Ages 18+.
Blog Post
Who will win the next Printz Award?
by K.C.
Speculation is running high now that the announcement is just days away. Check this Monday, Jan. 22 at 1 p.m. to find out what teen book has won the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award for literary excellence in young adult literature.
Here are a few possible candidates:
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
Just Listen by Sarah Dessen
Sold by Patricia McCormick
Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
King Dork by Frank Portman
The Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Recently I talked with Cindy Dobrez, chair of this year's Printz committee. She said the committee works in total secrecy. They cannot talk about any books with colleagues, teens, friends, or family. Their lips are sealed until Monday when Cindy makes the big announcement. So stay tuned!
Blog Post
Project Design:Submit your Designs this Saturday!
by erin
Do you design and create your own clothes? Are you a fashion fanatic? Our first ever A2 wide design event is a juried design exhibition and a fabulous opportunity to showcase youth talent. To enter you must attend the Submission Panel Session on Saturday, January 20-2:00-4:00 PM @ the Downtown Library in the Multipurpose Room. The Fashion Show will be on Friday, April 6-6:00-8:30 PM. Complete guidelines can be found by clicking HERE.
Blog Post
Best Books 2006 from Library Journal
by Van
Annotations are from Library Journal (January 2007)
Belleville, Bill. Losing It All To Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Environmental writer/filmmaker Belleville poignantly reveals how the words of the old Joni Mitchell song have become a grim reality in central Florida, as his traditional Cracker home and rural neighborhood give way to suburban strip malls. Uncontrolled development is an issue not just for the Sunshine State but for America as a whole. (LJ 3/1/06)
Blastland, Michael. The Only Boy in the World: A Father Explores the Mysteries of Autism
As the parent of a severely autistic son, BBC journalist Blastland knows frustration, but it does not fuel his crystalline contemplation. Neither patronizing nor glib, he instead relies on fascination to unlock Joe's head, reminding us how much we “normal” people take for granted. (LJ 7/06)
Brockmeier, Kevin. The Brief History of the Dead
Home to the dead as long as someone on Earth remembers them, the City starts emptying out fast after an epidemic devastates Earth. Beautifully written and brilliantly realized, Brockmeier's second novel delivers a startling sense of what it really means to be alive. (LJ 2/15/06)
Brown, Frederick. Flaubert: A Biography
In his quest to pen the definitive biography of Gustave Flaubert, acclaimed literary biographer Brown (Zola: A Life) takes us on a grand tour of France's history while disentangling the genius of one of the greatest novelists the West has known. (LJ 2/15/06)
Buford, Bill. Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
To satisfy a burning desire to work with famed chef Mario Batali, journalist Buford (Among the Thugs) agreed to become an intern, or “kitchen slave.” In this fascinating book, he describes his varied experiences preparing meals and also profiles the bigger-than-life Batali. (LJ 5/15/06)
Carey, Lisa. Every Visible Thing
Five years after 15-year-old Hugh Furey's disappearance, his parents remain distanced by grief and ignore the emotional needs of their two remaining children, who turn to self-destructive behaviors. Carey's fourth novel is an affecting study of family dysfunction, sorrow, and adolescence. (LJ 7/06)
Cash, Arthur H. John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty
Cash elegantly ensures that we remember the London journalist, rogue, agitator, saucy poet, and politician who influenced our Founding Fathers when he fought for rights regarding arrest warrants and search and seizure in the decades before the American Revolution. The personal and public life of a figure who seems out of Fielding or Sterne but whose influence still matters. (LJ 2/1/06)
de los Santos, Marisa. Love Walked In
For Cornelia Brown, it's like a scene from one of her beloved Cary Grant movies when handsome Martin Grace walks into her Philadelphia coffee shop. But this event is only the harbinger of more profound changes. Yes, poet de los Santos's witty and romantic debut novel is chick lit, but it's chick lit with soul and substance. (LJ 9/15/06)
Donohue, Keith. The Stolen Child
Inspired by a W.B. Yeats poem, Donohue's haunting debut reimagines the ancient changeling myth in a modern America. Seven-year-old Henry Day is kidnapped by a group of feral hobgoblins and becomes Aniday, eternally ageless but still clinging to his humanity; his changeling replacement grows up as Henry Day but struggles to find his true identity. (LJ 2/15/06)
Dunn, Jancee. But Enough About Me: A Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous
“Not another memoir” has become a chorus in the LJ bookroom, but here Rolling Stone scribe Dunn effervesces with wit and insight into celebrity journalism. Sparkling storytelling juxtaposes Dunn's coming of age in 1980s suburban New Jersey with her prestige career prodding the A-list. Imagine interviewing your teen hero, Bono, with the Mount Vesuvius of pimples erupting on your forehead. (LJ 5/15/06)
Ford, Richard. The Lay of the Land
Star of The Sportswriter and Independence Day, Frank Bascombe is now leading a somewhat diminished life as a real estate agent at the Jersey Shore, but Ford's enduring portrait is novel-making at its most ambitious. A pitch-perfect recapitulation of late middle age in America. (LJ 10/15/06)
Glover, Jane. Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music
Wolfie's love of women needs no embellishment, so Glover lets the composer speak for himself in a biography that virtually reanimates its complex subject and his intimates. Though beautiful music plays in the background, the book functions foremost as an ardent portrait of Mozart's humanity through his often impish and always diamond-acute correspondence. (LJ 11/15/05)
Grushin, Olga. The Dream Life of Sukhanov
Sukhanov compromises with the regime, trading art for the easy life, then watches everything he's won come cascading down as communism nears its end. In exquisite language, first novelist Grushin captures the fading Soviet era and, even more tellingly, the prime importance of being true to oneself. (LJ 10/15/05)
Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
With singular gusto, Haidt measures ten “Great Ideas” against past/present research in psychology and science. LJ's verdict: Dr. Phil et al. don't have diddly on the old-school sages. No man is an island, indeed, and no modern reader should be without this carefully considered demystification of life. (LJ 1/06)
Harryhausen, Ray & Tony Dalton. The Art of Ray Harryhausen
In his 2004 bio, An Animated Life, hugely influential film animator Harryhausen told the story of his career in the predigital era. In this companion volume, the living legend focuses on previsualization, thus illustrating the book not with film stills but with sketches, drawings, storyboards, and wax models. The sensible text is revealing, but the art speaks even louder. (LJ 2/15/06)
Helm, Sarah. A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII
Helm tells a gripping story of World War II heroism, especially of 12 women who volunteered for Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) and were parachuted into Occupied France, never to return, and of the persistence of their recruiter, Vera Atkins, who tracked their fate in postwar Germany. A spellbinding and tragically true spy thriller. (LJ 6/15/06)
Hodes, Martha. The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century
Hodes delicately unwraps papers left by Eunice Connolly, a mid-19th-century New England working-class woman who led the kind of life usually lost to history. Connolly ultimately married a black sea captain of the British West Indies and in that unconventional act found an interlude of stability. Both the biography of an unexamined and unexamining woman and an account of mapping her tempest-tossed life. (LJ 9/1/06)
Houpt, Simon. Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft
Who would dare steal an original Rembrandt or Picasso? Plenty of people; as we learn here, more than 20,000 stolen artworks are still missing. If your interest in learning about art theft wasn't spurred by the 2004 snatching of Edvard Munch's The Scream (recently recovered), it surely will be after reading journalist Houpt's crime novel–like investigation. (LJ 8/06)
Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Even the weak-stomached will agree that Johnson has a way with lethal intestinal disease. From microscopic bacteria (cholera), he builds a sweeping nail-biter of groundbreaking science and sociology that drops readers in the dead center of malodorous Victorian London. An intellectual appreciation of life and death that packs the punch of histories double its size. (LJ 9/15/06)
Kamp, David. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation
In this captivating story of the American food revolution, Vanity Fair magazine writer Kamp pays special tribute to the “big three” pioneer chefs (James Beard, Julia Child, and Craig Claiborne) who changed the way we shop, cook, and eat. (LJ 9/15/06)
Klinkenborg, Verlyn. Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile
In The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), English curate/naturalist Gilbert White noted the behavior of a tortoise named Timothy who lived in his garden. Now his subject (who actually was female) returns the favor, offering her wise and wry perspectives on the foibles of White and the other Selborne residents. Nature writing at its most original and delightful. (LJ 12/05)
Ledgard, J.M. Giraffe
On April 30, 1975, secret police in Czechoslovakia circled a small-town zoo and slaughtered nearly 50 giraffes, the largest domesticated herd in the world. In dreamlike yet incisive language, Ledgard tries to make sense of that event, offering a heartbreaking debut novel that compels us to confront suffering even as it limns the awful human weakness for doublethink. (LJ 8/06)
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road
A man and his son wander a devastated landscape, scavenging as they can and avoiding the few people they meet as real threats. Will they reach their destination? Will they even survive? In spare, brutally beautiful language, McCarthy offers the postapocalyptic novel against which all others will be measured. (LJ 9/1/06)
McMahon, Darrin M. Happiness: A History
Forget “To be or not to be.” The modern dilemma is more complicated, often revolving around our relentless pursuit of happiness. But what is happiness? In this accessible study, historian McMahon teaches us that its definition has evolved over time; at first embracing virtue and prosperity, happiness later became synonymous with God and is now perceived as an earthly entitlement. (LJ 1/06)
Messud, Claire. The Emperor's Children
Nothing works out as expected for three friends from Brown—earnest journalist Danielle; insecure, gay Julius; and spoiled Marina, who's still living at home and struggling to write that big book. But Messud effectively captures the insecurities and little successes of these three fledglings, at the same time giving us an unerring snapshot of contemporary society. (LJ 6/1/06)
Moore, Christopher. A Dirty Job
Having retraced Jesus's “missing years” in Lamb, satirist/fantasist Moore now turns his rapier wit to an equally weighty subject: Death. Meek beta male Charlie Asher becomes Death's assistant after walking in on a strange man dressed in mint green collecting his wife's soul. This mock epic of mortality and love is bizarre, outrageous, and very, very funny. (LJ 3/15/06)
Nasaw, David. Andrew Carnegie
It's weighty but reads like a breeze, surmounting the life of the industrialist and philanthropist who systematically accumulated a fortune and then just as systematically gave it away. (Where would our public libraries be without him?) Not just a Horatio Alger story but a thorough and engaging study of a steel titan who never departed from idiosyncratic human aspirations. (LJ 9/1/06)
Némirovsky, Irène. Suite Française
Before she was swallowed up by Auschwitz, Russian-born French Jewish author Némirovsky completed two parts of a five-part opus intended to capture the madness around her as the Germans invaded France. The result, which lay undiscovered for decades, is a landmark publication that powerfully delivers the era and the horrible suffering that defined it. (LJ 6/15/06)
Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker
A terrible accident leaves Mark Schulter with Capgras Syndrome—he thinks his sister is an identical imposter. But by deftly blending issues of identity and memory with a palpable sense of mystery, all rendered in faultless prose, Powers again proves himself to be the real thing. (LJ 7/06)
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day
Ranging from the Chicago World's Fair to the bad, bad American West to Venice, Mexico, and the trenches of World War I, this grand Wellesian fantasia is a superlative act of imagination. Readers may sometimes feel that they are on a runaway horse, but when the ride is over, every other book will seem ordinary. (LJ 11/15/06)
Reece, Erik. Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness—Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia
Reese's gripping work of literary journalism chronicles the systematic destruction of one Kentucky mountain through the brutal strip-mining process known as mountaintop removal. His portrait of the resulting environmental, economic, and social devastation will leave readers heartbroken and angry. (LJ 2/1/06)
Scurr, Ruth. Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution
Scurr chose one of history's most complex and contradictory figures for her first book, following the path of the provincial lawyer who rose with astonishing speed during the French Revolution and fell even faster—an apparent fanatic devoured by his own Reign of Terror. With integrity, Scurr draws in her readers and allows them to reach their own conclusions. (LJ 4/1/06)
Smolin, Lee. The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
Theoretical physicist Smolin argues that string theory is a scientific dead end, having led to unprecedented stagnation in theoretical physics over the past 30 years. Provocative and groundbreaking. (LJ 8/06)
Zoellner, Tom. The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire
Diamonds are the hardest substance, but what's really hard about them is the poverty, corruption, smuggling, and tenacious cartels they inspire. Zoellner's lucid text takes us into the blood and mire of diamond mining's racism and political corruption, showing us that the jewelry we buy comes at a global cost. (LJ 5/1/06)
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #47
by muffy
Inspired by the 1922 sensational case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, the British couple who were executed for the murder of Thompson’s husband, Percy, Leslie Margolin’s fiction debut The adulteress is “unusually sensitive and judicious”.
Young Alma was smitten when the much-older, world renowned architect Francis "Rats" Rattenbury left his wife to marry her. Soon they were forced to leave their comfortable lifestyle in Canada for Bournsmouth, England under a cloud of rumors. After Alma’s senseless automobile wreck that seriously injured their son, Rats hired 17 year-old Percy Stoner who could barely drive, to chauffeur her around. Before long, Alma has taken the good-looking and sulky Percy to bed. Rats, forever condescending, goaded Percy into retaliation and Alma found herself pregnant and at a crossroad.
Margolin, author of a true-crime study of the Snyder-Gray case Murderess! The Chilling True Story of the Most Infamous Woman Ever Electrocuted traces each stage of the adulterous couple's eventual descent into murder with surgical precision and Alma's turbulent emotions with understanding and compassion.
For readers of true crime and psychological thriller.
Blog Post
New Fiction Titles on the New York Times Best Sellers List (January 14, 2007)
by Mazie
Romance is in the air this week. Thrilling and chilling. These two authors started out in paperback romance but crossed over into the mainstream by shifting into romantic suspense. Great success followed their leap.
At #5 is Shadow Dance by Julie Garwood: "Jordan Buchanan, a successful businesswoman, encounters danger and romance when she investigates an ancient Scottish feud involving her family."
At #9 is Stalemate by Iris Johansen: "The forensic sculptor Eve Duncan travels to Colombia to identify a skull for a shady arms dealer who promises to help her discover who abducted her daughter."
Blog Post
At Folsom Prison
by RiponGood
On January 13, 1968, Columbia Records released At Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash. The album was recorded live at Folsom State Prison, located in Folsom, California. Cash was joined on stage by June Carter, Carl Perkins, and Cash's band, the Tennessee Three. At Folsom Prison reached #1 on the Billboard Country chart and #13 on the Pop chart. The single Folsom City Blues was a #1 Country hit. Dressed in his signature black, Cash introduced himself to the inmates saying "I'm Johnny Cash."
Blog Post
Ann Arbor is getting krump!
by jillean
Tommy the Clown and the Hip-Hop Clowns are coming to Ann Arbor as part of the 2007 Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Symposium, an annual series of events honoring the life and vision of Dr. King at the University of Michigan. Tommy the Clown invented clown dancing and has since offered membership in his dance team to youth as an alternative to gangs. They will perform a tribute to Dr. King, Wednesday, February 7th at the Michigan League Ballroom at 7:30pm.
If you want to learn more about an incredible new style of dance, check out Rize. This exhilarating movie documents the origins of krumping and clown dancing in South Central Los Angeles.
Blog Post
Tempting fate (or not?)
by Maxine
Is fate a tease, an illusion or a controller of one's life? These are questions David Case who re-names himself Justin Case, ponders. As evidenced by this name change, Justin thinks he needs all the help he can get after the close call when his year old brother Charlie almost flies out the window. Justin doesn't fit in and soon finds some kindred souls in Angela, a photographer who likes to take pictures of disasters, an imaginary greyhound named Dog and Peter, the most normal of the lot, who encourages Justin to take up long distance running.
When Justin and Angela find themselves among the survivors of a catastrophe at the airport, Justin's fears multiply and he can't see his way free from the forces of doom.
Alternately funny, horrifying and always thought provoking, Meg Rosoff's new book, Just in Case has some of the same dark elements as her Printz Award winner, How I Live Now.
Blog Post
Slow Week for New Titles
by Sis
Only one new title Into White by Carly Simon cracked the top 50 on the Billboard 200 this week. Into White entered at number 15. Moonlight Serenade was her last release in 2005.
Blog Post
New Fiction Titles on the New York Times Best Sellers List (1/7/07)
by Mazie
There are no new titles this week! However, it is also that time of year when newspapers and magazines start making their "Best Fiction of 2006" lists. I want to nominate one of my personal favorites, The Dead Hour by Denise Mina. It may not make an official list but this riveting thriller will delight many readers looking for something different. Featuring Glasgow crime reporter Paddy Meehnan, the most unconventional heroine to come along in a long time, this is the second (after Field of Blood) in a planned series by Mina. And after you have read these books, you can have the pleasure of catching up with her earlier books, including the Garnethill series.