Orhan Pamuk will sign and discuss his latest book
The Museum of Innocence
Monday, November 16, 2009 7:00 pm
Zilkha Hall, Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, 800 Bagby

Losing touch with his creative nature by years of lonely political exile, Turkish poet Ka returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral and learns about a series of suicides among pious girls forbidden to wear headscarves, a story that brings him face-to-face with militant Islamism, a new romance, and his own atheism.

The 30th Annual Houston Chronicle Book and Author Dinner benefits literacy programs sponsored by the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Public Library Foundation. 
The featured authors this year include:
Oscar Casares, Lee Child, David Cross, Charlaine Harris, and Julie Powell.

Sunday November 1, 2009
Hilton Americas, 1600 Lamar
Book Signing 5:00 PM
Dinner 7:00 PM


For more information or to purchase tickets click here.

New in the series from New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels. Lightning-struck sleuth Harper Connelly and her stepbrother Tolliver take a break from looking for the dead to visit the two little girls they both think of as sisters. But, as always happens when they travel to Texas, memories of their horrible childhood resurface. To make matters worse, Tolliver learns from his older brother that their father is out of jail and trying to reestablish contact with other family members. Tolliver wants no part of the man- but he may not have a choice in the matter. Soon, family secrets ensnare them both, as Harper finally discovers what happened to her missing sister, Cameron, so many years before. And what she finds out will change her world forever.

This groundbreaking anthology of short fiction by Latino mystery writers, Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, features an intriguing and unpredictable cast of sleuths, murderers and crime victims. Reflecting the authors’—and society’s—preoccupation with identity, self, and territory, the stories run the gamut of the mystery genre, from traditional to noir, from the private investigator to the police procedural, and even a “chick lit” mystery.  Authors Sarah Cortez and Lucha Corpi both wrote poetry before turning to mysteries.

Discuss this book at the Hillendahl Neighborhood Library Around the World Book Club Thursday 11/12/09.  Featured coutry is Sweeden.

Forty years after the disappearance of Harriet Vanger from the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family, her octogenarian uncle is convinced that she had been murdered by someone from her own deeply dysfunctional clan.  He hires journalist Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander, an unconventional young hacker, to investigate.  It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives.  The second book in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire, was just released.

Discuss this book at the Stella Link Neighborhood Library Monday 11/16/09 at 6:00PM.

Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.