Research projects and papers give you a headache? Come learn tips and tricks to help you get organized and stay on course. Call 327-8301 to register for this two-part workshop:

Oct. 25, 7-9 pm Tackling Assignments, Pt 1: Process and Print Sources Downtown
Nov. 1, 7-9 pm Tackling Assignments, Pt. 2: Process, Electronic Databases, Internet, Malletts Creek
Nov. 15, 7-9 pm Tackling Assignments, Pt. 2 [repeat of Nov. 1], Downtown

It's that time of year again: you've made gallons of sauce, sun-dried till they were coming out of your ears, canned a batch for later, and eaten salad after salad, and there are still more tomatoes ripening on the vine. What to do?

Take a look at some of our tomato cookbooks for fresh ideas for the rest of your crop:

The Tomato Festival Cookbook
The Great Tomato Book
Lee Bailey's Tomatoes
Tomato Imperative

(And don't get me started on zucchini!)

The Diane Rehm show Wednesday October 12, 2005 hosted the best-selling author, Judith Viorst. Ms. Viorst takes a poetic and humorous look at the ins and outs of becoming a septuagenarian in her new book
"I'm Too Young to be Seventy" The vast numbers of baby boomers now officially almost 60 may be particularly interested. It seems that group likes to be ready for whatever.

March of the Penguins is a hit at the box office. Why not read more true stories of penguins with your children? Three new titles at the Library are And Tango Makes Three, A Mother’s Journey, and My Season With Penguins.

Grandma Prisbrey raised 7 kids in a trailer home until she finally settled on a scrap of dirt in California. She built her own house out of colorful bottles from the dump, and hand-mixed cement. Enter a true fantasy through the book Bottle Houses and Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village.

Hope's Grandpa Jack has passed away. She does not want to go to the funeral for fear that she will never see him again. Aunt Poogee reminds Hope that the people we love are always with us as long as there a memories to share. Blackberry Stew is a soothing read for a child dealing with the loss of a loved one.

Yesterday the National Book Foundation announced the finalists for the 2005 National Book Awards.

The finalists in the four categories are:

Fiction

E.L. Doctorow The March
Mary Gaitskill Veronica
Christopher Sorrentino Trance
Renè Steinke Holy Skirts
William T. Vollmann Europe Central

Non-fiction

Playwright Harold Pinter became the first Briton to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since 2001 when V.S. Naipaul received this most coveted honor in 2001.

It is fitting that this announcement was made today on Yom Kippur -- Pinter credits his passion and inspiration to his Jewish roots. The anti-Semitism he experienced and the bombing of London in WW II shaped many of his works.

Among this prolific writer's well known plays are The Caretaker, for which he won a Tony in 1962, The Room, The Birthday Party, and The Lover.

Several screenplays bear Pinter's name, including The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Controversy swirled around Elfriede Jelinek, last year's recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Knut Ahnlund, an inactive member of the Academy, resigned on October 11th because of that choice.

Pinter is 75.

Each fall, the editors at Library Journal pick a handful of extraordinary books to highlight that in general fall below the radar of the bestsellers. The one that caught my eye this fall is Ariel Levy’s “fascinating and furious critique of raunch culture”.
In Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the rise of raunch culture., Levy, a New York magazine writer, interviewed scores of women - from teenagers, lesbian bois, to partygoers. She observed that “sex is about scoring, social status, and getting attention”, and the concept of what’s hot is promoted by the very people it suffocates.

I have a confession. I am prone to obsessions. One of the targets of this obsession is Zadie Smith. I had never heard of Zadie Smith until the release of her highly acclaimed novel White Teeth. I picked up this book because of the title. It's like someone out there knew about one of my other obsessions: teeth. After White Teeth, I looked around for other things by Smith and took to reading interviews. Then I got wind of The Autograph Man. This book wasn't as well-received as White Teeth, but I devoured it.