Today we had a visit from the Van of Enchantment featuring the exhibit Trails & Tales. Our intrepid roving reporter Mercedes snapped some photos of the event.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Well Done
I think I've written before about my obsession with cookery. However, since I just finished reading (with gusto) Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw, I thought now might be a good time to talk about new cookbooks in the library system.A keyword search by "cooking" (sorted by date) will show you the latest additions to our catalog-including offerings from Emeril, Jillian Michaels, & local author Deborah Madison-& will also show you if we have any upcoming cooking classes. Some of the latest finds I have savored:
Life's Too Short to Chop Onions: 99 Dishes to Make When You'd Rather Be Doing Something Else by Kitty Greenwald
This small volume had some good, easy recipes. Plus the author has a fun style-chapters have clever titles like "Shut the Oven Door and Run".
Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin
This is one of those "memoirs with recipes". Possibly the best of its kind!
Taste of Venice/Brunetti's Cookbook by Roberta Pianaro & Donna Leon (recipes by Roberta Pianaro ; culinary stories by Donna Leon)
Taste of Venice has exquisite recipes-some of the meat & fish dishes have ingredients like cuttlefish, which I'm not sure how to find, & veal, which I don't care to eat, but there are many other delights to choose from. None of the recipes are more than a couple of pages in length, most are less, & all are straightforward, if not easy. The cookbook is enhanced by mouth-watering excerpts from Donna Leon's mystery series & essays about Venetian life on culture by Leon & Roberta Pianaro.
A co-worker has been watching Daisy Martinez on PBS & loving her, so I thought I would put in a plug for her new cookbook: Daisy, Morning, Noon, and Night: Bringing Your Family Together with Everyday Latin Dishes. Another co-worker is enjoying the recipes from The French Women Don't Get Fat Cookbook by Mireille Guiliano.
I'm also curious to take a look at: Yum-Yum Bento Box: Fresh Recipes for Adorable Lunches by Crystal Watanabe and Maki Ogawa; Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater by Matthew Amster-Burton; & The Lost Art of Real Cooking: Rediscovering the Pleasures of Traditional Food, One Recipe at a Time by Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Man on Wire
On August 7, 1974, French stuntman Philippe Petit walked a tightrope strung between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. This iconic event has recently been the subject of 2 movies & 2 books that you can find in the library's catalog! Man on Wire is the film based on Petit's own memoir. This excellent documentary incorporates Petit's personal footage to show how he overcame seemingly insurmountable challenges to achieve the "artistic crime of the century".
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann is a novel that uses the 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers as a central motif to join together several storylines. This novel got a starred review from Booklist & was one of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2009.
The Man who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein is a children's book about the event. A companion film was also made. The book won the 2004 Caldecott Medal.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Gashlycrumb 2010
I am a huge fan of the late writer & artist Edward Gorey (you might recognize his art from the opening titles of the PBS show Mystery). Wikipedia says: "Gorey's illustrated (and sometimes wordless) books, with their vaguely ominous air and ostensibly Victorian and Edwardian settings, have long had a cult following"-& I am a devout follower. So I am always glad to find a fellow fan, as I did today in the author Carolyn Parkhurst.
One of my favorite Gorey books is the gloriously macabre Gashlycrumb Tinies (I have a poster of it in my house & frequently wear the matching T-shirt)-you can view it online here, from "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs" to "Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin". Carolyn Parkhurst has updated Gorey's words for 2010. Read her version here, from "A is for Avery, whose Wii was miswired" to "Z is for Zuma, who died of the snark" & see how you think her version compares.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Getting Ready for A Wizard of Earthsea
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It's time to start reading A Wizard of Earthsea for our online reading group! Don't forget to post comments & questions either on the blog or on the abc book banter forums.Click here to visit the official website of Ursula K. Le Guin-the site links to articles, biography, bibliography, & includes selected works by Le Guin onsite!
About the author:
Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, where she grew up. Her parents were the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi. She went to Radcliffe College and did graduate work at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953; they have lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1958, and have three children and four grandchildren.
Ursula K. Le Guin writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children's books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts. She has published seven books of poetry, twenty-two novels, over a hundred short stories (collected in eleven volumes), four collections of essays, twelve books for children, and four volumes of translation.
Most of Le Guin's major titles have remained continuously in print, some for over forty years. Her best known fantasy works, the six Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home redefine the scope and style of utopian fiction, while the realistic stories of a small Oregon beach town in Searoad show her permanent sympathy with the ordinary griefs of ordinary people. Among her books for children, the Catwings series has become a particular favorite. Her version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, a translation she worked on for forty years, has received high praise.
Three of Le Guin's books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, SFWA's Grand Master, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, etc.
Le Guin leads an intensely private life, with sporadic forays into political activism and steady participation in the literary community of her city. Having taught writing workshops from Vermont to Australia, she is now retired from teaching. She limits her public appearances mostly to the West Coast.
[abridged from her website]
Some things to think about as you delve into your reading:
About the author:
Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, where she grew up. Her parents were the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi. She went to Radcliffe College and did graduate work at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953; they have lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1958, and have three children and four grandchildren.
Ursula K. Le Guin writes both poetry and prose, and in various modes including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children's books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts. She has published seven books of poetry, twenty-two novels, over a hundred short stories (collected in eleven volumes), four collections of essays, twelve books for children, and four volumes of translation.
Most of Le Guin's major titles have remained continuously in print, some for over forty years. Her best known fantasy works, the six Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home redefine the scope and style of utopian fiction, while the realistic stories of a small Oregon beach town in Searoad show her permanent sympathy with the ordinary griefs of ordinary people. Among her books for children, the Catwings series has become a particular favorite. Her version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, a translation she worked on for forty years, has received high praise.
Three of Le Guin's books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors her writing has received are a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, SFWA's Grand Master, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, etc.
Le Guin leads an intensely private life, with sporadic forays into political activism and steady participation in the literary community of her city. Having taught writing workshops from Vermont to Australia, she is now retired from teaching. She limits her public appearances mostly to the West Coast.
[abridged from her website]
Some things to think about as you delve into your reading:
Ged grows up in the course of this novel. What are the qualities that mark him as childish in his early youth? What are the qualities that mark him as adult at the end?
What meanings are associated with Ged's Shadow? Why does it flee from him when he begins to pursue it?
Discuss pride. Is it Ged's pride that causes all his problems? Is the shadow a part of Ged's pride? Is pride always a bad thing? Are there times when pride is appropriate?
Discuss names. Names are important to a lot of cultures. Name one culture that treats names in a similar fashion to this novel. Why is it important to Ged that he not reveal his name to anyone?
What are the rules that govern magic in Earthsea? What can magic do and what is impossible using magic?
This novel is similar to traditional fairy tales in which characters succeed by confronting frightening beings, such as "Hansel and Gretel" and "Little Red Riding Hood." What are the similiarites & differences between those fairy tales & this novel?
The Big Read's A Wizard of Earthsea Reader's GuideFriday, July 30, 2010
Man Booker Prize for Fiction Longlist is Announced
I have probably mentioned this before, but I have been a follower of the Booker Prize since I read my first prizewinner, Keri Hulme's The Bone People, in high school. Every year I am on tenterhooks as first the longlist is announced, then the shortlist, & finally the winner!
This year's Man Booker Dozen (must be like a baker's dozen-there are 13 books) was announced on July 27th:
- Peter Carey, Parrot and Oliver in America
- Emma Donoghue, Room
- Helen Dunmore, The Betrayal
- Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room
- Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
- Andrea Levy, The Long Song
- Tom McCarthy, C
- David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
- Lisa Moore, February
- Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
- Rose Tremain, Trespass
- Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap
- Alan Warner, The Stars in the Bright Sky
For more information on the Man Booker Prize, head to their website. A shortlist of six will be announced on September 7th and the winner will be revealed on October 12th.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Voices from the Past
Suddenly, two authors long deceased are speaking to us again.
After 100 years of simmering, the first volume of Mark Twain's unexpurgated autobiography is about to be published. "Versions of the autobiography have been published before, in 1924, 1940 and 1959. But the original editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, was a stickler for propriety, cutting entire sections he thought offensive; his successors imposed a chronological cradle-to-grave narrative that Twain had specifically rejected, altered his distinctive punctuation, struck additional material they considered uninteresting and generally bowed to the desire of Twain’s daughter Clara, who died in 1962, to protect her father’s image," says the article in the New York Times.
In the late 1950s, English students at the University of Virginia were treated to a series of lectures by William Faulkner, then writer-in-residence. These lectures were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes that have since been digitized & published online. Check the UVA website's "Faulkner in Virginia" to listen to Faulkner lecturing & taking questions from students.
After 100 years of simmering, the first volume of Mark Twain's unexpurgated autobiography is about to be published. "Versions of the autobiography have been published before, in 1924, 1940 and 1959. But the original editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, was a stickler for propriety, cutting entire sections he thought offensive; his successors imposed a chronological cradle-to-grave narrative that Twain had specifically rejected, altered his distinctive punctuation, struck additional material they considered uninteresting and generally bowed to the desire of Twain’s daughter Clara, who died in 1962, to protect her father’s image," says the article in the New York Times.In the late 1950s, English students at the University of Virginia were treated to a series of lectures by William Faulkner, then writer-in-residence. These lectures were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes that have since been digitized & published online. Check the UVA website's "Faulkner in Virginia" to listen to Faulkner lecturing & taking questions from students.
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