How did I miss this?

So I'm trying to catch up on my blog reading and come across the Boston Globe's article about this year's National Book Awards winners. Except...it is last year's winners! How did I miss this? Sherman Alexie won the award for Best Young for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian -- good Lord!

Free version of a readers' advisory tool

Public librarians use and rely on What Do I Read Next?, a genre tool that aids librarians and patrons in making reading selections. It is organized by fiction genres (science fiction, romance, westerns, etc.) and is enormously popular at reference where the librarian may or may not have extensive knowledge of authors and genres. Use it to find similar authors to those you love and books that meet a certain criteria (vampire romances, anyone?).
This usually comes with a cost, of course. Libraries either purchase a print copy of What Do I Read Next? or purchase an online electronic subscription to the database, so interested patrons had to go to their local library (if they had a copy) or to their library's website and login (if they purchased the electronic version).
Not anymore -- Cengage Learning (owner and manager of the content) has recently introduced a "curtailed" version of the What Do I Read Next? database called Books & Authors. It will give patrons a chance to search for much of the same information on their own, with the ability to locate a local library which subscribes to the full, value-added content.
Leave them wanting more...

Writers Rejoice!

Red Room

Want to join a writing community but don't know where to find one? Red Room is just what you have been looking for! This website is too cool -- a resource for writers, aspiring writers and anyone interested in books and authors. Videos, podcasts, author interviews, blogs -- you name it, they got it.

Book stats

In my zealous quest to catalog all my books (please see post from yesterday) I have tallied up my reading stats from the past several years and give you some selected figures to dwell on (drumroll please):

33 books in 2007 -- I gave birth to my first child and didn't seem to have a lick of time to myself. 'Nuff said.

65 books in 2006 -- This is probably an inflated figure because so many of the titles were graphic novels. But they still count!

22 books in 2004 -- Lowest amount read during the thirteen years I have tallied the books I read. Surprising on the face of it, since I was newly divorced and all, but it is also the year I met Jeff, so there you go...

108 books read in 1998 -- Whew! I looked through my list and had to count again - 108 books in one year?? Wow, impressive. I was also unhappy in my marriage, on a major readers' advisory committee at work where we were selecting all the best books of the year, and lonely in a city where my then-husband and I knew practically no one.

I yearn for the days when I could read 100 books in a year...but wouldn't give up my present life on a bet!

LibraryThing addiction

Yes, its true. I have become addicted to LibraryThing. The social cataloging application is slowly ruining my tastes for other social networking sites and causing me to steadily lose interest in almost anything else besides cataloging my enormous home book collection. My husband bought me a $25 gift card so I could have a lifetime membership - basically its either that or pay $10 a year to have an unlimited number of books cataloged. Its an interesting production; I'm learning quite a bit about myself along the way. It is also forcing me to realize that I have waaaay too many books and need to assess my collection (should I keep all those M.C. Beaton paperbacks my mother-in-law gave me - 35, yikes! - or ditch them since, if I am honest with myself, I will NEVER end up reading them all?).
Sigh, so much to do, so little time to do it. Especially now that I am busily cataloging...

Fantagraphics Books - Linda Medley Comics

My all-time favorite comic book series -- Castle Waiting by Linda Medley -- has a new issue out! This series about an abandoned castle with very weird inhabitants is a not-so fairy tale with very feminist themes. Great story for teen girls interested in comics. Check it out...
Fantagraphics Books - Linda Medley Comics

The Big Read

The Big Read is a National Endowment for the Arts program which is:

"...designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest. The Big Read brings together partners across the country to encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment.."

The NEA gives out grants to interested libraries and communities to produce programming and book discussions surrounding the selected books. The next round of grant applications are due February 12, 2008 for programming from September 2008-January 2009.

Oprah's Book Club

Oprah's Book Club has been around for so long that is part of the vernacular in the book world. Oprah's latest book is The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, a historical novel set in the Middle Ages.

What our bookshelves say about us...

What do our books and our reading habits say about us? There is a saying about what you eat, maybe it should also say You are what you read...

"...in terms of the “snooping” factor, books on a nightstand are just about at the bottom of the list in terms of potential discoveries. These days most people don’t wait to get inside someone’s apartment to start snooping. Instead, they start doing online research on their potential partners as soon as they possibly can. Indeed, Google is the new digital apartment inside which we all live, with Facebook and Myspace pages being the new bookshelf or nightstand into and onto which we all peek. This is where first impressions and opinions are being made; this where more people are getting turned on or off. True, someone might see the boxset of Man Without Qualities sitting on a bookshelf, and decide that its owner has qualities, but Musil is no match for a Myspace page filled with drunken photos and a Limp Bizkit soundtrack..."

Yikes! Scary business...

Susan Faludi's new book

New book by Susan Faludi on how 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are changing (and, she claims, not for the better) women's roles. What is especially interesting is Faludi's premise that it is affecting not just women in the military, but all of American women.

clipped from www.nysun.com It is worth asking, then, what effect our current wars are having on the condition of women. Has the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan marked another milestone on the road to equality? Or is the war on terror, which remains a metaphor rather than an all-out mobilization, too different from past wars to make much difference in American society? Few writers are better entitled to answer these questions than Susan Faludi, the author of "Backlash" and "Stiffed," and one of the strongest feminist voices of her generation.

Bedtime stories a problem for many parents

From the UK's The Guardian, a sad but true story: bedtime stories a problem for many parents.
My mother-in-law is a professor of literacy and remarked that many children's picture books are actually too "wordy". Picture books and read-aloud need to keep it simple to attract parents as well as kids. I understand the necessity of children hearing as many different words as possible their first year of life, but keeping them simple with beautiful illustrations is the way to keep both parents and children happy.

Book lust

Hmmm...lust seems an inappropriate feeling to have for these beautiful libraries (for the most part theological libraries!), but they are so lovely and exquisite I can't help myself.

Its National Book Festival time again

8 days, 2 hours, 12 minutes...er, make that 11 minutes...until the 2007 National Book Festival is here! I have conned Jeff into taking me and Griffin this year; it falls on my birthday weekend and since we get what we want on our birthday weekends...

This year we are meeting his parents on the way down to D.C. and then staying outside of the city somewhere in Fairfax County, VA (i'm sure I have the details written down somewhere...) and taking the Metro on Saturday morning. I can't wait; over 70 authors in one place, on one day! Mercer Mayer, Rosemary Wells, Jodi Picoult, Stephen White, Ken Burns, Joyce Carol Oates -- a bibliophile's dream. Make that 8 days, 2 hours, 7 minutes...

Swann

Swann, by Carol Shields, was a difficult novel to start (and not the least of which was my difficulty concentrating on a novel while also taking care of my six month old son!). The novel is about the mysterious Mary Swann, a Manitoba housewife who is murdered before the story even begins. Swann is a poet and her works are "discovered" by a feminist scholar, Sarah Maloney, who is manipulative and ambitious, plus much too in love with herself. The irony of Sarah, of course, is her much-too-much attention to her looks and ultimate marriage to Stephen. The novel is about a symposium devoted to scholarship of this unknown poet. The story is narrated by four different characters who are influenced and affected by Mary Swann and her legacy. The aforementioned Sarah Maloney discovered the poet when visiting a remote cabin and on the run from a lover. The second narrator, Morton Jimroy, is an esteemed literary biographer writing about Swann's life, but reduced to stealing a fountain pen from the poet's daughter when interviewing her for his book. The third narrator is spinster librarian (what a cliche!) Rose Hindmarch who supposedly knew the poet best, but actually knows nothing at all. And, finally, narrator four is Frederic Cruzzi, erstwhile newspaper editor and poetry publisher who meets Mary Swann on the day she is murdered and has a secret of his own about her poems.

At the same time each of these characters are narrating the story of their relationship with Mary Swann, pieces of Swann's life are mysteriously disappearing, as if traces of Mary herself are gone. The novel is ambitious and the last section is a humorous send-up of academic symposia, but the whole of the novel tries to convey the nature of Mary's loss -- her murder as well as the loss of any legacy she left behind. It succeeds at conveying the bumbling nature of the four people who supposedly "knew" her the best and the irony of what they did not know.

Book sharing the social software way

Its amazing how much you find through sharing and exploring the web through del.icio.us links! I have bookmarked sites, my friends add me to their network of bookmarked sites, I find other people's networks and their bookmarked sites...it goes on and on, but you can find some fascinating websites and applications. One of my fellow librarians has bookmarked some cool sites and this one called Shelfari is similar to LibraryThing, where you add books (catalog), make recommendations, write reviews, and talk about books with others. Shelfari is a bit more limiting than LibraryThing -- it doesn't have the capability of finding an exact ISBN match to a title (which, by the way, drives me crazy as a librarian!!) so the books on my "shelf" in Shelfari may not be the editions I actually own at home in the "real" world. These applications do have the capability of creating real communities on the web, much the way chat rooms and discussion forums did in the first generation of websites.
Besides, didn't every kid want to catalog their books and play "library"? Or was that just geeky me???

Late summer reading

Still have time to do some summer reading? Catch up with this handy list from the Worcester Telegram & Gazette News. The list includes such kid favorites as Jack Prelutsky and Douglas Florian.

Reading challenges

These reading challenges always get me. I would love to compete (I think in the past I could have quite easily been in medal contention) but don't have the time -- babies tend to get fussy if their moms ignore them for too long while they read. The one above from Kate's Blog sounds interesting, but what kind of challenge should I give myself?

Here's a thought: try to read all the books by a favorite author in a row. I.e. finish all Carol Shields, one after the other. Move on to A.M. Homes, then finish up the month with all the books Barbara Kingsolver has ever written. And don't let the preceding sentence fool you -- I would never manage to get through all these books in a month! That was foolish. More like the rest of the year...

The Kid Stackz

This piece by Jessica Kane is interesting: she proposes that public libraries create areas in their buildings for childcare. Parents drop off their kids for a couple of hours while they read. The library could charge for the service and help fund their collections with the money they receive from the childcare center. What a (ahem) novel idea!

I would certainly sign up for it -- I never feel like I have enough time to read now that Griffin is here. If I could drop him off at a childcare facility just for the express purpose of reading (as opposed to dropping him off at workout gym-sponsored childcare area), I would certainly feel freed up to do my daily quota of reading...

Author Rushdie and wife to divorce

Its amazing that Salman Rushdie is generating this much buzz for something other than pissing off relgious fundamentalists...

Author Rushdie and TV host Lakshmi to divorce - omg

Gotta love subtitles...

So admittedly, it was the picture of actor Ed Norton holding a pink bar of soap with Pajiba written on it (a la Fight Club), but the subtitle of this blog did me in: "...scathing reviews for bitchy people..." Thats me!

The Generation's Best Books - Scathing Reviews for Bitchy People