Mahopac Public Library Reader's Advisory

4. Stop by or e-mail our circulation desk and let us know what kind of books you like to read; we will help you find others that are similar or help you find other books your favorite authors have written.

5. Stop by the library's new Reader's Advisory corner and pick up a book mark.

6. Check the new selections on the Book List below.

Current Book Lists:

Carry on with your New Year’s Resolutions

EAT HEALTHY FOOD
Healthy Foods: Fact Versus FIction
by Myrna Chandler Goldstein and Mark A. Goldstein
This book provides actual research findings to shed light on the true benefits of the most popular health foods—and in some cases, debunk misconceptions surrounding certain foods.

FIND A JOB
Cracking the New Job Market: the 7 Rules for Getting Hired in Any Economy
by R. William Holland
The author shows job seekers how to gather information on what a prospective employer finds important, then emphasize those skills, accomplishments, and qualities in tailored resumes and interview answers. Enlightening and practical, this book delivers seven powerful rules for landing a great job even in a difficult economy.

GET FIT
The Women's Health Big Book of Exercises
by Adam Campbell
The essential workout guide for anyone who wants a better body. A comprehensive collection of exercises, this makeover manual is for both beginners and longtime fitness buffs alike. Includes hundreds of useful tips, the latest findings in exercise science, and cutting-edge workouts from the world's top trainers.

GET ORGANIZED
Organized Simplicity: a Clutter-Free Approach to Intentional Living
by Tsh Oxenreider
The author’s aim is to convince readers that simple living is the absolute best way to live. Be it with house cleaning, family schedule management, personal finances, and managing the "stuff" you allow within your four walls, the only way to live well is to do so intentionally and simply. There are chapters for cleaning and organizing the home room-by-room, and future project ideas to inspire readers.

GO GREEN
The Country Almanac of Housekeeping Techniques That Save You Money: Folk Wisdom for Keeping Your House Clean, Green, and Homey
by Richard Freudenberger and the editors of Back Home magazine
Many of today's products are expensive, bad for the environment, and don't work any better than Grandma's methods, which cost only pennies. This indispensable guide shows you the best ways to take care of everything in your home from wood floors, to tile, to stainless steel appliances--and how to get the longest life out of every household item from pots and pans to pillowcases.

HELP OTHERS
1000 Mitzvahs: How Small Acts of Kindness Can Heal, Inspire, and Change Your Life
by Linda Cohen
Cohen shares her two-and-a-half-year journey from sorrow to inspiration through simple daily acts of kindness. Cohen finds that her life is improved by these small acts—that every time she goes out of her way to do something good for someone else, she enhances her own well-being. A testament to the transformational power of kindness, and a call to arms for those who would like to follow in Cohen’s footsteps with their own mitzvahs.

LOSE WEIGHT
You, Losing Weight : the Owner's Manual to Simple and Healthy Weight Loss
by Michael F. Roizen, Mehmet C. Oz
The authors keep their usual no-nonsense approach to explaining the human body to outline why crash dieting can’t work for the long term. They share their favorite weight-loss super-foods recipes and provide exercise suggestions for how to get the most from any kind of workout. Includes food plans, shopping lists, and comprehensive advice.

MANAGE DEBT
Debt Free for Life: the Finish Rich Plan for Financial Freedom
by David Bach
Offering a revolutionary approach to personal finance that teaches you how to pay down your debt and adopt a whole new way of living – debt free.

SAVE MONEY
Clark Howard's Living Large in Lean Times: 250+ Ways to Buy Smarter, Spend Smarter, and Save Money
by Clark Howard with Mark Meltzer and Theo Thimou
Clark's ultimate guide to saving money, covering everything from cell phones to student loans, coupon websites to mortgages, investing to electric bills, and beyond. In his candid and friendly next-door-neighbor manner, Clark shares the small, manageable steps everyone can follow to build a path towards independence and wealth.

TAKE A TRIP
The 100 Best Affordable Vacations
by Jane Woolridge & Larry Bleiberg
Vacation categories include Classic Americana; Learning Vacations; Wilderness Trips; and Mind, Body, and Soul themed getaways. With this mix, there are lots of creative ideas and appealing destinations for everybody, whatever their interests, schedule, or budget.

Celebrate National Business Plan Month

Anatomy of a Business Plan: The Step-By-Step Guide to Building Your Business and Securing Your Company's Future
by Linda Pinson
A proven step-by-step process for developing a polished, professional and results-oriented plan.

Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies
by Mike E. Gerber
Dream; Vision; Purpose; These four words define the life of the author...In this book he has created the Dreaming Room where entrepreneurs come to discover how to make their dreams a reality.

Business Planning Guide: Creating a Winning Plan for Success
by David Bangs
The author's no-nonsense style takes the intimidation out of the business planning process.

Greening Your Small Business: How to Improve Your Bottom Line; Grow Your Brand; Satisfy Your Customers; and Save the Planet
by Jennifer Kaplan
The ultimate resource for small business owners who want to go green without going broke...

Guerrilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business
by Jay Conrad Levinson
The author offers ideas for small business success including: strategies for marketing on the internet; and tips for using new technology such as podcasting and automated marketing.

McGraw-Hill Guide to Writing a High Impact Business Plan
by James B. Arkebauer
This guide shows one how to turn dreams into reality by writing a business plan that will obtain the financing and support needed to get a new business going.

Entrepreneurs Toolkit: Tools and Techniques to Launch and Grow Your New Business
compiled by Harvard Business Essentials
Concise and covers many points in starting up a business.

How to Write a Business Plan
by Mark McKeever
How to write the right plan for your business and design a loan package necessary to finance and make your business work.

How to Write a Successful Marketing Plan: A Disciplined and Complimentary Approach
by Roman G. Hiebing A methodical and detailed approach to preparing a marketing plan in a disciplined and comprehensive manner.

The Lean Star Up: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Eric Ries
Creating a new business under conditions of extreme uncertainty is like a mission to penetrate the fog to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

Small Business Startup Kit: a Step by Step Legal Guide
by Peri Pakroo
An easy to follow, basic approach to starting a business in a presentable format including resources and forms on a CD.

Tips and Traps for Writing an Effective Business Plan
by Greg Balanko-Dixon
In only 30 days, entrepreneurs can craft business plans that make their goals a reality. Concrete plans can assess a business’s earning potential or when applying for a loan. Tips and traps step by step guide is of great assistance in formulating the plan.

Steampunk Stories -- Old & New:

The Windup Girl
by Paolo Bacigalupi
This [is a] grim but beautifully written tale of Bangkok struggling for survival in a post-oil era of rising sea levels and out-of-control mutation. Capt. Jaidee Rojjanasukchai fights desperately to protect his beloved nation from foreign influences. Factory manager Anderson Lake covertly searches for new and useful mutations for a hated Western agribusiness. Aging Chinese immigrant Tan Hock Seng lives by his wits while looking for one last score. Emiko, the titular despised but impossibly seductive product of Japanese genetic engineering, works in a brothel until she accidentally triggers a civil war. This complex, literate and intensely felt tale, is clearly one of the finest science fiction novels of the year. (Publisher’s Weekly)

The Somnambulist
by Jonathan Barnes
Set in Victorian London, this superb debut from British author Barnes raises the bar for historical thrillers, starting with its curious opening line: Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. A page-turner, it's full of peculiar characters, notably Edward Moon, a highly unorthodox detective, and Moon's bizarre sidekick, known only as the Somnambulist. Together, they wend their way through a London rich in period detail. Barnes saves his best surprise for the story's homestretch, when he reveals the identity of his narrator, who's been cleverly pulling strings since the opening. (Publisher’s Weekly)

Soulless
by Gail Carriger
Prickly, stubborn 25-year-old bluestocking Alexia Tarabotti is patently unmarriageable, and not just because she's large-nosed and swarthy. She's also soulless, an oddity and a secret even in a 19th-century London that mostly accepts and integrates werewolf packs, vampire hives and ghosts. The only man who notices her is brash Lord Conall Maccon, a Scottish Alpha werewolf and government official. After Alexia kills a vampire with her parasol at a party—how vulgar!—she and Conall must work together to solve a supernatural mystery that grows quite gruesome. This intoxicatingly witty parody will appeal to a wide cross-section of romance, fantasy and steampunk fans. (Publisher’s Weekly)

The Difference Engine
by William Gibson
1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine, and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time. Three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with the future: Sybil Gerard—fallen woman, politician’s tart, daughter of a Luddite agitator; Edward “Leviathan” Mallory—explorer and paleontologist; Laurence Oliphant—diplomat, mystic, and spy. Their adventure begins with the discovery of a box of punched Engine cards of unknown origin and purpose. Cards someone wants badly enough to kill for.

The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack
by Mark Hodder
The usual superlatives for really clever fantasy aren’t nearly big enough for this debut novel. With this one book, Hodder has put himself on the genre map. Hodder has brilliantly combined various genre staples—time travel, alternate reality, steampunk—into something you’ve never quite seen before. His mid-nineteenth-century Britain features steam-driven velocipedes, rotorchairs, verbally abusive messenger parrots, a pneumatic rail system, and robotic street cleaners. (Booklist)

Infernal Devices
by K.W. Jeter
He inherited a watchmaker's store - and a whole heap of trouble. But idle sometime-musician George has little talent for clockwork. And when a shadowy figure tries to steal an old device from the premises, George finds himself embroiled in a mystery of time travel, music and sexual intrigue. A genuine lost classic, this is a steampunk original whose time has come.

Perdido Street Station
by China Miéville
The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans and mutants and arcane races throng the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the rivers are sluggish with unnatural effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night. For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers and artists, spies, magicians, junkies and whores. Now a stranger has come, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand, and inadvertently something unthinkable is released.

The Anubis Gates
by Tim Powers
This sci-fi tale of time travel evokes 17th-century England with a combination of meticulously researched historic detail and imaginative. The colonization of Egypt by western European powers is the launch point for power plays and machinations. Steeping together in this time-warp stew are such characters as an unassuming Coleridge scholar, ancient gods, wizards, the Knights Templar, werewolves, and other quasi-mortals, all wrapped in the organizing fabric of Egyptian mythology. In the best of fantasy traditions, the reluctant heroes fight for survival against an evil that lurks beneath the surface of their everyday lives. Winner of the 1984 Philip K. Dick Award

Boneshaker
by Cherie Priest
Maternal love faces formidable challenges in this stellar steampunk tale. In an alternate 1880s America, mad inventor Leviticus Blue is blamed for destroying Civil War–era Seattle. When Zeke Wilkes, Blue's son, goes into the walled wreck of a city to clear his father's name, Zeke's mother, Briar Wilkes, follows him in an airship, determined to rescue her son from the toxic gas that turns people into zombies. When Briar learns that Seattle still has a mad inventor, Dr. Minnericht, who eerily resembles her dead husband, a simple rescue quickly turns into a thrilling race to save Zeke from the man who may be his father (Publisher’s Weekly)

Leviathan
by Scott Westerfeld
This is World War I as never seen before. This global conflict is between the Clankers, who put their faith in machines, and the Darwinists, whose technology is based on the development of new species. After the assassination of his parents, Prince Aleksandar's people turn on him. Accompanied by a small group of loyal servants, the young Clanker flees Austria in a Cyklop Stormwalker, a war machine that walks on two legs. Meanwhile, as Deryn Sharp trains to be an airman with the British Air Service, she prays that no one will discover that she is a girl. She serves on the Leviathan, a massive biological airship that resembles an enormous flying whale and functions as a self-contained ecosystem. When it crashes in Switzerland, the two teens cross paths, and suddenly the line between enemy and ally is no longer clearly defined. (School Library Journal)