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From time to time, a patron will tell us that they returned a book that never got checked in and we have to look for it. Often, this involves sending an email to all the branches in case it somehow got returned to a different branch or something, and then every branch responds.

This means that, for the past few days, I have received a series of emails titled "His Unexpected Amish Twins" as each branch chimes in in turn to report that they haven't found the book.

Somehow, that is the funniest goddamn book title I've ever seen. It gets funnier with each new email.

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In other book-related news, I have finished the most recent book I've been reading, which has led me to add a column on my reading spreadsheet for "did this book lie to me about its genre?"

The Last House on Needless Street was a pretty good book - I enjoyed reading it - but despite all the marketing I've seen for it, it was not a horror novel. It's suspenseful at times, and deals (fairly obliquely) with some dark subject material, but that and a talking cat who ( spoilers )

do not a horror story make. It is an engagingly-written mystery with some effective misdirection, an interesting twist (which I won't spoil), and a satisfying conclusion - I would have enjoyed the experience of reading it a great deal more if I hadn't been waiting the whole time for the horror to show up.




ETA - This is the silliest addendum to this post, but it was going to bother me until I added it. This book is explicitly set in Washington state - I would guess western Washington from the descriptions of the setting. (Characters also spend some time in Oregon, which I'm less familiar with.) I live in western Washington and while I don't claim to be a wildlife/plantlife expert, I do know some things. Such as:

- northern flickers are common in Washington year round. No one is going to put that in a local newspaper as a rare bird sighting.
- there are native paper birches in some parts of Washington, but only up near the Canadian border - you don't see them often. If you want a tree with stark white bark that's native and common, you want an alder. I promise they resemble bones enough for your spooky purposes.
- okay, this one is moot if the book is meant to be set east of the mountains and I will freely admit that but if as I believe it's set in western Washington, there are no rattlesnakes here. There are no native venomous snakes west of the Cascades.
- there are definitely no cottonmouths oh my god. (The cottonmouth may have been misidentified/a hallucination but also its inclusion made me crazy.)