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.

Franz Ferdinand just recently released their second album titled You Could Have It So Much Better. New bands oftentimes have some difficulty with their sophomore effort, but “it's a stunning, confident piece of work that suggests the band is merely getting started.” (Amazon.com) Their first single off the album is a catchy punk-pop song called “Do You Want To.” The AADL has several copies on order, so get yourself on the hold list! If you haven’t checked out this group yet, we also own their first album, which is self-titled.

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.

Make sure you've read the book before you see the movie. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens on December 9, 2005. This is sure to be popular.

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.

When is a film more than just a movie? When the subject is portrayed in a way that the audience is forced to rethink their opinions? Try again. Randall Adams would contend that The Thin Blue Line had more of an effect on the world than any other. Adams was pardoned and released from Death Row as a direct result of this film by legendary documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. TBL was recently released on DVD as part of The Errol Morris Collection. Original music by Philip Glass.