Looking to read a book and join a discussion on it? Check out Crazy Wisdom’s monthly book discussions, which take place at 7 p.m. at the Crazy Wisdom Community Room. Titles to be discussed in the near future are:

September 10: Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization by Spencer Wells

October 15: The Idle Parent: Why Laid-Back Parents Raise Happier and Healthier Kids by Tom Hodgkinson, hosted by Bill Zirinksy

November 12: The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit: A Return to the Intelligence of the Heart by Joseph Chilton Pearce

December 10: The Power of Rest: Why Sleep Alone Isn’t Enough - A 30-Day Plan to Reset Your Body by Matthew Edlund

There is no registration, just show up! Check here for full details, and for more information on each title. AADL owns all four titles! Any spark your interest?
Crazy Wisdom

September 1st marks the birthday of authors Edgar Rice Burroughs and C. J. Cherryh.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American writer best known for his characters Tarzan (of the series by the same name) and John Carter (of the Barsoom series).

Burroughs also wrote the famous novel The Land that Time Forgot (first in the Caspak trilogy), which was originally published as a serial. The story is much like other famous "lost world" stories, like Journey to the Center of the Earth. The novel has been made into two films.

C. J. Cherryh is an American author of science-fiction and fantasy. Out of her impressive bibliography, two novels have won Hugo Awards for best novel: Downbelow Station and Cyteen. A department of NASA named an asteroid after her (77185 Cherryh), and said, in reference to it, "She has challenged us to be worthy of the stars by imagining how mankind might grow to live among them."

Among Cherryh's works are at least 15 series and a few solo novels. One of the series, called The Gene Wars, starts out with the book Hammerfall, which Publisher's Weekly summed up as "two women with superhuman powers wage psychic and genetic war for control of a civilization."

August 26th marks the birthday of authors John Buchan and Christopher Isherwood.

John Buchan was a Scottish novelist and Governor General of Canada. He wrote mainly adventure fiction, five books of which contain the manly and MacGyver-like character Richard Hannay. Three other stories by Buchan feature the middle-aged reluctant hero Dickson McCunn, whose adventures start in the book Huntingtower.

Baron Buchan also wrote historical fiction, like the mystery Witch Wood, which features romance and religion in 17th century Scotland, and even a novel about a terminally ill man, his death and redemption, called Sick Heart River.

Christopher Isherwood was an English-born American author. One of his novels, Mr. Norris Changes Trains, was inspired by his life as an expatriate in Berlin in the 1930s. The main characters include the narrator, William Bradshaw, and the masochistic Arthur Norris.

Another of Isherwood's novels is A Single Man, which centers on a middle-aged gay Englishman and his recent partner's loss, which he must learn to cope with. It was recently made into a film by Tom Ford, and it stars Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.

826National is dubbing August 26 (8/26) National Youth Literacy Day. That’s today!! “826 writing centers provide totally free literacy instruction to 22,000 students every year.” There are eight nonprofit chapters across the country, including 826Michigan right here in Ann Arbor.

Did you know that there is a writing/tutoring lab in the back of that wacky Robot Shop on Liberty Street? Behind that red curtain is totally FREE tutoring, drop-in writing, workshops, fieldtrips, and other goodness going on for kids age 6-18. Need help with math? Drop in afterschool, as tutoring starts Sept. 20. Want to drop the kids off for an amazing writing workshop one evening while you grab coffee next door? Stay tuned here for the fall schedule, which gets posted on Sept. 6! Register fast, as spaces fill up quickly. (There are even workshops for adults!) I know for a fact that the kids and adults around there have oodles of fun while teaching/learning.

Some of the works the children write get published in anthologies, and the beautiful books are sold at the Liberty Street Robot Supply & Repair Shop, and some are available for check out right here at AADL. Neat, right?
826nat

The mix tape lives on! It's not spooled inside a 3"x4" piece of plastic any more; instead, it's on an iPod playlist or on sites like 8 Tracks, but the idea of assembling the perfect collection of songs to capture just the right moment in your life is alive and well. Rob Sheffield, writer for Rolling Stone magazine, believes in the magic of the mix tape. It helped him meet his wife, Renee, and their funny, real, and ultimately heartbreaking story is chronicled in his book, Love is a Mix Tape.

Rob Sheffield is unabashedly obsessed with music. On his variously themed mix tapes -- the Party Tape, the I Want You Tape, or the You Broke My Heart and Made Me Cry and Here Are Twenty or Thirty Songs About It Tape -- one might find anything from ELO to Biggie to Big Star to Eric Carmen, etc. There is no genre of music that Sheffield doesn't connect with on some level, which means there is a song (or at least a lyric) alluded to in this book for everyone. Almost every chapter is another year in his life with Renee, and each starts with the track list of a mix tape representing that year, from their first meeting in 1989 to her sudden, tragic death in 1997, and ending in the mid 2000s.

The adventures of these music geeks had me alternately laughing and crying as they trade vocals on Hall & Oates songs, dig through moldy vinyls, invent names for their imagined synth-pop duo, and find Jackie Kennedy's documentary LP, Portrait of a Valiant Lady, a solace for deepest grief. A great book for music lovers and anyone who's ever believed in true love.

August 22nd marks the birthday of authors Dorothy Parker and Ray Bradbury.

Dorothy Parker was an American poet and satirist, noted for being a "wisecracker". She was a founding member of the famous Algonquin Round Table, and was even put on the Hollywood blacklist for being a suspected communist in the McCarthy era.

Parker's poems were published in magazines such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. The Nation said that her voice is, "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity." The New York Times published an obituary for her in 1967. In it, Alden Whitman wrote, "Miss Parker was a little woman with a dollish face and basset-hound eyes, in whose mouth butter hardly ever melted. It was a case, as Alexander Woollcott once put it, of 'so odd a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.'"

Ray Bradbury is an American novelist, best known for writing the dystopian Fahrenheit 451. In honor of his sci-fi greatness, Wikipedia notes that "an asteroid is named in his honor, "9766 Bradbury", along with a crater on the moon called "Dandelion Crater" (named after his novel, Dandelion Wine)."

However, Bradbury also wrote fantasies, horrors, and mysteries. Among the horrors is Something Wicked This Way Comes, which tells the story of a pair of 13-year-old boys who encounter a creepy traveling carnival. Bradbury's mysteries include a trilogy, narrated by an unnamed screenwriter. The first is Death is a Lonely Business, and it focuses on a string of murders in Venice, CA.

Attention Hunger Games fans! Worried that you won't have anything thrilling to read after Mockingjay comes out on Aug. 24? Fear not! Try one of these novels and immerse yourself in another disturbingly delightful dystopia!

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Feed by M.T. Anderson
The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines
The Diary of Pelly D by L.J. Adlington
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer
Exodus by Julie Bertagna
Unwind by Neil Shusterman
Salt by Maurice Gee
The Maze Runner by James Dashner
The Silenced by James DeVita
The Other Side of the Island by Allegra Goodman
Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Shade's Children by Garth Nix

In a dystopian future America divided into twelve districts, twenty-four teenagers must fight to the death each year to sate the corrupt Capitol's need for absolute control and bloody entertainment. That is, until Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark of District 12 provide the spark to ignite nationwide rebellion! Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series first appeared on the scene in 2008, and finally, after an extremely suspenseful cliffhanger in the second book in the trilogy Catching Fire, fans will find out what happens to Katniss, Peeta, Gale and the entire nation of Panem.

Join us at the Downtown Library on August 24th from 4 to 6 p.m. to celebrate the release of Mockingjay with food and fun. Come in costume, so that I won't be the only one! Brush up your trivia knowledge for a chance to win prizes! And, as Effie Trinket says, "May the odds be ever in your favor."

Here's a list of suggestions for Hunger Game fans.

On August 18th, 1958, Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita was first published in the U.S. That makes tomorrow its 52nd anniversary.

The book is his best known, and was made into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again by Adrian Lyne in 1997. Unlike many of his other works, Nabokov actually wrote Lolita in English, and then translated into Russian. It was--and probably still is--controversial; the story is narrated by a man named Humbert Humbert, who has an amorous obsession with his girlfriend's 12-year-old daughter.

Author Erica Jong, in a New York Times Book Review in 1988, said, "'Lolita' teems with loving lexicography, crystalline coinages, lavish list-making - all the symptoms of rapture of the word. 'Nymphet' was a coinage of this novel, as were the more obscure 'libidream,' 'pederosis,' 'nymphage' and 'puppybodies.'"

Here at AADL we have Lolita in not only its original English, but also in Spanish, French, and Russian. We also have an audiobook version read by film great Jeremy Irons, who actually played Humbert in the 1997 film.