Have you just finished a book you can’t stop talking about? Is there a CD you’ve been recommending to everyone you know? Want to share your recommendations with Birmingham magazine’s readers? Contact Carla Jean Whitley to learn how you can be included in Currents.”

listen

Gabe Dixon Band Wild Sweet Gabe Dixon’s melodic piano playing grabs you from the first notes of The Gabe Dixon Band (Fantasy Records), and it remains the driving force throughout the band’s first full-length album in six years. That first track, “Disappear,” has a magical quality that appears frequently in The Gabe Dixon Band’s work. It’s hard to decide if Dixon’s piano playing or his smooth voice is the main attraction—both are intoxicating. Dixon says the album is an assimilation of influences from the band members’ childhoods, influences like Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and James Taylor. That’s evident as The Gabe Dixon Band evokes the same timeless quality as its predecessors. Though not yet as well-known, Dixon and crew should join their idols in the annals of music history.—CARLA JEAN WHITLEY

MY tunes

Celeste Griffin Singer/songwriter, Birmingham band Monarchs; Graduate student at University of Texas There are two CDs that I keep loving more with time. One is Ray Lamontagne’s Trouble. I just can’t get over it. His voice is incredibly soulful and moving and smooth. It almost feels like he’s bleeding. It’s one of my go-to chill CDs if I’m cooking dinner or drinking wine. The other one is Bright Eyes’ Lifted Or The Story is In the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. In my mind, Conor Oberst defines a modern day poet. His lyrics are phenomenal. He gives so much insight to young love and pain as well as young people’s anger about politics in the States. I think it is one of the most powerful albums of our time.

MUSIC makers

Singer-songwriter Mark Mathis merits more than a few casual listens on his latest album, We Both Was Young (Freshwater Records). As Mathis croons in his husky voice on “We Will Fall in Love,” it’s hard not to do just that. It opens quietly, with Mathis’ gentle guitar strumming, before being joined by a full band and some smoky horn-playing. The song is seductive, with an alluring jazz-influenced sound that dovetails with the album’s predominantly folky tone. If Children (Merge Records) is a surprisingly nuanced collection for a band comprised of two people. Wye Oak is Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack, and even live the duo performs alone, with just guitars, keyboards and drums between the two of them. They played every instrument on If Children, and the result is enchanting. Juliana Hatfield continues to create, with her latest album How to Walk Away (Ye Olde Records) to be followed by an autobiography, When I Grow Up, due out next month. This new musical effort is also personal, filled with vulnerable lyrics. Her voice floats on “My Baby” as Hatfield sings, “Though he doesn’t want to hurt me, I know he’ll soon be leaving.”

learn

web-based browsing Children today may not know what a card catalog is—do they even have them in elementary schools these days?—and it’s rare to find a date due card stuck in the back of a library book. Those were tactile pleasures, but they’ve been replaced with much more efficient systems. And our local libraries use technology to create even more catalog-based resources for area readers. Entries for each book within the Jefferson County Library Cooperative catalog include ways to access reviews and book recommendations. One set of links point patrons to additional recommendations generated by amazon.com. From there, it’s easy to see if those books are available at any of the county’s libraries. Information Systems Manager Tobin Cataldo recently received the Most Innovative Implementation of E-resource Discovery award at the 2008 Innovative Users Group Conference in Washington, D.C., for creating the links within the catalog. Here’s how you can find recommendations. Visit jclc.org. Click the catalog link. Enter the title of a book or author for which you’re searching. When a list of matches comes up, select the book or version of the book (large print, audio, paperback, etc.) you’re looking for. When you are viewing the catalog entry for your book, click other resources on the sidebar, at the right of the page. A new window will open with links to bibliographic sources, references and database links. You’ll find your Amazon-generated recommendations at the bottom of that page. If no recommendations appear, try selecting another version of the book. Click on the title of a recommended book and you’ll be directed to its page in the JCLC catalog.

read

Inventive and brainy, this first book, Atmospheric Disturbances (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24), by physician-turned-novelist Rivka Galchen asks that eternal question of who do you love. An older psychiatrist tries to make sense of his younger Argentinian wife, whom he is convinced quite literally is not the person he married. In a month when our attention turns to the Olympic Games, author David Maraniss (who wrote the acclaimed biography of Bill Clinton First in His Class) reaches back to the Games of Rome in Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, $26.95). Maraniss finds in these Games an exercise in Cold War politics, propaganda and unfurling societal changes. The Eaves of Heaven (Harmony Books. $24.95) is a memoir of the Vietnam War from a new and illuminating position, the odyssey of Thong Van Pham, a man who fought in the South Vietnamese army. Written by his son, Andrew Pham (who earlier told his own story in the acclaimed memoir, Catfish and Mandala) in the father’s voice, this book captures the explosive arc of 20th century Vietnam through the eyes of a man whose personal journey echoed his nation’s history. A great new collection of short stories, Demons in the Spring (Akashic, $24.95) by Joe Meno, mixes generations, cultures and locales with fantasy and magic to create a collection that speaks to the overwhelming sense of loneliness living can bring. Startling revelations, a disturbing childhood and a mother’s murder of a child are chillingly told in Between Here and April (Algonquin, $23.95) a novel by the author and photojournalist Deborah Copaken Kogan. The murder of two college students in Montana puts Dave Robicheaux in the unenviable position of being in danger and on vacation at the same time in the new novel by James Lee Burke’s, Swan Peak (Simon & Schuster, $25.95), Burke's 17th Dave Robicheaux detective novel.

E D I T O R ' S CHOICE

Here’s a first look at the big books of fall, still the big season in the world of book publishing. Roberto Bolano’s 2666 (FSG, November) based in part on the still unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Rock star Prince’s collection of poetry/music/lyrics, 21 Nights (Atria, September). We Bought a Zoo by Benjamin Mee (Weinstein Books, September), the story of a family that buys a dilapidated zoo in the English countryside. Philip Roth’s coming-of-age story set in the Korean war era, Indignation (Houghton, September). Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy (Knopf, November) about racism in the 17th century.

WHAT THEY'RE READING

Anna Ruth Williams Development Director, Empower Alabama "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" by David Sedaris As soon as When You Are Engulfed in Flames was published, I grabbed a copy. I am a huge Sedaris fan and love reading the bizarre recounts of his life. Laugh out loud funny? You betcha!

O.Z. Hall III Lawstudent, Cumberland School of Law "Tokyo Year Zero" by David Peace I am continually interested in Japan and the way the Japanese people struggled to maintain their national character after World War II. David Peace deals with the subsumed rage of defeated masculinity in the context of an appropriately dark, gritty detective novel, and surprised me with the slashing, exclamatory way he paces and spaces his words. Tokyo Year Zero manages to be exciting, mournful, furious and visceral, often at the same time.