Want to know where all that stimulus money is going? Check out MSNBC’s Stimulus Tracker:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33498869/ns/us_news-the_stimulus_tracker/#/all/all/us/all/

This is an interesting idea. However, it makes you wonder about how the books will fare in the weather. I like the take a book and return it or leave another book idea. I also like the stage for public performances. It would be a great space in a warm-weather environment:

Click here to visit the Open Air Library

With the recent release of Fallout 3: Game of the Year ed. for PS3, now seems to be a good time to cover it in a review.  I have played very long games and I have played very short games, Fallout 3 is the shortest longest game I have ever played.  If you just follow the main story line it will not take long to beat the game, the real fun comes in when you start doing all the side missions and exploring the vast (and I do mean vast) wasteland that is Washington D.C.  The game is huge.  To give some idea of how large the game is I spent a good few weeks on it and still didn’t see everything.  The graphics are awesome, voice acting was done very well and the all of the story lines are great; this was one well-thought-out game.

For replay value I have to give it a 9.  You can play the game as the most helpful, kind and honest chap, just a plain nice guy, a neutral guy, a bad guy or a complete and utter ,um, *beep*.  Also, be on the look out for downloadable content as well that is going to make the game just that much larger [which is included in the Game of the Year ed.].  The one annoying thing I found was the radio.  For being such a large game, the rotation of music was lacking. If I heard “I don’t want to set the world on fire” one more time I was going to vomit.  Thank god for more than one station, right? Wrong.  That other station gets stagnant pretty quickly too. However keep listening because as you accomplish more the radio will tell of your adventures or misadventure.

The language is mild, but there are some adult themes…what am I talking about , the whole thing is adult themed….you are in the Washington  D.C. wasteland after a nuclear fallout trying to survive…blood,  gore, and suggestive themes definitely give this game a mature rating (official game rating: M). I would say 16 and up to be on the safe side.  This is a game to buy to have in your collection of games because it is one you will go back to again and again.  Five stars.

-contributed by Christopher Nagle

Author Interview with Hilary Mantel subscribe to Book Army

The competition for the Booker Prize was extremely tough this year, with A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and previous winner J.M. Coetzee making the short list. However, after much speculation and debate, Hilary Mantel was awarded the 2009 Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall. Set in the court of Henry VIII in the 1520s, Wolf Hall is an extraordinary read. Find out more about the author and her novel in this interview.

Sarah O’Reily: What made you a writer, and when did you realize that writing was where your future lay?

Hilary Mantel: I realized quite late in life, as these things go. A lot of people know they’re going to be writers when they’re children, but I made a conscious decision to become one when I was 22, when, because of my poor health, I saw other career prospects slipping away from me. I knew I could write – you couldn’t take the decision otherwise – but what I didn’t know was whether I could write fiction. I didn’t seem to be what people call a ‘natural storyteller’. I had to learn that bit.

SO: How did you first come across Cromwell, and when did you decide to write about him?

HM: I first came across him when I was a child learning history in a Catholic school. I grew up with the sainted Thomas More looking down from stained-glass windows. As I am a contrarian, it made me ask whether there was more to Cromwell’s story than just his opposition to More, and I carried that question with me. When I began writing, I registered him in my mind as a potential subject. This would have been in the 1970s, before I’d finished my first novel. There seemed to be a lot of blanks in his story, and it wasn’t easy to find out anything about him, but it’s in those gaps that the novelist goes to work.

SO: When you eventually came to write about Cromwell, was there a discovery that helped you to unlock his character?

HM: When I began writing Wolf Hall, it was the arc of Cromwell’s story, the transformation from blacksmith’s son to Earl of Essex, that fascinated me. I wondered, ‘How is that done?’ You’ve got to try to answer that question – it’s the very kind of question that novels are for. But what made me sure that I could work with him, so to speak, was a letter he wrote to a friend in the 1520s, when he was an MP. It is a huge rhetorical description of the course of Parliament and all the business it dealt with, which finishes with a simple, and totally deflationary, line. I paraphrase: ‘And at the end of it, absolutely nothing changed.’ The wry humour in that letter showed me there was a personality that I could write about.
Another thing that drew me was Cromwell’s will, which he wrote towards the end of the 1520s. When you’ve seen somebody’s life so minutely taken apart, when you know who’s going to get his books and who’s going to get his second-best gelding, and you know the names of the people in his household, you become part of that life. You see his daily existence and routine and his whole system of orienting to the world. Seeing the will was like being able to go into Cromwell’s house and take photographs.

SO: How did you find a title?

HM: I liked the idea of a book that was always in progress, right up until its last words. Wolf Hall, the Seymour house in Wiltshire, is where we’re going at the end of the book. But, of course, I chose it primarily for its metaphorical resonance: who could resist it? The whole of Henry’s court is Wolf Hall.

SO: ‘Alistair Campbell with an axe’ is one of the less flattering descriptions given to Cromwell by the historian David Starkey. What persuaded you that this unlikely hero not only required, but actually deserved an advocate?

HM: I think Cromwell’s been given a very hard time by writers. In fiction and drama he’s been caricatured as an evil figure in a black cloak, lurking in the wings with dishonourable intentions. In biography he’s missing, because his private life is almost entirely off the record.

David Starkey’s phrase works wonderfully to alert you to Cromwell’s role as a propagandist for Henry, but Cromwell was a lot more subtle than Alistair Campbell – or at least, more subtle than the popular picture of Alistair Campbell suggests. Cromwell didn’t deploy his heavy artillery unless he needed to. He was a persuader and a negotiator and, to a degree, a compromiser.

I think the picture darkened with the Victorians. Cromwell’s image hasn’t always been bad: in Elizabethan legend and literature he was a hero, but to the Victorians he presented a problem. He wasn’t a varsity man. Historians couldn’t get their heads around the idea of a member of the lower orders rising so high in the hierarchy. There was also a sentimentality about the medieval world, with Cromwell seen as one of its destroyers. This idea persists today.

SO: How did you tackle the challenge of writing about a period of history that is so familiar to modern readers? And why did you choose to do so in the present tense?

HM: The Tudors are the great national soap opera; their story has been worked over so extensively that we see it as having a kind of inevitable, predetermined quality about it, so I needed to find a way of telling the story that would create an immediacy of viewpoint and cancel out the preconceptions we were brought up with. In writing the opening scene, of the boy being beaten up by his father, I was simply launched into the present tense. And I stayed with it because it was a way for me to capture the soundtrack inside Cromwell’s head – the immediacy of his experience. Also, though we may know how it all ends, Henry and his court didn’t. They didn’t know that the War of the Roses had ended; because the Tudor claim was weak, they dreaded that civil war might break out again. Henry didn’t know he would have six wives – even when he married number five, he couldn’t have known it. The present tense forbids hindsight and propels us forward through this world, making it new, just as it was, in every unfolding moment, for the players.

SO: How did you go about finding a voice for Cromwell and getting under his skin?

HM: Because they were so often dictated, letters, personal or impersonal, can give you a sense of the rhythm and vocabulary of the character’s spoken voice, and hence their mode of thought. So you look at those, and you look at what other people have said about your character.
The main person who tells us about Cromwell is the Spanish Imperial Ambassador, Chapuys, who was his enemy, but he was also his neighbour in the city and someone whom Cromwell saw a great deal of. Chapuys was a very astute observer. He tells us about how, when you were talking to Cromwell, he would fasten his eyes on your face, to calculate minutely the effect his words were having on you. He also paints a portrait of Cromwell as a very open-handed, generous, affable host, a man with whom it was wonderful to have a conversation.

SO: Can you talk a little about what it’s been like to live with a character like Cromwell during the writing of this book?

HM: There’s huge exhilaration in following a career like this, charting someone’s rise and rise. I do think without doubt that you become completely involved: someone of Cromwell’s strength and optimism can’t help but get into you. But the downside of it is that sooner or later your character will fall from the heights. Living with Cromwell has been a good experience so far, but you’ll have to ask me again when I’ve executed him.

SO: Near the end of the novel you write: ‘It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust in their rattling mouths. We edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.’ How much of a responsibility do you feel towards your historical characters, who have had an existence independent of your imagination, when you pin them to the page?

HM: In the lines you’ve just quoted, I am holding up my hands and saying to readers, you might think that what I’m doing in this book is dubious – it might even be thought reprehensible – yet we can’t help but reimagine the past; we have no choice. It is part of us, and we must acknowledge that it is we who reimagine it, we in the present moment, who can’t help but project our own insights and preoccupations backwards.
I think this creates a responsibility for the writer. I feel research must be as good as I can possibly make it, and guesses should be made only where there are no facts to be had. They must be plausible. Where gaps occur, the way you fill them must offer a possible version. I owe these characters as much scholarship as I can contrive, and all my care to try to get them right.
I should also say that it’s immensely rewarding to feel that you have, perhaps, succeeded in reanimating someone. There is a kind of magic moment where you feel your characters are really speaking, and you don’t have to think about their dialogue any more. I found that very early in this book, particularly with Thomas Wolsey. As soon as he began to speak, I felt that my job was simply to take down what he said, like a secretary. There is a peculiar pleasure to be had in feeling that you’ve brought someone back to life in that way.

SO: You’ve written in a number of forms – short story, memoir, the contemporary and historical novel. Have any of these had a bearing on the composition of Wolf Hall?

HM: Looking back, I think that writing my memoir was a kind of training ground for future novels, and something that was good for me as a writer. There are people who insist that almost all your memories of childhood are later reconstructions, but what I found when writing my memoir was that my childhood rose before me as an utter sensory wraparound, so that I was able to inhabit my past, and my work was to simply describe it. When you write fiction, the object is to achieve that on behalf of a character that you’ve invented or a person who is dead. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to do it as successfully, in fiction, as I have in Wolf Hall.
What I also found when writing Giving Up the Ghost was that whilst I could capture the entirety of my childhood experiences, I often couldn’t tell the reader why things happened, or how the event I was describing linked to another, and I think I carried this discovery into Wolf Hall. When Cromwell remembers an incident from his childhood – for example, he recalls plunging the head of another boy into a butt of water – he has no idea why he did it, and I knew from my own experience that these gaps and holes are part of the texture of memory. In this book I was determined to reproduce a life from the inside. I thought, ‘Let us try to see a man in his full complexity. Even if there are bits that he himself doesn’t understand and can’t add up, let me still include them, because that’s the experience of being alive.’

SO: Can you describe your mood on launching into the Tudor period once more, for the follow-up to Wolf Hall?

HM: Exhilaration. I’m longing to be back in the thick of the action. Partly it’s because I want to know what’s going to happen next. When I write, there are often times when I go into a scene not quite sure what I think, knowing that the problem I have to solve revolves around one question, ‘How did this happen?’ And by the end of the scene I have an answer, because it’s happened on the page. So I am looking forward to getting back to those puzzles in the new book.
Also, I’ve been so heartened by the way in which Wolf Hall has been received. There’s always the danger with historical fiction that it may fall short as both literature and history. I knew when I took on this project that it was going to be a very difficult thing to do. But, ha! Who’s interested in what’s easy?

Fans of Metal the Gods almost shined on you with Brutal Legend.  I may be one of the few that are not praising how awesome this game is.  Oh, don’t get me wrong the graphics are stunning, the sound track is absolutely amazing, and the voice acting is thought out and somewhat funny.  You play as Eddie, a heavy metal roadie voiced by Jack Black.  I’m not a big fan of Jack Black; he can be funny but after awhile I feel like lighting my head on fire and putting it out with a sledge hammer.  There are other surprises that I will not ruin for metal heads but I will say you can’t have a game about heavy metal, demons, and rock and roll without a certain Metal Icon.

Let us get to the game play….Brutal Legend becomes Brutal Boring.  I was forcing myself to play it just so I could write a review.  You spend most of your time driving/ or running around exploring, which becomes very mundane and rather humdrum.  The actual missions and secondary missions at first are ok but then, once again, they become humdrum as well and rather bland.  But, once again, the soundtrack I could listen to over and over…it rocks.

Now for you parents:  in the beginning of the game you will be asked if you want the vulgarity bleeped out and to see or not to see the gore.   This is of course to make it safe for kids to play…..don’t be fooled.  Kids will just reset the game and choose door number one to get all the F-bombs and blood the game offers.  This is not a game for kids.  Yes, I know it looks all cartoony and it is somewhat funny but once again this is not a game for kids.  Do you remember your first real, and I do mean REAL, metal album and knowing how much it was going to tick off your parents…this game is that record/tape/ cd.  Blood, Gore, Language, and partial nudity make this game definitely not for kids.  I have to give this game 2 stars one for the great voice acting and graphics and one for the sound track.

-contributed by user Christopher Nagle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Rock_Band:

youtube.com trailer

Song title	Artist	DS version
“A-Punk“	Vampire Weekend	Y
“Accidentally In Love“	Counting Crows	Y
“Aliens Exist”	Blink-182
“Breakout“	Foo Fighters
“Check Yes Juliet“	We the Kings	Y
“Crash“	Primitives The Primitives	Y
“Crocodile Rock“	Elton John
“Dig“	Incubus
“Dreaming of You“	Coral The Coral
“Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic“	Police The Police
“The Final Countdown“	Europe	Y
“Fire“	Jimi Hendrix
“Free Fallin’“	Tom Petty	Y
“Ghostbusters“	Ray Parker Jr.	Y
“Girls and Boys“	Good Charlotte	Y
“Grace“	Supergrass	Y
“I Want You Back“	Jackson 5	Y
“In Too Deep“	Sum 41	Y
“Kung Fu Fighting“	Carl Douglas	Y
“Let’s Dance“	David Bowie	Y
“Life is a Highway“	Rascal Flatts	Y
“Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)“	Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel
“Monster“	Automatic The Automatic	Y
“Naïve“	Kooks The Kooks
“The Passenger“	Iggy Pop	Y
“Real Wild Child“	Everlife
“Ride a White Swan“	T. Rex
“Rooftops (A Liberation Broadcast)“	Lostprophets
“Ruby“	Kaiser Chiefs	Y
“Short & Sweet”	Spinal Tap
“So What“	Pink	Y
“Song 2“	Blur	Y
“Stumble and Fall“	Razorlight
“Suddenly I See“	KT Tunstall	Y
“Summer of ‘69“	Bryan Adams
“Swing, Swing“	All-American Rejects The All-American Rejects	Y
“Thunder“	Boys Like Girls
“Tick Tick Boom“	Hives The Hives
“Two Princes“	Spin Doctors	Y
“Valerie“	Zutons The Zutons
“Walking on Sunshine“	Katrina & the Waves	Y
“We Are The Champions“	Queen	Y
“We Will Rock You“	Queen	Y
“Word Up!“	Korn
“You Give Love a Bad Name“	Bon Jovi

Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code, Angels and Demons, and most recently, The Lost Symbol, appeared on NBC on Friday to talk to Matt Lauer about the new book. Brown told a little bit about what is fact and what is fiction in his latest conspiracy tale set in Washington D.C. Here is the link to the transcript of the interview, in case you missed it, plus some video clips that may be of interest (such as a Sept. 15th interview w/Dan Brown about the Freemasons):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33280724/ns/dateline_nbc-newsmakers/

Ok, I just bought books from Amazon. “What?” you say, “You work in a library. Why are you buying yourself books?” Well, I’m going to let you in on a little bit of our buying process at the Avalon Library (specifically stated, because acquisitions policies in  libraries differ). The books that I bought are very specific to yoga and anatomy, subjects that I feel will not circulate well in the library. They are not general works on yoga, which might go out, but very specific works on a particular topic within the field of yoga.  So, I figured it was unethical for me to buy something that only I was likely to be interested in reading.

So, have you ever wondered why sometimes when you request a book from the library we purchase it, and sometimes we get it for you from another library (i.e. Interlibrary loan)?

There are a couple reasons why we buy a requested book: 1. We think it will be popular with  other patrons too. 2. It is too new to get from another library, even if we are not sure if it will be popular with other patrons. 3. It is a classic work and we think that we should have it in the collection, no matter what.

We will try to get the book from another library if: 1. The book is out of print. 2. The book is too specific to be of interest to our general population. 3. The book is expensive and does not merit acquisition, according to our criteria. Most likely, the book is out of print. Also, we will interlibrary loan books for book clubs if they are older and there is large demand for a short period of time (i.e. the month the club is reading the title). This saves precious room on our shelves.

Our library is small, and although we are fairly new (opened in November 2005), we have already had to discard a great many books (referred to in the business as “weeding”) for lack of space. Don’t worry–the books get good homes. We have learned that we are mostly a poplar reading library and not a reference or research library. We have few students, and even though we are connected to the K-8 school, the children’s non-fiction collection is sufficient to cover their research needs. When those students go to high school (and keep in mind a typical graduating 8th grade class in Avalon is between 8 and 15 students), they seem to use their school libraries or the Internet for projects rather than our library.

Essentially, we just don’t have the space to have the kind of subject depth that we would like. So, would I like to be able to have one or two books on yoga and anatomy on the shelves? Yes, absolutely. Does this seem unreasonable, it’s only 2 books, right? However, if the books will not circulate, they are not worth buying. We need to purchase what our patrons want. And while, yes, even though I work in the library, and I am a patron, I have an ethical dilemma considering I have the ability to make purchasing decisions. So, I bought the books for myself through Amazon with my own money and I will have them to keep.

But, there are a lot of books that I purchase for the library, read, put out on the shelf and market to our patrons, because I think that they are worthy of a look and that people will like them. So there’s a thought-process that goes into buying books. We carry the burden of representing the taxpayers and trying to reflect what items the taxpayers will want. With media, it’s a bit easier; we can’t seem to go wrong with DVDs and CDs. Everything we buy in these categories are popular and go out like crazy. But books are harder these days. The publishing industry overwhelms us with gems and tripe left and right. We who are charged with acquiring the books have the tools to view these items and reviews of these items in advance. This gives us the difficult task of trying to make an educated guess (and there are methods to help with this) of what will be the next best-seller, the next big hit. Often we hit the mark, and sometimes we take a chance and we bomb. But we try our best.

Hopefully you found this an interesting little slice of how we make some of our decisions in the library. I enjoy letting people in on the little secrets of the “back of the house.” Sorry, folks, no gossip, though

-contributed by staffer Shannon Wertzberger

Boingboing.net reports that a teenage boy is keeping a lending library of his school’s banned books (with an inventory and due dates and everything!) in an empty locker next to his. Demand was so great for particular books his school had banned, such as Catcher in the Rye (heaven forbid the kids get out of control if they read that oldy but goody). The article source was Yahoo Questions so the location of the school is not named but it sounds like it may be a parochial school.  It’s great! I’m so glad to hear that kids want to read so desperately that they are willing to run the risk of “illegal” libraries. Here are some of the books listed that the teenager has inventoried. Click here to read the full article.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
His Dark Materials trilogy
Sabriel
The Canterbury Tales
Candide
The Divine Comedy
Paradise Lost
The Godfather
Mort
Interview with the Vampire
The Hunger Games
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Animal Farm
The Witches
Shade’s Children
The Evolution of Man
the Holy Qu’ran
… and lots more.

source: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/24/kid-keeping-a-lendin.html

You must take this fun quiz, created by the Chicago Tribune, that judges whether you are a foodie, a Trekkie (I know, folks, the preferred term is “Trekker” but I still like Trekkie, so deal), or an NPR—what?—nerd? Junkie? Anyway, click below to take the quiz. I got a 93% (one question wrong, btw. Number 12. Guess that shows that I am all of the above.  What can you expect from a librarian anyway?)

Is it a Star Trek Character, an NPR Host or a Food Additive?

I just finished Tethered (click title to place a hold) by Amy MacKinnon last week and I have been recommending it to everyone since. Amy MacKinnon is a debut novelist and this book is such a success, IMO. MacKinnon slowly builds up a character study of a young woman who is a mortician. She is the person in the basement who handles the unpleasantness of death, the draining of the blood, the restoring of the facial features to comfort the grieving family members. She is sensitive to her charges, placing flowers with particular meanings, such as remembrance or innocence, in the casket with the dead.

You find that, although she has been virtually adopted by the owners of the funeral parlor, that she is much more comfortable with the dead than the living and that she may not have had the best of childhoods. One day she spies a young girl in one of the parlor rooms and speaks to her, trying to discourage her from playing in the funeral home. The girl becomes attached to her, however, and ends up coming back repeatedly. Suddenly a connection is made between the little girl and another similar girl found dead three years prior, abused and mutilated. The similarity is so close that the local police think she may be a sibling and can lead them to the killer.

I won’t say more but MacKinnon’s deft handling of character and plot are such that you want to devour the book and at the end you want even more.

Funny enough, I just came across this book as we were discarding it from our collection. It’s ironic considering that I just finished a novel about a mortician (see following post). It is an interesting contrast to the way we handle corpses and death in our society and how they handle it in modern Japan. Aoki has had vast experiences from village to city and he is frequently called in by police after investigations to take away the bodies. He propounds upon the modern Japanese view of death in comparison to life.

His own ideas of death and life are shaped by his career (which is considered unclean and shameful in Japan). He notes his extreme sadness as a bucket of water provided for him by a village elder to clean his hands is dumped against a bamboo tree and a blue dragonfly, full of eggs, drowns in the water. In spite of being in a household full of grieving relatives and villagers, the thing that touched him the most was the potential of the dragonfly so abruptly ended.

If anything, the book is an interesting contrast between Eastern and Western ideas and an insight into Buddhist thought. The endnotes were not overly enlightening, as they merely repeated the same things that you easily got in context within the sentence.

I still am just astounded by the coincidence of finding this book after reading Tethered, a novel about a female American mortician. Coffinman is an interesting book, with a lot of Buddhist ideas interspersed, which assumes a prior knowledge of not only Buddhism but the various sects of Buddhism which exist in Japan. I know a very little about Buddhism, through yoga practice, but I didn’t let myself get confused by the details and just tried to extract the overall view. If you are not interested in Buddhism, I also recommend reading this book just for Aoki’s experiences and skipping his propounding of Buddhist thought. Either way, the book is worth reading. For our patrons, since we just deleted the book from the collection, you’ll have to either Interlibrary Loan a copy through us or just ask me if you’d like to borrow it.

-contributed by staffer Shannon Wertzberger (@avalonlibrary)

White Nights (click title to request) by Ann Cleeves is the sequel to her first in the Detective Inspector Perez series, Raven Black (click title to request). I read the first voraciously but the second is a slower go. I can’t tell if it’s me or the book. I’ve started a couple books lately and can’t settle on any one to finish. The book itself is engaging, I think I just must have adult ADD!

The series is set in Scotland’s remote Shetland Islands, which is unusual and appealing. Cleeves describes the countryside and the lifestyle of the residents without overblown language or too much metaphor. You barely notice the description at all, a picture just forms naturally in your head. I feel that this is good, solid writing.

Perhaps I’m not getting as interested because from the very beginning you have no idea who the victim is and you don’t really feel empathy for the murdered man. This may change soon, but I am halfway through the book. I feel that when you don’t empathize with any of the characters that there may be a flaw in the characterizations. Or, again, maybe it’s just me. I will finish it, and I want to go to it when I have the time to read a few pages (contrary to popular belief, librarians have very little time to read on the job and probably less when they get home after work).

I’ll give a final update once I finish, but right now I just needed to vent. I’m going to go read a chapter or two before bed and see if I can go a little quicker, before I lose interest.

I highly recommend the first book, Raven Black. It was highly engaging and the plot left you twisting in the wind throughout. Another book that captures your imagination and keeps your attention.

I found this post on BoingBoing and it is a really interesting DIY project to make a purse (or a carrier) out of a stack of old books. It even has the vintage book-strap look! Click on the link below to view:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/10/25/howto-make-a-puse-ou.html

Provided by patron Doni Tamblyn:

ATTENTION BOOK DISCUSSION GROUPS!

Local author Donald Gallinger’s new novel, THE MASTER PLANETS (Kunati Books, September 2008), is getting strong national reviews and raves from readers. It also happens to be a highly discussable book, with discussion questions available online — and an author who loves meeting with book groups!

Here’s ForeWord Magazine’s review of the book:

In 1973, Peter Jameson was nineteen years old and preparing to conquer the world with his band, the Master Planets.  Then echoes of his Holocaust ancestry swept in.  The twin ordeals of having to deal with rapacious, dope-addled music executives while simultaneously coming to terms with his Jewish mother’s bloody past are the engines that drive this story.  The background, as Gallinger lays it out, is this:  Peter’s father, a Presbyterian doctor with the U. S. Army, rescues a woman who identifies herself as Rachel Arenberg from one of Hitler’s death camps.  The two marry and settle down in Sea Ridge, New Jersey, where he sets up a practice and she opens a flower shop.  Their first child is a daughter, Penny.  Three years later Peter is born.  At the age of nine, he discovers the Beatles and ten years hence is fronting and writing songs for his own band.

Idyllic and All-American as this may sound, Peter sees some ominous clouds.  His mother drinks too much, keeps a psychological distance from her children and husband and demonstrates a capability—even a zeal—for violence, as when she expertly overpowers and then brutalizes a drug addict who attempts to rob her store.  Just as Peter is immersing himself in ironing out a recording contract and a tour schedule for the Master Planets, a stranger appears at the family’s door who seems to know his mother well and who refers to her familiarly as “Leah.”  The consequences of this incident will, in the long run, do more to mark the course of Peter’s life than his beloved music.

Apart from Peter (who narrates the story) and his demon-haunted mother, Gallinger’s most fully realized character is the patient, all-knowing Daniel Gilaad, now an Israeli ambassador but once a Polish resistance fighter alongside Peter’s mother.  Each new conversation between the two men reveals more of the mother’s shadowy past. When Peter reluctantly sheds his rock ‘n’ roll dream to become a conniving real estate lawyer, it is Gilaad who serves as his de facto moral compass.

Gallinger deftly orchestrates this clash between the glitzy, egocentric rock world that first enchants Peter and the grim, self-sacrificing world his mother was forced to confront—and he does so without distorting or minimizing the significance of either.  With its smooth shifts from the balmy Jersey shores to the frozen Polish forests, this intriguing tale reads like a movie in embryo.

If interested, you may read the first chapter of the book here:

http://donaldgallinger.com/the-master-planets.html

To look at the suggested discussion questions:

http://donaldgallinger.com/book-discussion-questions.html

As mentioned, the author is delighted to meet whenever humanly possible with groups discussing his book. If your group plans to include THE MASTER PLANETS on its reading list and thinks it would like to invite Donald to the discussion, you may contact him at (609) 926-8194.

I just did the audio version of this book. The reader was just right, definitely portraying well the spunky, southern red-headed character. I will say that the book was pleasantly amusing, completely fantastic and, even with the fantasy element, just not special. It was just a below-average mystery with stereotypical characters and a bland yet ridiculous plot.

This website, Midomi, is pretty amazing. It can fairly relibably identify songs and artists by “listening” to  you humming or singing a snippet (not sure if it takes into account people who are tone deaf!). Check it out and try for yourself. It is free, but you have to register. It has some other functions where it can save your favorite songs, and some social networking functions, but mostly it’s just cool. We’ve all gotten songs stuck in our heads that we’d kill to identify. This saves you the embarassment of singing it to friends and coworkers. Plus, it would make a fun game for a half hour or so. Try to stump the computer by using songs you know, or by singing them slightly off-key. Ok, maybe my sense of fun is a little warped, or, dare we say, nerdy, but hey, like I said, it’s all free…

The Reader, with Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, is an absolutely Oscarworthy film. It is sincere, realistic, and moving with being melodramatic. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, because there are important things I don’t want to give away if you haven’t seen it, but to summarize: It begins with Ralph Fiennes as a middle-aged man, who obviously has difficulty with relationships.

The bulk of the film takes place in his past, 1958 Berlin, when he, as 15 year old Michael, has a summer-long affair with a 35 year old woman, Hanna. She asks him to read to her from his school work. She leaves town without a word to Michael after the summer and he does not see her again until he is in law school in 1966. His seminar is attending a very-well publicized trial of thirteen women who are on trial for being Nazi guards at Auchwitz. There, he sees that one of the women is Hanna. How he deals with the presence of Hanna, the outcome of the trial, and how an adult Michael uses this traumatic episode as a focal point of his life, are all part of the profound story told here.

The movie haunted me for two days after, and I spent seemingly every moment trying to assess Hanna’s character, trying to deal with the workings of her mind–psychologically and physiolgically. Again, I can’t go on without giving away key plot elements. I highly recommend this film. I’d like to also read the novel, to see how the two compare and to see if I can gain more insight into this enigmatic character.

This movie (of which I got a sneak peek, since it’s not due out on DVD until this upcoming Tues. 2/17) was hysterical. First off, I love Simon Pegg (of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz). He is a supurb comedian, master of physical comedy and intellectual comedy, as well as low-brow comedy. The plot summary from Internet Movie Database is as follows:
“Sidney Young is a disillusioned intellectual who both adores and despises the world of celebrity, fame and glamor. His alternative magazine, Post Modern Review, pokes fun at the media obsessed stars and bucks trends, and so when Young is offered a job at the diametrically opposed conservative New York based Sharps magazine its something of a shock! It seems Sharps editor Clayton Harding is amused by Young’s disruption of a post-BAFTA party with a pig posing as Babe. Thus begins Sidney’s descent into success – his gradual move from derided outsider to confidante of starlet Sophie Maes – and a love affair with colleague Alison Olsen, that will either make him or break him.”  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455538/plotsummary

Alison Olsen is played by Kirsten Dunst, who is not one of my favorite actresses, but in this role I liked her, she fit the bill perfectly. And it’s always nice to see Jeff Bridges (as Sharps editor, Clayton Harding) in a good role.  There was a Lebowski reference in the movie as well as several others from previous Simon Pegg movies.

Overall, I give this movie an A as far as comedy and romance and highly recommend it.

On Saturday March 21st the library will be showing the movie Twilight, based on the book by Stephanie Meyer, starring Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.  The movie, which was released in November 2008, has grossed over $370 million worldwide.

The library programming committee met in mid February and discussed the possibility of obtaining a license to show feature films.  While doing research for this we found out that enough  studios were covered to make going ahead with the license worthwhile.   During the process  we discovered that while the studio (Summit Entertainment) that made Twilight wasn’t covered under the yearly license, we were able to obtain a one time use license to show it.

Having read all the books and seen the movie four times I am excited to be able to show it to the library community.  I went to see the movie for the first time without having read any of the books but the excitement that my sister, who had read the book, felt was contagious.  After I saw the movie the  first time I immediately wanted to read the book, which I did within a matter of days.  I had never understood the Twilight phenomenon, but once I started the first book I couldn’t wait to read the others, and am now anxiously awaiting the release of the second movie New Moon on November 20th, 2009.

The movie, which is rated PG-13, will be shown in the gym on the library’s large screen.  Children ages 13 and under need to be accompanied by a parent or guardian.  There is no food or drink allowed in the gym and all backpacks must be left in the rear of the room.

Since we now have the unlimited license, the library is happily accepting recommendations for future movie nights.  All recommendations may be submitted to mdevine@avalonboro.org or 609-967-5900 ext.3152

I hope you can join us at our first event!

Here’s a book series for you that is part DaVinci Code, part Indiana Jones adventure: Sacred Bones and Sacred Blood, novels by Michael Byrnes. Here’s the review from Booklist: Booklist 2009-03-01 In The Sacred Bones (2007), Charlotte Hennessy, an American geneticist, made a startling discovery: the bones of an ancient crucifixion victim are almost certainly those of Jesus Christ. Charlotte managed–barely– to escape the clutches of a Vatican-based conspiracy to keep the existence of the bones a secret, and now, in this fast-paced follow-up, she is once again being targeted. This time, however, it’s because she has DNA extracted from the bones running through her bloodstream–the DNA of Christ himself, which comes with some very special powers. The religious thriller exploded with the publication of The Da Vinci Code, and fans may be beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed with the sheer quantity of titles vying for their attention. Readers of The Sacred Bones should have no trouble finding this one, but others may need a gentle push in its direction. The novel will never be confused with great literature, but it keeps you entertained for the duration with a mix of suspense and a premise that, however outlandish, proves difficult to abandon. David Pitt. 272pg. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2009.

So, I’m back down here in Crystal City for the Computers In Libraries Conference (cherry blossom time again!) and I was on the Metro on the way to the hotel when I noticed an interesting ad on the wall of the car. It was for a newly released book called Drood by Dan Simmons. It’s a work of historical suspense fiction that takes the position that Charles Dickens went around the bend after his wife died and delved into the most unseemly parts of London by night, and possibly committed foul acts. We received a pre-pub copy at the library a few months ago after reading the first chapter and being unimpressed by the style of writing, I put it down. But I really thought it interesting that the publisher is taking out ads on the Metro. Now, DC is a cultured city, if you go by the advertising in the area: plays, social causes, museums and also books. The book ad surprised me, though, because you don’t expect to see them on a train. But then, lots of people read on the Metro so what better place to catch interest? P.S. I have a habit of trying to nonchalantly look at what people are reading as they are riding. Yesterday I saw a man in his late twenties reading Revolutionary Road (the movie-tie in paperback with DiCaprio and Winslet on the cover).

[forgive the bad camera work. This was taken while I was standing in a jolting Metro car with a cell phone camera!]

Well, I haven’t been on blogging this conference as much as last year’s, the main reason being that there is no time during the day and at night the Wi-Fi is bogged down horribly. My main complaint from last year seems to have been addressed, (yeay user surveys!) that the descriptions for some programs were not accurate and many of the seminars were geared toward academic libraries. Several of the seminars were divided up, like CMS for Public Libraries, and CMS for Academic Libraries. That was nice so I knew which one to avoid. However, the pickings were slim as far as decent seminars to attend. They did the whole Open Source track again, and nothing seems to have changed there and I didn’t want to just repeat for the fun of it. Another track was entirely social networking and mobile apps for libraries (like making an app for iPhone kinda stuff), which doesn’t really apply to our library. I did one seminar about using blogs as webpages, and that was useful. I didn’t know that you could download Blogger and Word Press software for free and host it on your own website host (therefore giving you more control over the site and also giving you your desired URL). I have definitely extracted many useful things from this conference and the big book of collected slide presentations will be a useful object to have at hand, and I plan to go through and explore sources listed therein. Overall, it’s been a good conference and at least I didn’t have to worry about conflicting seminars, since there wasn’t too much that bowled me over as far as selection. Maybe this isn’t one of those conferences to attend two years running. Oh well…next year I’d like to go to the Innovative Users Group anyway, since that’ll be back on the East Coast. But stay tuned for some great pictures I took of the Cherry Blossom Festival yesterday and some other sights along the way. I was going to photoblog this whole thing, but you know, you can only look at so many strangers up at a podium and the back of other strangers’ heads before you get bored. I’m saving you all the trouble! You can thank me by sending me chocolate chip cookies! Shannon

I saw this on the way back from the Cherry Blossom Festival and thought, “How appropriate!” This is now my favorite offering by the National Park Service!

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Samples of the Tulip Library:

This is a little sad, considering it was a decent encyclopedia program, one of the first to replace physical encyclopedias. Here’s the link to the Yahoo blog article explaining more

Of course, my husband’s first comment when I told him was, “Oh, yeah! Encarta! I forgot all about that…”

Click thumbnails to see larger image

-contributed by staffer Shannon Wertzberger

This particular site (MusicPlasma.com)has been around for a while now (about 5 years), and I had forgotten about it until recently. The idea is that you enter a band or musician that you like and a word cloud of related/similar bands will appear, those closest being the most closely related, the ones farther out being less similar. Each band cloud can be clicked on to see similar bands to those bands.

They have added movies and actors, but I still find the music the most effective search. Go check it out–it’s worth hours of fun

P.S. On the left-hand side is a link that will link the selected band to Amazon, where you can listen to free sample clips to see if you like the band.

Since we just showed Doubt at the library movie night, I thought it would be interesting to create a little poll. Tell us what you think, if you’ve seen the movie!

My husband sent me a post from the popular blog Boing Boing about a new website, in beta (public trial mode), BookArmy.com, that aims to “link every book and every author on earth.” It’s an interesting concept and a potentially great tool to find new books and authors. I’d like to see it again when it becomes more well-used and fleshed out. I signed up as a user and made suggestions for similar books to Twilight, but I found that suggesting the books was very frustrating. Adding three at a time was unweildy, since every second choice I made would invalidate the first. So I finally went in and one by one added three books. This is a beta so these are the kind of things they are working to fix. I highly recommend signing up and suggesting books you like that may be similar to other books you’ve read. This will help BookArmy be more successful. Like I said, I love the idea.

How it will compare to databases to find books that we pay for our users to use, like Novelist Plus (you’ll need your library card number handy to see this)? I don’t know. I doubt it will ever be as good as a professionally created database, but it has the advantage of being free and open on the web. To use Novelist you have to be a member of a library that pays for a subscription.

Here’s the post (oh, and let me just say to Steve Jobs, “So, people don’t READ anymore? Au contraire, pal”):

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/22/bookarmy-a-lastfm-fo.html

BookArmy: a last.fm for books
Posted by Cory Doctorow, April 22, 2009 10:40
Mark sez,

Bookarmy.com is a London-based start-up aiming to be the last.fm of books — and we’re gathering steam on our mission to link every book and every author on earth.

A month into public beta, the site’s already throwing up some curious connections. Neil Gaiman and Lewis Caroll? Ray Bradbury and George Orwell? Charles Stross and Fyodor Dostoevsky? Anything goes: Bookarmy recommendations are generated by members themselves, who can mix and match similar reads from a full bibliographic database. The site also give readers space to host online libraries of their favourite books — and compares their tastes to refine its recommendations.

Big-name authors already active on Bookarmy include ‘Alchemist’ author Paulo Coelho and ‘Jumper’ scribe Steven Gould. Publisher HarperCollins recently took a stake in the business, which should mean not just bags of multimedia on the way but potentially access to all manner of great content as the ebook revolution gathers pace!

Book Army (Thanks, Mark!)
posted in: Book , Happy Mutants