P-R-E-S-S-U-R-E

It's that time of year again.  Time for the Scripps National Spelling Bee!  Started in 1925, this annual tradition is going strong with 281 finalists this year.  The last winner from New Mexico was Blake Giddens in 1983 with the word "Purim".

Photo Credit

You can explore behind the scenes with the Oscar nominated documentary Spellbound, which follows competitors of the 1999 spelling bee through preparation and the finals.  There's also the more mainstream Akeelah and the Bee.

The spelling bee can draw on words from all languages, but if your interest is whetted, the library has a number of books on etymology, including:

Spell It Out: the Curious, Enthralling and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling
Spellbound : the Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: the Untold History of English
and
Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 pages.

Lastly, there's always The Professor and the Madman about the collaboration which led to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Last year's winning word was "knaidel".  Tune in to ESPN at 6 p.m. (or watch the live stream) to watch the finals and root for this year's stellar spellers!

Phenomenal Woman

Photo Credit

Author and poet Dr. Maya Angelou passed away today after a long illness.  Ms. Angelou's words have filled the lives and libraries of those in New Mexico and around the world.  She won many awards and inspired even more.

Although lives can rarely be reduced to sound bites, many of her notable quotations can be found, including these from Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.

The library has several works by her, including "I know why the caged bird sings" as well as biographies.

She is survived by her son Guy Johnson.  Mr. Johnson was once asked if he ever felt he had grown up in her shadow, to which he responded that he "grew up in her light."  We are lucky that we also got to share in that light and today honor this Phenomenal Woman.

New and Novel Graphic Novels

Long dismissed as a less serious art form, graphic novels have finally started to gain more mainstream credibility over the last 20 years... The world of the graphic novel is one that spans a wide range of authors, artists, styles, and subject matter... While the distinction between graphic novels and comic books gets dicey (the term “graphic novel” was only introduced in the late 1970s), for [our] purposes...they are lengthier, meatier book-like works — and they’re all brilliant for both their literary and visual merit.
~ Brie Hiramine, "25 Essential Graphic Novels"

Graphic novels are a genre close to my reading heart. While I confess to a lack of expertise in the field of manga and only a nodding acquaintance with superhero comics (and I welcome your recommendations on these subjects!), I love to read all sorts of other graphic novels.  Sometimes other adults ask, "What's the appeal?" It's hard to pin down into words.  I've long been an avid comic reader, starting with Tintin, Asterix, Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes, Doonesbury, and Archie back in my childhood, so I've always been drawn to the medium. Perhaps it is just the combination of "literary and visual merit" in the quote above - words and pictures on the page together managing to appeal to both my English major's love of literature and my sense of aesthetics (I am very picky about the art in graphic novels in much the same way a bad reader can ruin an audiobook for me).

I asked a couple of friends what the appeal of comics was to them. We discussed whether or not, as one person said, reading comics is "like a combination of reading a book and watching a movie". Sometimes a comic will contain extras such as a copy the writer's working "script" before the art is added, and one friend was quite interested in how the comic's writer seemed to be storyboarding the action for the illustrator, including instructions such as "The scene has shifted to the next day, so the characters should be wearing different clothes". We agreed that reading comics and/or graphic novels is a fast medium, and details are easily absorbed visually.  Even though you are still only using one sense, sight, with comics you take in more sensory detail.  As another friend said:

You can do that with comics, create that immersion and empathy.  That gutter I mentioned [the space between the panels where the reader's imagination completes the story] is part of why.  Your brain is being stimulated, through language and image, to experience with all your senses, as well as emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, whatever-allys the comic's creators are adept enough to reach.  The reader in the gutter is the one actually pulling it all together, fitting the pieces of the puzzle, participating in its creation.  The comic itself is just a series of guideposts, instructions for a scavenger hunt - turn the corner here, shuffle that cobblestone, watch for the rusty nail - too late!, and then what's next?

Alas, one my friends said when he tried to suggest a graphic novel to his book club, almost none of the club's members read it and a few who tried were confused by the genre - they professed to not understand how to read comics, or at least to not understand how to follow the action from panel to panel across the page. I guess there will always be people who don't like or don't get the appeal of comics, but those who do can be pretty diehard - Albuquerque alone has two comic book conventions and at least seven dedicated comic stores.

Others sometimes ask, "What's the difference between comics and graphic novels?" Wikipedia defines the difference thusly:

A graphic novel is a book made up of comics content. Although the word "novel" normally refers to long fictional works, the term "graphic novel" is applied broadly, and includes fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work. It is distinguished from the term "comic book", which is used for comics periodicals.

That definition can be a point of contention. Writers such as Alan Moore (Watchmen), Jeff Smith (Bone), and Neil Gaiman (Sandman) have objected to the term "graphic novel" as unnecessary and/or pretentious. The author Douglas Wolk said:

Comics are not prose. Comics are not movies. They are not a text-driven medium with added pictures; they're not the visual equivalent of prose narrative or a static version of a film. They are their own thing: a medium with its own devices, its own innovators, its own clichés, its own genres and traps and liberties. The first step toward attentively reading and fully appreciating comics is acknowledging that. 

Whether you want to call them graphic novels or comics, there are a lot of good ones out there on a lot of different topics.  There are graphic (or "visual") memoirs and biographies, graphic short story collections, classics of the canon adapted to a graphic format.  There is a graphic version of the U.S. Constitution. There are graphic versions of Game of Thrones, the Millennium Trilogy, and Laurell Hamilton's Anita Blake series for adults, and graphic versions of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and Blue Bloods for teens. Don't hesitate to check the graphic novel bounty available in the library catalog - a search of "graphic novels" is easy-peasy in Encore, and using the categories in the left sidebar (format, collection, tag) will help you to limit your search!

For your convenience, we have compiled a list of graphic novels from the library catalog to get you started - some new, some novel, some both. The graphic novels listed are recommended for young adult to adult readers, unless otherwise noted. 

Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni

The Red Ruby by Lars Jakobsen [YA]

On the Ropes by James Vance and Dan E. Burr

Persia Blues: Volume 1 by Dara Naraghi & Brent Bowman

Rage of Poseidon by Anders Nilsen

The Property by Rutu Modan

The Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg

Bad Houses by Sara Ryan

World Map Room by Yuichi Yokoyama

Incidents in the Night: Bk 1 by David B.

Fanny & Romeo by Yves Pelletier, Pascal Girard

Mind the Gap - Vol. 1 : Intimate Strangers by Jim McCann

The Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire

A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return by Zeina Abirached [YA]

Little White Duck: A Childhood in China by Na Liu and Andrés Vera Martínez (J)

Steve Jobs: Genius By Design by Jason Quinn

Corto Maltese: The Ballad of the Salt Sea by Hugo Pratt

Dominique Laveau, Voodoo Child - Volume 1: Requiem by Selwyn Seyfu Hinds

Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer by Trina Robbins (J)

Vietnamerica: A Family's Journey by GB Tran

Bad Habits: A Love Story by Cristy C. Road [eBook]

The Rime of the Modern Mariner by Nick Hayes

Miss Don't Touch Me by Hubert

Berlin: City of Stones by Jason Lutes

Howl: A Graphic Novel by Allen Ginsberg

Bandette: In Presto! by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover (J)
         
The Comic Book History of Comics  by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey


If you are a fan of this genre, the Lomas Tramway Library has a Graphic Novel Club for Adults!

Links

2014 Eisner Award Nominees   

The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards are considered the “Oscars” of the comics world. Named for the pioneering comics creator and graphic novelist Will Eisner, the awards are given out in more than two dozen categories during a ceremony each year at Comic-Con International: San Diego. 

Comic Books vs. Graphic Novels: Let's Find a Good Fit For You!

Talking Comics with Scott McCloud

Understanding comics: Scott McCloud  on TED.com 

Excerpt: 'Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean' 

Comic Books: A freakish kind of writing

Top 10 Graphic Novels 2014

What's in a Title?

After doing a blog series about judging books by their covers, I started thinking about book titles. Some titles stand out more than others, and I often find myself reading things (or not reading things) based on their titles. Here are ten of my favorite young adult book titles.

Note: For this post, I'm not showing the book covers. I think it's important to let the titles stand on their own when it comes to judging them.

Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira

What isn't intriguing about this title? I want to know who is writing love letters to the dead and why, and why the letters are love letters.

Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler

When I look at this title, all I can think is, "This has to be good."

If We Survive by Andrew Klavan

If we survive what? The zombie apocalypse? A toronado? A shipwreck? This title is full of possibilities.

I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga

Why? What could possibly make someone want to hunt killers? Unless the person hunting killers is in law enforcement, I want to know more about who's hunting killers and why.

What We Saw at Night by Jacquelyn Mitchard

What you see at night is likely very different than what you see during the day. Of course I want to know what they saw at night, and why they were even awake late at night.

#scandal by Sarah Ockler

Hashtags are becoming more and more common--they aren't just on Twitter anymore. The fact that this title is a hashtag makes me curious about what the scandal is, and why it's gone viral.

The Book of Broken Hearts by Sarah Ockler

With a title like this, the story is bound to be good.

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

It's hard not to assume that this book is about Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. What I want to know is, what did she do that was so awful she deserves to die?

My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher

This is another title that easily leads to assumptions about the book. Even though I can figure out why the sister lives on the mantelpiece, I want to know how she got there and what it means for her family.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Days of Blood and Starlight, and Dreams of Gods and Monsters by Laini Taylor

I'm cheating a little, since I'm counting three titles as one. It's impossible not to love all the titles in Laini Taylor's series. They definitely make me want to know more about the books.

What are your favorite book titles?

If you like Game of Thrones...

HBO's Game of Thrones gallops apace through Season 4!  If you are a fan, we can't recommend highly enough George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books, on which the series is based.  However, if you've already read all the books (we're on tenterhooks for the next title, The Winds of Winter - still no release date listed on Martin's website, but he has been tantalizing us with excerpts!) or perhaps want to skip the books to avoid spoilers, we have compiled a list of some other titles that might tickle your fancy.


Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners by Ellen Kushner

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin [eBook]

Acacia by David Anthony Durham

Dune by Frank Herbert

A Cruel Wind: A Chronicle of the Dread Empire by Glen Cook [eBook]

Gardens of the Moon: Book One of the Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey

Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb [eBook]


Looking for more readalikes?  If you search for books from the series in the catalog, you can scroll down past the "Copy Status/ More Details/Find Similar Items"  to find Reader Ratings and Reviews, a list of Books in the Series, and You Might Also Like These...Series, Titles, and Authors!

Of interest to Game of Thrones fans


A Game of Thrones - Volume 1: The Graphic Novel by George R.R. Martin

The Hedge Knight: The Graphic Novel by George R.R. Martin

A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Companion Cookbook by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer [eBook]

Inside HBO's Game of Thrones by Bryan Cogman

Game of Thrones DVDs

A Song of Ice and Fire
...audiobooks 
...eAudiobooks 

 
Links

What Will Be The Next 'Game of Thrones?' We've Got Some Ideas

Goodreads: Popular Game of Thrones Readalikes

Happy 100th Birthday Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel was born on May 16, 1912 in New York City. He was a prolific journalist, radio interviewer, and oral historian, who authored numerous books. Studs Terkel won two Pulitzer Prizes for his books: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974) and The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1984). Studs Terkel started his career in the New Deal's WPA (Works Progress Administration) Writers Division in radio. Terkel attributed his excellent interviewing skills to listening respectfully to his subjects. He focused on topics such as The Great Depression, American history, work, jazz, civil rights, and spirituality. Terkel died on October 31, 2008 in Chicago, Illinois.

Studs Terkel : A Life In Words by Tony Parker

Hard Times : An Oral History of the Great Depression  

Hope Dies Last : Keeping Faith In Difficult TimesAnd They All Sang : Adventures Of An Eclectic Disc Jockey 

Touch and Go : A Memoir 

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections On Death, Rebirth, and Hunger For a Faith

The Spectator

Coming Of Age : The Story Of Our Century By Those Who've Lived It

My American Century

Chicago

Minding Our P's & Q's



Celebrate National Etiquette Week on May 14 -18, 2014. This week focuses on etiquette and protocol in every area of life - business, social, dining, travel, weddings, and online life. It is a week to celebrate and focus on kindness, civility, manners, gratitude, and respect for each other. Our library offers a plethora of classic and contemporary tomes of propriety that will address everything from table manners to technology.

Emily Post's the Etiquette Advantage in Business, 3rd edition : Personal Skills for Professional Success by Peter Post with Anna Post, Lizzie Post and Daniel Post Senning

Emily Post's Etiquette by Peggy Post

Talk To the Hand : The Utter Bloody Rudeness Of the World Today, Or, Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door by Lynne Truss

Essential Manners For Men: What To Do, When to Do It, and Why by Peter Post

Letitia Baldrige's More Than Manners! : Raising Today's Kids to Have Kind Manners and Good Hearts by Letitia Baldrige

Miss Manners'® Guide To a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding by Judith Martin, Jacobina Martin

Miss Manners' Guide to Domestic Tranquility : The Authoritative Manual for Every Civilized Household, However Harried by Judith Martin

Miss Manners Rescues Civilization : From Sexual Harrassment, Frivolous Lawsuits, Dissing, and Other Lapses In Civility by Judith Martin, illustrations by Daniel Mark Duffy

Multicultural Manners : New Rules Of Etiquette For a Changing Society by Norine Dresser

Social Q's : How to Survive the Quirks, Quandaries, and Quagmires of Today by Philip Galanes.

An Uncommon History of Common Courtesy : How Manners Shaped the World by Bethanne Patrick