Books, Movies, and Music

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Prepare to fall in love with scrappy, poor, beautiful Fiona Finnegan, a young East London woman full of dreams of starting her own shop with her childhood sweetheart, Joe Bristow. But those dreams are dramatically shattered, and Fiona flees, alone, to New York. There, she works hard, builds a fortune, and builds a family of friends along the way – but she never forgets Joe, and after ten years, she travels back to London to see what has become of him. A sweeping, gripping work of historical fiction, Jennifer Donnelly’s The Tea Rose will keep you reading long past bedtime.

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The Professor and the Madman is the story of two men, James Murray and William Minor, who contributed in different ways to the creation of the monumental first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Murray was a studious Scot who eventually became the editor of the OED; Minor was an American, a former medical surgeon, and – at the time he contributed to the great work – a patient at the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Simon Winchester speculates sympathetically on the cause of Minor’s paranoia and insanity, but focuses primarily on the story of the OED and the eventual correspondence between “the professor and the madman.” Winchester combines elements of history, mystery, and lexicography (the compiling, writing, and editing of dictionaries) into one book of manageable size. It's a good read, and chances are you'll learn something new!