundraising/reading summer challenge--every hour read equals a dollar for the building fund. Except this year was our boldest challenge yet–25,000 hours for $25,000 in just 8 weeks. How’d we do?!

Books, Spice, and Everything Nice: Fenugreek

For 2022, the Berryville Library is hosting its own Books, Spice, and Everything Nice spice club. Stop by the library to get the spice of the month and then stop by the blog on the first Tuesday of the month for recipes and more information on the featured spice. We’ll also be adding monthly posts about cookbooks in our collection. For August, our spice is fenugreek!