So you’re planning to do some entertaining this summer! You’ll be outdoors of course, and you want everything to be just perfect, to feel as if this outdoor space is a part of your gracious home.

Perhaps Howard County Library can provide some new ideas. Information Specialists at each branch can help you find books, videos, and DVDs on a wide variety of summer entertaining and garden topics.

Is it time for an extensive outdoor building or landscaping project? Creative Homeowner publishes some great titles, including Ultimate Guide to Gazebos and other Outdoor Structures and Deck Designs. Black & Decker’s Building Your Outdoor Home covers thirty easy landscaping projects to spruce up your walkways or add outdoor lighting. Our brand new One Thousand Garden Ideas by Stafford Cliff gives a British slant and is full of inspiration. I really like The Garden Floor: from Gravel Gardens to Camomile Lawns by Nigel Colborn, also a British import.

Do you need ideas to make your summer flower garden company-ready? Browse the Library’s non-fiction shelves in the gardening subject area, numbered 635–annuals, perennials, container gardens, oh, my!

What if you want to decorate your deck and set up for the party and find that nothing will substitute for the advice of a design professional? April Force Pardoe of AFP Interiors is such a professional and she will present a class at Glenwood Branch on Monday, July 14 from 7:00 to 8:30 pm. Learn creative, easy ideas for adding the "WOW factor" to your outdoor party. You can register beginning June 30.

Barbara Cornell – Glenwood Branch

My husband and I are committed to making our yearly vacation an exotic event we’ll remember forever. This summer we’ve settled on exploring backroads Alaska. To prepare for the trip, we gathered the requisite Fodor and Lonely Planet guides, but on a whim added Into the Wild – the DVD – to the mix.

Director Sean Penn’s film introduces us to Christopher Johnson McCandless, a recent college graduate still struggling with the discord of his parents’ volatile union. Equally disillusioned with what he sees as an uncaring society, he cuts up his credit and ID cards and disavows family expectations by donating his remaining college funds. Assuming the new identity of Alexander Supertramp, he envisions purifying his soul via a summer in the untainted wilds of Alaska.

But in order to make the trek, he needs money earned with his own two hands. He works a variety of jobs – from burger flipper to grain farmer, bunks in some unusual places, and makes significant friendships along the way. Each new acquaintance is awed by his gentleness, his morality, and his commitment to a vision.

And reach Alaska, he does. He happens upon an abandoned bus in the middle of nowhere and meagerly lives off the land. During his brief stay he gathers a lifetime of wisdom about the importance of family, companionship, and love.

Watching Into the Wild proved to be a moving experience for me. Contributing to the film’s power is the amazing soundtrack provided by Pearl Jam vocalist Eddie Vedder. Into the Wild won’t influence the course of our future Alaskan adventure. However, I can tell you while we cruise past stunning landscapes, the film will remain vivid for us both as we listen to the minor chords of Vedder’s music and his hauntingly elemental voice.

Fitzi Newton – Miller Branch

Vampires are really hot right now and I can certainly appreciate that, but I’m here today to make a plea for zombies. They aren’t much to look at, and they really aren’t up for playing sports or hanging out with you at summer picnics, but for a bout of fun and some truly scary movie moments, you can’t beat them in George Romero’s brilliant but bloody Dawn of the Dead. And for those of you who love to shop, the Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania is a major star in the film, originally released in 1978.

Warning to ye of faint heart: this is not for everyone, but for those who can handle it, there’s no escaping its very odd appeal. Romero’s cult status as THE director of the dead rests strongly on his ability to make more than just a zombie movie. Dawn of the Dead is not a sequel to the infamous Night of the Living Dead, but rather an installment in a series where there’s no negotiating with fate once you’ve been bitten by a zombie.

On the surface, Dawn of the Dead is a pretty straightforward tale about an apocalyptic world where the dead are reanimated by an unnamed virus. Prominent figures in society and government have been so busy arguing about the causes that no one has come up with a solid solution. Now everything is in chaos. Private residences are overtaken by the zombies, and cities offer no refuge. Only people who can think fast on their feet and know where to go have the best chance of surviving. Their place of refuge? The local mall,  the perfect backdrop for a movie about zombies and shoppers sleepwalking through life.

Romero’s not a slacker when it comes to scaring. The 1970s-era side effects surprisingly hold up pretty well in our current CGI (computer-generated imagery) world and the acting is top-notch. The only thing to worry about once it’s all over is whether you’ve locked your doors or not.

Angie Engles – Savage Branch

"An exciting thriller…full of surprises; captures the intense atmosphere of the White House"…..President Bill Clinton.

Could an author ask for a better plug than this, and then have it plastered on the front side of the book jacket to boot?

Michael Palmer’s new medical suspense, The First Patient, carries the reader along with twists and turns that make this read a real page turner. Michael Palmer is well-qualified, having spent twenty years as a full-time practitioner of internal and emergency medicine. He is currently an associate director of the Massachusetts Medical Society Physician Health Services.

President Andrew Stoddard suffers from mysterious breakdowns and his personal physician has suddenly disappeared. Gabe Singleton and Andrew Stoddard were roommates and best friends at the Naval Academy and Gabe, now a country doctor, agrees to cover as the president’s personal physician. After witnessing an episode of total incoherence, Gabe is convinced that the president of the United States is losing his mind. As the president’s personal physician, Gabe has the power to invoke the 25th amendment, which transfers presidential power to the vice-president.

Palmer inserts juicy nuggets of information about what goes on in the White House and with the medical support team. I was fascinated with the short description of what happened when President Clinton seriously injured his knee and required surgery. I’ll tell you that POTUS never lost consciousness!!

The suspense escalates as Gabe is convinced that someone is out to get the president and that his life is in jeopardy. There is little time to lose.

Eve Olsen – Central Library

Lisa See, best known for her novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, started out as a non-fiction author, telling the story of her own family in the magnificent On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family. Thanks to family stories and government records, See has a remarkable knowledge of her family and is able to comprehensively recreate the lives of her ancestors as far back as her great-great-grandfather. See’s family story is dynamic, vital and engaging. While many of our ancestors were working the same piece of land or living in the same town from generation to generation, See’s ancestors were building a series of successful businesses in California, traveling to visit relatives in China, and striving to build a foundation for future generations on “gold mountain.”

See begins her narrative with her great-great-grandfather Fong Dun Shun, an herbalist supporting the Chinese laborers working to construct the trans-continental railroad, and continues with the story of her great-grandfather, Fong See, and his arrival in the United States. Fong See established himself as a businessman in Sacramento, whose factory making undergarments for prostitutes was gradually transformed into a large import business bringing antiques and furnishings from China. The main instigator of this transformation was See’s great-grandmother, Letticie Pruett, a white woman born in Oregon in 1876, who set out for California on her own, and met Fong See while she was looking for work.

We spend a great deal of time with the children of Ticie and Fong See, the author’s great grandparents and great-great aunts and uncles. The “one hundred year odyssey” referred to in the subtitle is really that of Milton, Ray, Eddie, Benny and Sissee’s generation. These are the people who the reader follows from childhood to old age, through World War II, through the economic conditions of the mid-to-late twentieth century, and through the family negotiations around separations, business disagreements and accommodations with their father’s other family in China.

Although this is a family history, it is also a detailed social history of California and of the broader U.S. in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Working on these multiple levels, On Gold Mountain is an outstanding, rewarding and uniquely constructed work of non-fiction, notable both because See knows so much about her family, and because their experiences were so extraordinary.

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

One of the best scenes in Carol-Muske Dukes’ Channeling Mark Twain occurs when Holly Mattox, a young, idealistic poet, confronts a vicious pimp outside The House of D – better known as The Women’s House of Correction at the Rikers Island Prison Complex in New York City.

It’s the early seventies, when cause and radical thinking still permeate many college campuses. But cynicism has begun to seep in and the hope that young proletariats will right the wrongs of social injustice – all to the strains of Pink Floyd – is flagging.

When the Sly Stone-like pimp comes on to Holly with a lewd and malicious street rhyme, she counters and corrects his lack of "metrical assurance", almost getting herself murdered on the spot.

Yet it is this very kind of encounter which galvanizes Holly. She is after all, here at The House of D to teach a poetry workshop to female felons – among them, Polly, who swears upon her Whorehouse Bible that her ‘great-granddaddy’, Samuel L. Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain), ‘speaks’ through her.

As Holly gets closer to her students though, her Midwestern naivete and passion for the gift that words can offer the hopeless is put to the test within the prison system.

Grim, enlightening and complex, Guggenheim fellow Muske-Dukes has crafted an unusual tale worthy of the most discerning book discussion.

Aimee Zuccarini – East Columbia Branch

The World Without Us is a book that is not entirely what it claims to be.

On one level, Alan Weisman explores a fairly straightforward but improbable notion. What would happen to the the world if all of humanity just disappeared? We’re not talking about annihilation by nuclear holocaust or anything. Instead, the author examines what would happen to the planet if all of humanity just quietly vanished.

Pretty unlikely of course. One day or another humanity almost certainly will vanish, but leaving without making an absolute mess on the way out? Not our style.

Anyway, in order to describe how the world would fare in the absence of humanity, the author first has to describe how it is faring in our presence. Such description provides the opportunity for him to go into enormous detail on exactly what kind of global slum we have made of our world. Clever approach if you want to write a book about environmental blight – and that is exactly what The World Without Us really is.

Mr. Weisman’s approach is more than clever, in fact. It is utterly fascinating. How long would our bridges last? How long before our abandoned cities disappeared? Would the fish populations of our oceans, lakes and rivers ever recover? Would the great beasts who once roamed the earth repopulate their old stomping grounds?

All in all the questions are intriguing and the answers are both interesting and plausible. In the process, Alan Weisman gives us a not particularly subtle hint that, if the earth could do as well as he seems to think it will in humanity’s absence, perhaps we humans might take a shot at helping it do a bit better without first getting ourselves exterminated. Not a bad argument. Since the post-pollution world that Mr. Weisman describes seems, for the most part, pretty appealing, it’s hard to argue with the idea that it might be nice to do a better job of cleaning up the neighborhood while we are still around to enjoy it.

Joe McHugh – Administraton Office

If you want to watch a captivating and heart-warming comedy, My Lovely Sam-Soon is a drama that will satisfy your viewing palate. The story and lead female character defy the conventional mold of Korean drama (K-drama). Because the English subtitles work so well, this exceptional K-drama can be easily enjoyed by anyone.

The female lead character, Kim Sam-Soon (Kim Suh Ah), plays a thirty-year-old, overweight, unmarried woman. Her outspoken, obstinate, and occasionally foul-mouthed and bad-tempered character bucks the cutie stereotype. Sam-Soon’s feelings of unattractiveness due to her chubby image are all too real for her. These feelings lead to her constant desire to change her self-image by changing her name! On Christmas Eve, she loses her boyfriend and runs into the owner of a French restaurant, Hyeon Jin-Heon, played by Hyun Bin. The two keep crossing paths, and eventually Sam-Soon works as the pastry chef in his restaurant.

All the characters are colorful and well-acted. Henry Kim (Korean-American Daniel Henney) provides many comedic exchanges. Henney plays an American doctor traveling with his patient, who happens to be the former girlfriend of Hyeon Jin-Heon. It is a riot to watch him learn the Korean language and culture. Additional comedy arises from the relationship between Sam-Soon’s divorced sister with the sous chef at Jin-Heon’s restaurant . Numerous witty exchanges, as well as serious love and life lessons, grace this exceptional story.

My Lovely Sam- Soon is indeed an outstanding drama to watch. You will not regret spending time with this gem. No wonder it received the Korean prestigious 2005 Baeksang Awards – Grand Prize for TV Drama.

Mai-Leng Ong – Administration Office

The author of the popular Color of Water does not disappoint with his third book, Song Yet Sung, a story of slavery, slave traders, moral choices and the redemptive power of love and forgiveness.

Liz Spocott is a beautiful, young runaway. She is a dreamer who can see into the future. Liz inspires a breakout from the colorful slave thief Patty Cannon. The book takes you into the search for the fleeing slaves in the swamps and rivers of the Eastern Shores of Maryland. The reader gets to know the oystermen, the blacksmith, a free slave who knows the "code", the "Gimp", the expert slave-catcher and the "Woolman", a wild man who lives in the swamps.

In addition to being a writer, James McBride is also a jazz musician. His talent is evident as he weaves words through this book to make the pages sing:

"She dreamed of Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout and fat black children who smoked odd-smelling cigars and walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes. She dreamed of Negro women appearing as flickering images in powerfully lighted boxes that could be seen in sitting rooms far distant, and colored men dressed in garish costumes like children, playing odd sporting games and bragging like drunkards—every bit of pride, decency and morality squeezed out of them."

Cristina J. Lozare – Central Library

I stumbled onto my newest addiction in a most innocent way. A coworker originally from Korea returned some interesting-looking Korean DVDs that were part of a series. There were only six discs in the series, and that was the entire show. How could an entire TV series happen in six discs? Where was season two? Apparently, in Korea, shows almost always last just one season. I decided to watch Over the Rainbow as an experiment to see if this "squish it all into one season" idea really worked. The story focuses first on two people, Hyeok-Ju and Hee-Su, and then picks up two more main characters as the plot progresses. Hee-Su, desperate to be a singer, starts off as a dancer in order to make her way into the industry. Hyeok-Ju wants to share her interests and impress her, so he decides to become a dancer as well. The action follows them as they claw their way to the top of the entertainment industry. The dancing in this series is amazing.

After Over the Rainbow, I watched My Lovely Sam-Soon, a huge hit in Korea and reminiscent of Bridget Jones’s Diary.  The main character, Sam-Soon, is a completely average woman in looks, but a powerhouse in attitude. She bakes pastries for a living, and hates her name. ("Sam-Soon" is considered an old-fashioned and embarrassing name in Korea.) She begins working for a rich, handsome young man who has as much spunk and sass as she does, and their love-hate relationship takes off. Sam-Soon’s daydream sequences are hilarious, and the pastries she makes look so delicious that this DVD should include a pastry-making instruction segment!

In the TV show Ruler of Your Own World, Bok-Su is a pickpocket who picks the wrong pocket one day and meets Kyung. They are drawn together as Bok-Su discovers he has a brain tumor, and decides to live life to its fullest. This drama, brimming with lots of quirky humor, does have its incredibly sad parts. If it wasn’t for the humor, Ruler of Your Own World probably would be really depressing. Bok-Su (Yang Dong-Geun) carries the show, and Bok-Su and Kyung seem like a great match for each other.

These are only three of the many Korean television shows the Library offers. If you would like to watch some great TV dramas, but don’t want to keep track of all the different seasons and discs, I would recommend one of these.

Jen Johnson – Glenwood Branch