150th Anniversary of the Civil War

On April 12th, 1861 the first shot was fired on Fort Sumter, S.C. and thus began the American Civil War. It has remained a steadfast interest in the minds of many Americans, through research, the reading of old diaries, and through re-enactments of actual battles. ABC Libraries has over 1200 items listed from a keyword search, "History--United States--Civil War, 1861-1865" and this list includes, audiobooks, movies, fiction titles for adults and children, non-fiction titles and genealogical materials currently located at the Main Library 2nd floor.

A sampling of a few of our newest items include:

--A new 3 volume DVD set titled The American Civil War.

--The Crossing by author Gilbert Morris. It is a new Christian fiction series subtitled "The Last Cavaliers" with Stonewall Jackson as one of it's main characters.

--A children's novel titled Will at the Battle of Gettysburg, 1863 by Laurie Calkhoven. There are also several well-known and not so well-known titles that you can check out.

--You Wouldn't Want to be in the First Submarine!: An Undersea Exploration You'd Rather Avoid: The story of the H.L. Hunley geared to juvenile audiences.

--The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, considered to be one of the best novels ever written about Gettysburg and a Pulitizer Prize winner. A prequel novel Gods and Generals was written by Shaara's son Jeff and centers around four leaders, Joshua Chamberlain, Winfield Scott Hancock, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and the journey each of them takes from 1858 to the battle of Gettysburg in 1863. You can also check out the two movies based on these books, Gettysburg, starring Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee, Jeff Daniels as Joshua Chamberlain and Tom Berenger as James Longstreet and the follow-up movie Gods and Generals with Robert Duvall as Robert E. Lee, Stephen Lang as Stonewall Jackson and Jeff Daniels reprising his role as Joshua Chamberlain.

--The three volume set The Civil War, a Narrative by Shelby Foote. Volume 1 is Fort Sumter to Perryville, Volume 2 is Fredericksburg to Meridian and Volume 3 is Red River to Appomattox. The link will allow you to choose which volume you would like to check out.

--The Confederate War by Gary Gallagher is a history and social work on the Confederacy.

--Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson is a one-volume history on the war that can be read by novices and academics alike.

--Glory is a story of the 54th Massachusetts regiment from it's inception by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw to it's demise at Fort Wagner is a compelling movie starring Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington. Winner of three Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor for Denzel Washington.

--The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane was published in 1895 and has long been read by millions of students throughout the country. You can also watch the DVD directed by John Houston, starring Audie Murphy as the young soldier Henry Fleming.

--New Mexico had a crucial, if not limited role in the Civil War; some of the works we have include Pati Nagle's works The Guns of Valverde and Glorieta Pass as well as Distant Bugles, Distant Drums by Flint Wheelock, to name a few.

--Of course no list would be complete without mentioning Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell and the equally brilliant DVD, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable.

This list is just a sampling of the large collection the library has of the Civil War and if you need something that ABC libraries does not have, be sure to check out Interlibrary Loan program to see if we can find it for you.

The Wilder Life

I recently got hold of an advance copy of Wendy McClure's The Wilder Life (I sometimes review books for Librarything's Early Reviewers). Subtitled "My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie", it is a wonderfully entertaining look-particularly for someone who grew up in the '70s, when the book series reached an epic popularity-at the works & life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Those who read the Little House series as a child should definitely check out this book-you won't want to miss Wendy's detailing of her obsession with "Laura World", which takes her through buying a butter churn on e-Bay to homesteading lessons to pilgrimages to sites from the book (including a stay in a sleeping wagon at the Ingalls Homestead in De Smet, South Dakota).

Here are some of the locations Wendy McClure visited:

Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home & Museum

Ingalls Homestead ("Laura's Living Prairie")

Little House on the Prairie (Independence, Kansas)

Little House Wayside

Walnut Grove, Minnesota

I was happy to see that ABC Libraries owns some of the background titles referred to in The Wilder Life:

Laura: The Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Donald Zochert

The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Classic Stories by Barbara M. Walker

On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri in 1894 by Laura Ingalls Wilder (with a setting by Rose Wilder Lane)

West from Home: Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder to Almanzo Wilder, San Francisco, 1915 edited by Roger Lea MacBride

Searching for Laura Ingalls: A Reader's Journey by Kathryn Lasky & Meribah Knight

The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane by William Holtz

The library system also owns many other titles on the subject of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Reading The Wilder Life made me want to reread the Little House books as an adult-though I'm not sure I'll be churning butter or travelling to De Smet anytime soon-even though the book does deal with some of the questions surrounding how fictionalized the series was, some of books' prejudices (particularly towards Native Americans) & the troubled life of Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.

I also found myself waxing nostalgic for other children's books classics I read in the same period: Anne of Green Gables & Emily of New Moon, both by L.M. Montgomery; Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott; All-of-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor; & the Betsy-Tacy-Tib books by Maud Hart Lovelace, even though Wendy McClure writes

"I don't have a sister, but for a time, while growing up, I had Laura Ingalls... Plenty of [books] offered surrogate sisterhood through their chacters, but none filled the need the way the Little House books did. I enjoyed Little Women, but the March sisters were a self contained bunch, the four of them so chummy together that I could only be an onlooker at their attic plays and Christmas mornings. Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables was a little more solitary, but she seemed awfully needy. I loved that Laura World was full of wide open spaces that expressed the sort of not-alone lonesomeness that I often felt. One frontier seemed to stand for another."

Right on, sister.

A Day in the Library Life

Well, perhaps a day in the library life is not exactly like the video above. But it has a lot of the elements...bookdrop, Information Desk, customers needing assistance.

Recently the staff at my library kept track of the kinds of questions we were asked during the average day. For instance:

--Library cards: We created 10 new customer records! We also answered questions like "The machine says my card is invalid, why is that?" [Most of the time, the card has expired or your record is open in 2 locations, such as check-in & check-out.]

--Location, location, location: a good deal of the library day involves helping people find things, as you might imagine-the restrooms, the holdshelves, the book return, the DVDs, the study rooms. We also might get questions like "How are the holdshelves organized?" [Alphabetically, by the customer's last name.]

--Reference: In an average day, we might get asked (in person or by phone) for book recommendations, help placing holds, help renewing items, to print a document off a USB drive, how to download books, & for help on the computer (ranging from "I can't get on the internet" to "Can you help me create a resume?").

In addition to the basic reference questions, we might get something a little out of the ordinary, such as:

• "How many hits on Electrical Sensitivity?" (Google site hits)


• "What sounds do horses make & what are the names of those sounds?"


• "I need a book about Joan of Arc. Not a novel. Not what she might have done."


• "Do you have any books about maneaters?"


• "Do you have any books about parkour?"


• "What were Ancient Egyptian cosmetics made of?"


• "I just moved to New Mexico. Can you tell me information about New Mexico counties, county seats, & general New Mexico demographics?"


• "I'm teaching an editing class-can you recommend some badly written books?"

The great thing about working in the library is you never know what kind of people, questions, & situations you'll run across in a day. Some days you get a hard reference question, & you end up researching online & in books for quite some time. Some days you find yourself tied to the public computers-either there are lots customers needing assistance, or something is wrong with the system. Other days, you end up helping little kids find picture books, or there's an interesting program going on that you get to look in on, or a customer introduces you to something cool (a book or movie, perhaps) that you hadn't heard of before.

Featured Author: Steve Hockensmith

(Cowboys + Mystery Fiction) x (Zombies + Romance Fiction) = What Next?


Author Steve Hockensmith is making a name for himself with entertaining, genre-blending fiction series.

First in the saddle is the Holmes on the Range series, cowboy mysteries set in the 1890s. Cowboy brothers Otto “Big Red” Amlingmeyer and Gustav “Old Red” Amlingmeyer are just two more cowhands drifting between jobs, until the fateful night when they read something new around the campfire: a Sherlock Holmes story. Old Red finds a purpose in life, starts "detectiving" (with Big Red as his Watson), and their lives will never be the same as they pursue mysteries amid stampedes, rustlers, Holmes-hating English aristocrats and a cannibal named “Hungry Bob.”

The series follows their adventures as they seek to mix cowboy wisdom with Holmes's methods in a time and place where justice was often swift, sometimes arbitrary, and most folks just didn't have a clue what a clue was.

Holmes on the Range (2006)

On the Wrong Track (2007)

The Black Dove (2008)

The Crack in the Lens (2009)

World's Greatest Sleuth (2011)

To see how other authors are working with Arthur Conan Doyle's legacy, visit the Sherlock Holmes Universe LibGuide.

Hockensmith went another direction in 2010, proving himself a master of the mashup (a current term for pastiches that blend several genres) with the release of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, the followup prequel to 2009's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by "Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith." Both titles were New York Times bestsellers.



His next installment in these monstrous adaptations of a classic is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After, wherein the new Mrs. Darcy is faced with the problem of having to deal with husband Fitzwilliam being bitten by an "unmentionable." This third book promises to be as popular as the first two. Visit Steve Hockensmith's website for information on these works and what mashups he might be tackling next.

See what other (non-monstrous) authors are doing in the Jane Austen Universe.

More monstrous Jane Austen mashups:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance -- now with ultraviolent zombie mayhem! by "Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith"

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by "Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters"

Mr. Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange

Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford -- featuring Jane Austen herself as a deathless bookstore owner!

Celebrate National Poetry Month!

In her poem, “A Word with You”, Elizabeth Bishop observes that “Bright objects hypnotize the mind.” When our glittery public discourse becomes addled or trivial or shrill, it’s a relief to spend time under the spell of well placed words, genuine feelings, and vivid images. Welcome to National Poetry Month, our annual respite and reminder to share and celebrate the uniquely human art of poetry!

Poems are not puzzles to solve or riddles to answer. Each poem combines words, images, and emotions, all deployed at maximum power, designed to reveal a moment and reverberate beyond it. A good poem articulates something its reader hasn’t been able to express. Some of the pleasure of reading poetry is the relief of this discovery: someone has said what, before we found this poem, we weren’t able to say ourselves.

The ABC Libraries Poetry Page offers many opportunities for both readers and writers to play among the poems, and as always, we have books! I highly recommend:

--Gwendolyn Brooks’s Selected Poems: The poet who brought you “We Real Cool” does the most amazing things with words.

--Garrison Keillor’s compilations Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times. Keillor’s collections mix wonderful contemporary poems with wonderfully familiar poems from centuries past. Either is a great introductory anthology for the reluctant poetry reader.

--Ron Koertge’s The Brimstone Journals: this story-in-poems for young adults builds suspense as high school students react to potentially explosive pressures in their lives.

The following titles can be found in the children’s collection, but I recommend them for adults, too. There are delightful poems in all of these for adults and kids to share:

--Tomie dePaola’s Book of Poems: dePaola’s illustrations complement the selections beautifully.

--A Child’s Anthology of Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Hague Sword and Virginia McCarthy: the scope and variety of the poems in this collection keep me coming back to it again and again.

and finally,

Ogden Nash’s Custard the Dragon is the tale of a cowardly dragon. Or is it? Seriously silly.

If you’re already a poetry fan, April is your month to wallow in what you love. If you’re tentative about poetry, it’s a chance to explore, to find a poet or a poem that speaks to you, that you can return to again and again when you need some good company. Also check out our Poetry Month LibGuide for tips on writing poetry, poetry events @ your library, & more!

Written by Eileen O'Connell of the San Pedro Library staff.

Blended Genres

Library Journal had an interesting article this month called "Crossing Boundaries: The Pleasures of Blended Genres". In it, the editor & members of the 2010–11 Reading List Council (RUSA’s committee to select the best genre titles of the year) recommend 6 novels that "while too blended to exemplify the best of a genre, undoubtedly offer readers of all genres great ­pleasure".

The novels are:

The City & the City by China Miéville ("fantasy novel–cum–hard-boiled detective story")

Mister Slaughter* by Robert McCammon ("part thriller, part historical fiction, and part horror tale", this is McCammon’s third Colonial adventure involving Matthew Corbette-the other 2 are Speaks the Nightbird & The Queen of Bedlam)

Who Fears Death* by Nnedi Okorafor ("Quests and magical apprenticeships are familiar fantasy elements, but this moving and unique novel also features strong touches of literary fiction and a far-future setting more often found in SF.")

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni ("The scholarly blending of biblical and mythical lore as well as historical and political references greatly enriches this contemporary epic fantasy while the multilayered plot and sustained suspense also make it an adrenaline-paced thriller.")

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake ("blending women’s and historical fiction")

The Passage by Justin Cronin ("a grand mix of horror, apocalyptic SF, and thriller")

Have you read any good books lately that blended genres?

Or, for the list of the top genre titles of 2011, check out the RUSABlog (RUSA is the American Library Association's Reference & User Services Association).

*not in the ABC Libraries' catalog

Yes, You Can Write a Script in April!

From the website: "Script Frenzy is an international writing event in which participants take on the challenge of writing 100 pages of scripted material in the month of April. As part of a donation-funded nonprofit, Script Frenzy charges no fee to participate; there are also no valuable prizes awarded or 'best' scripts singled out. Every writer who completes the goal of 100 pages is victorious and awe-inspiring and will receive a handsome Script Frenzy Winner's Certificate and web icon proclaiming this fact."


The Info

Who: You and everyone you know. No experience required.

What: 100 pages of original scripted material in 30 days. (Screenplays, stage plays, TV shows, short films, and graphic novels are all welcome.)

When: April 1 - 30. Every year. Mark your calendars.

Where: Online and in person (if you want!). Hang out in the forums, join your fellow participants at write-ins, and make friends by adding writing buddies online.

Why: Because you have a story to tell. Because you want a creative challenge. Because you’ll be disappointed if you missed out on the adventure. Because you need to make time for you.

How: Sign up. Tell everyone that you are in the Frenzy. Clear your calendar. (U.S. participants: Get your taxes done now!) Start some wrist exercises. Have fun!


The 5 Basic Rules of Script Frenzy

1) To be crowned an official Script Frenzy winner, you must write a script (or multiple scripts) of at least 100 total pages and verify this tally on ScriptFrenzy.org.

2) You may write individually or with a partner. Writing teams will have a 100-page total goal for their co-written script or scripts.

3) Script writing may begin no earlier than 12:00:01 AM on April 1 and must cease no later than 11:59:59 PM on April 30, local time.

4) You may write screenplays, stage plays, TV shows, short films, comic book and graphic novel scripts, adaptations of novels, or any other type of script your heart desires.

5) You must, at some point, have ridiculous amounts of fun.


For books on writing screenplays, try a subject search in the library catalog under Motion Picture Authorship or Television Authorship. For tips on creating a graphic novel, check under Graphic Novels - Authorship.

There will be 3 Script Frenzy write-ins at the Cherry Hills Library on Saturdays in April: on the 16th, 23rd & 30th, from 2-5 p.m. Join us if you're looking for a place to write or a place to meet with other Script Frenzy participants for help getting started, to discuss plot problems, or just get a little support!