Sometimes you need to bob your head to the rhythm. Other times you need to brood to the beat. Sometimes you need to single out ridiculous lyrics in falsetto. Other times you need to wallow in moody vocals, nodding along.

Röyksopp’s 2009 album Junior is a prescription for good times, but with a healthy dose of doom and gloom thrown in to balance it all out. A self-described "two-headed Norwegian monster," Röyksopp alternates between happy-go-lucky electronica (with dancing keyboard loops and cute singers) and sinister trance songs (laden with foreboding and heavy instrumentals).

The first track, Happy Up Here, is so delightful and light that it could physically brighten a room when played. But the second track, The Girl and the Robot, is the complete opposite, with Robyn’s haunting vocals darkening the mood. The transition is not jarring, though — the juxtaposition of enthusiastic keyboard with serious vocalizing works because the difference between the songs is so vast. I would definitely recommend this for a long drive, as the musical variety will keep you tapping your fingers for the entire ride.

While it might not seem like the greatest idea to go from a frolicking joyful song to an immediate dark track, Röyksopp does it with gusto, making Junior an album that is dance-worthy, no matter your mood. If you’re looking for something a bit moodier, keep an eye out for their follow-up album, Senior, to be released sometime this year.

Khaleel Gheba – Miller Branch

Thinking about starting a small business? If so, join us at this series of workshops designed for small businesses still in the planning phase. Topics include registering a business name, filing your business as a legal entity, and marketing strategies. 

These workshops are presented by Mary Redmond, Small Business Counselor at the Maryland Small Business Development Center, in cooperation with Howard County Center for Business and Technology Development. This month’s workshop takes place Tuesday, February 23 from 2:00-4:00 pm at Howard County Central Library, with future workshops scheduled on April 27, June 22, and August 24.

Register online or call 410.313.7860

Elaine Johnson – Central Library

"Worthy of Trust and Confidence" is the motto of the Secret Service and of the men and women who pledge to take a bullet to protect the President and his family. During the Bush administration, Director Mark Sullivan broke with his agency’s long-standing policy of absolute silence and allowed Washington correspondent Ronald Kessler to get an earful.

In Kessler’s new book In The President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect, he does a credible job presenting the origin and history of the United States Secret Service, but the interviews with current and retired Secret Service agents became juicy and salacious gossip. The agents forgot their motto and relished in trashing other agents and political leaders — much akin to reading the tabloids. How much should the American public know about the private affairs of our leaders? Is it important for us to know that Obama smokes, that Gerald Ford was cheap, that Jimmy Carter never bothered to get to know anything about his Secret Service entourage, or that Lady Bird caught Lyndon in a compromising position? I shamelessly ate it up and got a kick out of some of the stories the agents shared with the author. 

Kessler also points out the alarming deficiencies in how the agency currently operates, and how budget cutbacks make protecting the current President a very serious matter. That is one scary thought.

Eve Olsen – Central Library

Not too long ago, on a dismal rainy day, I watched The Reader. I can see why it was, and still is, considered so controversial. A sympathetic portrayal of a Nazi prison guard who’d rather hide her illiteracy than tell the truth about her involvement in war crimes? Who is also a grown woman who had an affair with a teenage boy?

Kate Winslet, as always, is terrific in this role, but I can’t stop thinking about how her illiteracy bothered her more than what she was on trial for. Did she truly feel guilty? And how, as the film seems to suggest, can not knowing how to read possibly make any difference in being humane or not?

This film definitely makes you think, and Ralph Fiennes is superb. There’s one stirring moment when his character (Michael Berg, the teenage boy now grown up) begins reading books and recording them on cassettes for Hanna Schmitz (Winslet) so that she can have books with her in jail after she is convicted. His inner turmoil is etched in his face, and interlaced throughout his gentle voice. Also terrific (playing two roles!) is Lena Olin. Her screen time is short, but pivotal to the film.

Evocative and provocative, The Reader will make your brain cells work out — but your heart and soul will definitely take a beating.

Angie Engles – Central Library

We gardeners devote a significant percentage of winter to planning the spring garden, scouring seed catalogs, reading great books about gardens, and daydreaming about possibilities while we wait for spring. Farm City by Novella Carpenter is the perfect book for this pursuit.  

Farm City documents Carpenter’s efforts to cultivate her "squat farm" on a dead-end street in the Ghost Town section of downtown Oakland, California. Her farm is far from the rural idyll that we often imagine when thinking about locally-grown food. There’s a speakeasy across the street, toughs on the corner, and one of her neighbors lives in an indeterminate number of abandoned cars. In an example of natural entropy that any gardener will understand (and perhaps even envy,) Carpenter’s farm quickly expands to match her ambition. Taking over the vacant and undeveloped lot next door, she and her partner install raised beds made from scrap lumber, and gradually construct habitats for their livestock, including bees, poultry, rabbits, and (eventually) pigs.

This is not a book about an over-sized vegetable garden. There’s an added dimension here, since Carpenter’s farm has fauna as well as flora, and she unabashedly raises her livestock for meat. This effort provides some of the highlights of the book as Carpenter endeavors to live off her produce exclusively for a month, struggles to find local scraps in bulk to feed the pigs, and bonds with the owner of a local restaurant as she learns to make salami and prosciutto.

This is an epic adventure undertaken on a local scale, and provides a remarkable lens through which to view our relationship with food in general and agricultural produce in particular. Brighten your winter with Farm City by Novella Carpenter.

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

You’ve heard it before: the devil is in the details. Megan Whalen Turner makes good use of those little details in her Newbery Honor book The Thief. The astute reader will be rewarded for paying close attention when the story gets upended in the last few chapters.

Meet Gen, self-proclaimed best thief in the world.

The only problem with this assertion stems from the fact that Gen is in prison while he’s boasting. Presumably, good thieves, let alone great ones, don’t spend a lot of time in jail. Nor do they boast about their skills.  Perhaps Gen’s bragging does him some good, though, when the king’s advisor offers him a deal. If Gen agrees to accompany a small group on a quest to steal an ancient artifact, then all charges against him will be forgiven.

What choice does a young thief have?

Gen proves to be one of the most disagreeable traveling companions ever, with little to no manners and no respect for other people’s belongings. In fact, the author has quite a bit of fun detailing all the ways Gen needles his captors. Turner’s writing is spare but lovely throughout. She gives just enough description that you can picture Gen’s world — a close relative to ancient Greece — in a way that completely engages your imagination.

Although technically for children, readers of all ages should enjoy this mythological tale. It would make a great read-aloud, as it’s not too long and has a great voice. Or, you can listen to it on audiobook. Gen’s adventures continue in The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia. 

Kristen Blount – Administration Office

"There are some people with a gift for conviction — a talent for cutting a line through the jumbled phenomena of world affairs and saying, I’m in: this is my position. All of the Litvinoffs had it to some extent. It was a genetic thing, perhaps."

The Litvinoffs of New York have always prided themselves on being radically chic and believers of many causes. Joel, the patriarch and the family’s unifying force, is a lawyer famous for defending accused terrorists and radicals. His wife of 40 years is Audrey, an Englishwoman who is vividly described as a "middle-aged termagant." Their daughter Karla, a social worker trapped in a slightly disappointing marriage, feels unattractive and bears patiently her mother’s wisecracks about her weight. Their younger daughter Rosa is flirting with Orthodox Judaism and goes after it in such an awkward, charming way in spite of ridicule from her parents, who are contemptuous of any organized religion.

When Joel suffers a massive heart attack, the women in his life struggle to redefine themselves and their relationship with each other. Heller has the gift of letting her characters, faults and all, come alive and interact with the reader. The Litvinoff women are fascinating in a weird way — the kind of dinner guests who will stare you down and argue all the way to dessert. Audrey muses in one poignant scene: "How had she ended up like this, imprisoned in the role of a harridan? Her anger had become a part of her. It was a knotted thicket in her gut, too dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted."

The Believers is Zoe Heller at her best — witty, intelligent, acerbic and funny. Heller may not be known for her lovable characters, but they surely are memorable. Her novel What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal, about an obsessive English teacher, became a movie. She believed that the "point of fiction is not to offer moral avatars but to engage with people whose politics or points of view are unpleasant or contradictory." Be prepared to be entertained with this book. I surely was.

Cristina J. Lozare – Central Library

“War is like a disease. Until you’ve had it, you don’t know it.”

On an overcast August afternoon in Nagasaki, Hiroko Tanaka loses her German fiancé in the flash of the second atomic bomb. Ravaged by the blast, her back engraved with scar like black birds, Hiroko survives. She seeks out her fiancé’s family in India, discovering a whole nation on the brink of independence. With Pakistan’s creation approaching, what will become of Hiroko’s friendship with the colonialist family, the Burtons? And what of her budding relationship with Sajjad, her young, kindhearted Urdu teacher?

Author Kamila Shamsie takes us from Nagasaki to Delhi, Karachi to New York, stopping by the way of Dubai, Islamabad, Kandahar. Hiroko’s story evolves into the tale of her family, trying to hold themselves together over the decades. Over and over again, history shatters what little stability they can find. The Afghan war of the 1980s and 9/11 overwhelm the second half of the book, tying the personal with the political.

Yet, life goes on. Burnt Shadows‘ strengths are not so much in the heart-wrenching tragedies that befall Hiroko and her family, but rather, the lovely moments of peace, the belief in love, and family over all things ideological. Hiroko herself is an emblem of this: literally scarred by war, she still manages to find love in a strange land, and learn new languages, becoming an enigma of identity in a world of conflicting creeds.

The novel is broken up into five sections, oceans and decades apart. Shamsie’s prose flows throughout, keeping a steady pace, but still taking time to detail the minor beauties, the intricate sentiments of these characters. In the relatively tranquil moments of family drama, we grow to love Hiroko’s confidence, and Sajjad’s enthusiasm. Thus, when the burn of history scorches their home life, the pain is visceral. Burnt Shadows is a breathing tale of our times, encapsulating a half-century of conflict as well as the plurality of identities that populate this world of ours.

Khaleel Gheba – Miller Branch

How do you encourage your children to discover themselves, embrace their passions, and find direction in this world — without suffocating them or compelling them to allow you to live vicariously through them?

Dr. Michael Jinkins of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary begins this discussion in his book Called to Be Human: Letters to My Children on Living a Christian Life. Written as a series of letters to his two adult children, Jeremy and Jessica, we have here a provocative look into the thinking mind and loving heart of a father. Jeremy is wondering what to do with his life, and wants to know how to discern his "calling." Jessica has blunt questions about things like love, friendship, the existence and goodness of God, and the meaning of life.

"After considerable reflection," he writes in his introduction, "I have come to realize I am not very religious myself. (You’ll learn more about what I mean by this in the letters that follow.) And because I don’t really understand what the word spiritual means today — given the fact that it seems to mean something different for every person who uses the term — I’m not sure I would describe myself as spiritual either. I am, however, a person of faith." I had to check the front cover of the book to see if somehow I was the author of this short book, because these words could have very easily been my own.

I don’t have children yet, but I felt that there was much wisdom here for life in general — not just for guidance as a parent, but as a friend, and as a human being. Largely anecdotal, Dr. Jinkins draws from the likes of Karl Barth, Marilynne Robinson, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, John Calvin, G.K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, the Sufi poet Rumi, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. If any of these topics even remotely interest you, this short collection will grip you.

Dan Curry – Savage Branch

I’m a person who likes to make up things to worry about. What if one day I turned invisible? What if I were stranded on a deserted island with nothing but my wits to keep me alive? What would I do if I were trapped in a horror film? Fortunately, author Seth Grahame-Smith has the answer to this last obsessive question of mine.

How to Survive a Horror Movie teaches you everything you might ever need to know about how to recognize that you are, indeed, in a horror film, the different types of incredibly horrible things that could potentially happen to you, who to stick close with (and of course, who to avoid), and more. This book takes a great look at the themes in horror films, and it pokes fun at it while still holding horror in reverence. Grahame-Smith teaches you what to do if you did something last summer, how to react if there are children in your corn, and that you should always travel on planes with a suitcase full of mongooses (lest there be snakes on your flight). Grahame-Smith is an expert on zombies, as he also wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

How to Survive a Horror Movie is for horror film buffs, the curious, and the obsessive worrier.

Jennifer Johnson – Glenwood Branch