Featured Author: Lev Grossman

Author Lev Grossman was no stranger to writing when his first book came out in 1997.  His parents are the poet Allen Grossman and the novelist Judith Grossman, and his twin brother is the author Austin Grossman. In addition to writing fiction, Lev Grossman is also the book critic at Time magazine, and has been published in many other periodicals, including  the Believer, the New York Times, Wired, and Salon. His second book, Codex, became an international bestseller in 2004, and he has really hit his stride with the publication of the fantasy fiction Magicians Trilogy, which began in 2009.

The Magicians Trilogy is the story of Quentin Coldwater, a high school senior obsessed with a series of fantasy novels set in a land called Fillory. Upon his admittance to an exclusive college of magic, Quentin discovers that Fillory is real. George R.R. Martin called The Magicians "thoroughly adult, his narrative dark and dangerous and full of twists"; Patrick Rothfuss said "[m]ost people will like this book. But there’s a certain type of reader who will enjoy it down to the bottoms of their feet"; and Cory Doctorow said it "may just be the most subversive, gripping and enchanting fantasy novel I’ve read this century". The series is considered to be dark urban fantasy.

Codex [eAudio]
About to depart on his first vacation in years, Edward Wozny, a hotshot young investment banker, is sent to help one of his firm's most important and mysterious clients. His task is to search their library stacks for a precious medieval codex, a treasure kept sealed away for many years and for many reasons. Enlisting the help of passionate medievalist Margaret Napier, Edward is determined to solve the mystery of the codex-to understand its significance to his wealthy clients, and to decipher the seeming parallels between the legend of the codex and an obsessive role-playing computer game that has absorbed him in the dark hours of the night.

Magicians Trilogy

The Magicians [eBook, eAudio]
Like everyone else, precocious high school senior Quentin Coldwater assumes that magic isn't real, until he finds himself admitted to a very secretive and exclusive college of magic in upstate New York. There he indulges in joys of college-friendship, love, sex, and booze- and receives a rigorous education in modern sorcery. But magic doesn't bring the happiness and adventure Quentin thought it would. After graduation, he and his friends stumble upon a secret that sets them on a remarkable journey that may just fulfill Quentin's yearning. But their journey turns out to be darker and more dangerous than they'd imagined. Psychologically piercing and dazzlingly inventive, The Magicians, the prequel to the New York Times bestselling book The Magician King and the #1 bestseller The Magician's Land, is an enthralling coming-of-age tale about magic practiced in the real world-where good and evil aren't black and white, and power comes at a terrible price.

The Magician King [eBook]
Quentin Coldwater should be happy. He escaped a miserable Brooklyn childhood, matriculated at a secret college for magic, and graduated to discover that Fillory—a fictional utopia—was actually real. But even as a Fillorian king, Quentin finds little peace. His old restlessness returns, and he longs for the thrills a heroic quest can bring. Accompanied by his oldest friend, Julia, Quentin sets off—only to somehow wind up back in the real world and not in Fillory, as they’d hoped. As the pair struggle to find their way back to their lost kingdom, Quentin is forced to rely on Julia’s illicitly learned sorcery as they face a sinister threat in a world very far from the beloved fantasy novels of their youth.

The Magician's Land [eBook, eAudio]
Quentin Coldwater has been cast out of Fillory, the secret magical land of his childhood dreams. With nothing left to lose he returns to where his story began, the Brakebills Preparatory College of Magic. But he can't hide from his past, and it's not long before it comes looking for him. Along with Plum, a brilliant young undergraduate with a dark secret of her own, Quentin sets out on a crooked path through a magical demimonde of gray magic and desperate characters. But all roads lead back to Fillory, and his new life takes him to old haunts, like Antarctica, and to buried secrets and old friends he thought were lost forever. He uncovers the key to a sorcery masterwork, a spell that could create magical utopia, a new Fillory--but casting it will set in motion a chain of events that will bring Earth and Fillory crashing together. To save them he will have to risk sacrificing everything.

*book descriptions are provided by the publisher unless otherwise noted
  

Science & Technology Staff Picks

Library staff don't just check out books to you - we read them, too! Many branches have staff pick displays which you can browse. Here are some staff picks in science, social science, and technology from various staff members.  Would you like to see more staff picks in different categories on abcreads?  Let us know in the comments! Also, make sure you check out our Best of 2014 Staff Picks and our Staff Picks in the catalog.

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin 

From one of our foremost thinkers and public intellectuals, a radical new view of the nature of time and the cosmos. What is time? This deceptively simple question is the single most important problem facing science as we probe more deeply into the fundamentals of the universe. All of the mysteries physicists and cosmologists face--from the Big Bang to the future of the universe, from the puzzles of quantum physics to the unification of forces and particles--come down to the nature of time. The fact that time is real may seem obvious. You experience it passing every day when you watch clocks tick, bread toast, and children grow. But most physicists, from Newton to Einstein to today's quantum theorists, have seen things differently. The scientific case for time being an illusion is formidable. That is why the consequences of adopting the view that time is real are revolutionary. Lee Smolin, author of the controversial bestseller The Trouble with Physics, argues that a limited notion of time is holding physics back. It's time for a major revolution in scientific thought. The reality of time could be the key to the next big breakthrough in theoretical physics. What if the laws of physics themselves were not timeless? What if they could evolve? Time Reborn offers a radical new approach to cosmology that embraces the reality of time and opens up a whole new universe of possibilities. There are few ideas that, like our notion of time, shape our thinking about literally everything, with huge implications for physics and beyond--from climate change to the economic crisis. Smolin explains in lively and lucid prose how the true nature of time impacts our world.  Staff review: Lee Smolin is the guy to turn to for arguments that time is not an illusion, and that physics is stuck because we don't understand it.  

The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle Over General Relativity 

by Pedro G. Ferreira

At the core of Einstein's general theory of relativity are a set of equations that explain the relationship among gravity, space, and time--possibly the most perfect intellectual achievement of modern physics. For over a century, physicists have been exploring, debating, and at times neglecting Einstein's theory in their quest to uncover the history of the universe, the origin of time, and the evolution of solar systems, stars, and galaxies. In this sweeping narrative of science and culture, Pedro Ferreira explains the theory through the human drama surrounding it: the personal feuds and intellectual battles of the biggest names in twentieth-century physics, from Einstein and Eddington to Hawking and Penrose. We are in the midst of a momentous transformation in modern physics. As scientists look farther and more clearly into space than ever before, The Perfect Theory engagingly reveals the greater relevance of general relativity, showing us where it started, where it has led, and where it can still take us.  Staff review: A great book about the history of General Relativity, full of new insights about the theory as well as the people.  

The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorn 

Interstellar, from acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan, takes us on a fantastic voyage far beyond our solar system. Yet in The Science of Interstellar, Kip Thorne, the physicist who assisted Nolan on the scientific aspects of Interstellar, shows us that the movie's jaw-dropping events and stunning, never-before-attempted visuals are grounded in real science. Thorne shares his experiences working as the science adviser on the film and then moves on to the science itself. In chapters on wormholes, black holes, interstellar travel, and much more, Thorne's scientific insights many of them triggered during the actual scripting and shooting of Interstellar, describe the physical laws that govern our universe and the truly astounding phenomena that those laws make possible.  Staff review: Kip Thorne was the science consultant for the movie, and he's also one of the top experts on relativity and worm-holes.  It's lot's of fun, and well grounded and speculative, with great pictures.

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow 

The best-selling author of The Drunkard's Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), gives us an examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world and how, for instance, we often misperceive our relationships with family, friends, and business associates, misunderstand the reasons for our investment decisions, and misremember important events. Your preference in politicians, the amount you tip your waiter, all judgments and perceptions reflect the workings of our mind on two levels: the conscious, of which we are aware, and the unconscious, which is hidden from us. The latter has long been the subject of speculation, but over the past two decades researchers have developed remarkable new tools for probing the hidden, or subliminal, workings of the mind. The result of this explosion of research is a new science of the unconscious and a sea change in our understanding of how the subliminal mind affects the way we live. Employing accessible explanations of the most obscure scientific subjects, the author takes us on a tour of this research, unraveling the complexities of the subliminal self and increasing our understanding of how the human mind works and how we interact with friends, strangers, spouses, and coworkers. In the process he changes our view of ourselves and the world around us. 

Staff review: Spooky! 

Going Viral by Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley  

We live in a world where a tweet can be instantly retweeted and read by millions around the world in minutes, where a video forwarded to friends can destroy a political career in hours, and where an unknown man or woman can become an international celebrity overnight. Virality: individuals create it, governments fear it, companies would die for it. So what is virality and how does it work? Why does one particular video get millions of views while hundreds of thousands of others get only a handful? In Going Viral, Nahon and Hemsley uncover the factors that make things go viral online. They analyze the characteristics of networks that shape virality, including the crucial role of gatekeepers who control the flow of information and connect networks to one another. They also explore the role of human attention, showing how phenomena like word of mouth, bandwagon effects, homophily and interest networks help to explain the patterns of individual behavior that make viral events. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from the Joseph Kony video to the tweet that spread the news that Osama Bin Laden was dead, from the video of Homer Simpson voting in the US elections to the photo of a police officer pepper-spraying students at the University of California Davis, this path-breaking account of viral events will be essential reading for students, scholars, politicians, policymakers, executives, artists, musicians and anyone who wants to understand how our world today is being shaped by the flow of information online.

 Staff review: A fascinating and timely study.

*book description is provided by the publisher unless otherwise noted

Scully & Mulder Write! (But Not About the X-Files)

You can stream all the seasons of Friends on Netflix. Twin Peaks is coming back to TV! People are brushing the dust off their Doc Martens and buying new scrunchies, because the '90s are back in style!  That's what we've read, anyway. But we're starting to believe it now that Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny have both published fiction within 4 months of each other!  (Guess they got really in sync all those years as Scully and Mulder on The X-Files, which, by the way, is also rumored to also be making a comeback.) Interestingly, Gillian Anderson's book is science fiction and Duchovny's is a humorous fable.  Of course, we're only basing this on their X-Files characters, but that's not what we would have expected from them!

How about you? Would you check out a novel by Anderson and/or Duchovny? What do you think of celebrity authors?

 

Vision of Fire by Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin

Book one of the Earthend Saga. Juggling her career, parenting responsibilities and lackluster dating life, child psychologist Caitlin O'Hara begins treating an ambassador's daughter, who starts having fits and speaking in tongues right before children throughout the world demonstrate similar mystical symptoms.

Holy Cow: A Modern-Day Dairy Tale by David Duchovny

A rollicking, globe-trotting adventure with a twist: a four-legged heroine you won't soon forget. Elsie Bovary is a cow, and a pretty happy one at that--her long, lazy days are spent eating, napping, and chatting with her best friend, Mallory. One night, Elsie and Mallory sneak out of their pasture; but while Mallory is interested in flirting with the neighboring bulls, Elsie finds herself drawn to the farmhouse. Through the window, she sees the farmer's family gathered around a bright Box God--and what the Box God reveals about something called an "industrial meat farm" shakes Elsie's understanding of her world to its core. There's only one solution: escape to a better, safer world. And so a motley crew is formed: Elsie; Jerry--excuse me, Shalom--a cranky, Torah-reading pig who's recently converted to Judaism; and Tom, a suave (in his own mind, at least) turkey who can't fly, but who can work an iPhone with his beak. Toting stolen passports and slapdash human disguises, they head for the airport. Elsie is our wise-cracking, pop-culture-reference-dropping, slyly witty narrator; Tom--who does eventually learn to fly (sort of)--dispenses psychiatric advice in a fake German accent; and Shalom, rejected by his adopted people in Jerusalem, ends up unexpectedly uniting Israelis and Palestinians.  Feeling nostalgic?  The X-Files are in the library catalog!   *all book descriptions are taken from the library catalog unless otherwise noted   

On John Green's Response to the Quote He Never Said

This week, one of my colleagues alerted me to an article about John Green and a quote that has been attributed to him, but was not actually written by him in any of his books. The Swiss Army Librarian posted about it, as did the Copyfight blog, and an interesting topic came up: the fact that because of digital rights management (DRM), an author was not able to search his own copy of an eBook to see if he had written the quote that has been attributed to him.

Let's start with this: What is digital rights management? According to the American Library Association, "the purpose of DRM technology is to control access to, track and limit uses of digital works." For eBooks, this means DRM "limit[s] copying, printing, and sharing of eBooks," according to Wikipedia.

Now, let's take it back to John Green. He needed to find out if the quote that was being attributed to him all over the Internet was, in fact, something he had actually written. The easiest way to do this? Check the book that the quote was said to come from, of course. With DRM, you might not be able to do that, so John Green illegally downloaded a copy of a book he had written, just so he could search the text for the quote. And for many, this is problematic, because, as the Copyright blog pointed out, DRM can prevent authors from doing things such as sharing samples of their books, or, in a case like John Green's, searching the text for a specific quote or passage.

As it turns out, John Green is just plain awesome, because once he confirmed that he didn't write the quote being attributed to him, he decided that his store, which was selling posters with that quote on it, would pay royalties to the person who did originally say the quote. That person turned out to be a thirteen year old Nerdfighter. In addition, John Green loved another image that person had on her Tumblr so much that they started selling that poster, too--with royalties going to the Nerdfighter.

I love this about John Green because he could have continued to accept the quote as being his, without researching it further, as he had done for several years, and instead, he not only said that the quote is not his, but he gave credit where it was due, and he took it a step further by deciding to pay the person royalties from posters already sold with that quote. I also love it because in his vlog where he discusses what happens, he touches on copyright and intellectual property, which is always an important issue to talk about. Here's the video.



I can't write this blog post without using John and Hank Green's catchphrase: Don't forget to be awesome. Because in this case, John Green didn't forget.

Want to know more about DRM? Check out the following websites.


Boing Boing: Here, author Cory Doctorow writes about DRM and why he believes it to be so problematic.
EPIC Digital Rights
Wikipedia

New and Novel: The Short Form - Essays and Stories

Short stories may have grown out of the fables of Aesop in the 6th century BCE, or out of the oral storytelling tradition. Up until the 18th century in Europe, a popular short story form was the anecdote ["a brief realistic narrative that embodies a point", Wikipedia]. However, the first proper collections of short stories were thought to have appeared in the early 1800s. In the early 1900s, short stories were flourishing due to publication in periodicals such as The Strand, the Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, and others. Since 1945, short story collections continue to be published, but their popular readership has declined. Alice Munro brought the form back into the spotlight with to her 2013 Nobel Prize win. In an interview, Munro said:

Interviewer Adam Smith: And the award will bring a great new readership to your work ...
Alice Munro: Well I would hope so, and I hope this would happen not just for me but for the short story in general. Because it's often sort of brushed off, you know, as something that people do before they write their first novel. And I would like it to come to the fore, without any strings attached, so that there doesn't have to be a novel.

Essays, on the other hand, can be directly traced back to their French origin - Michel de Montaigne was the first to popularize this term in the 1500s, from the French "essayer" [to try or to attempt]. Since this term came into fashion, in the 18th and 19th centuries, many essays were written for public consumption, and may have contributed to the rise of magazine publication. Essays have been used a forum for politics, literary criticism, and more, and have found a place in education, with students being assigned essays to improve their writing skills.

At abcreads we have a romantic vision of both these forms - Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner publishing their short stories during the Jazz Age; Southern story writers such as Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O'Connor at work in the 1950s, Porter writing amidst her travels and O'Connor, debilitated by lupus, writing from her family farm in Georgia; Thoreau and Emerson's Transcendentalist essays celebrating nature; philosophers such as Voltaire, Francis Bacon, and Samuel Johnson scribbling their essays by candlelight during the Age of Enlightenment.

All that said, we hope you'll find something to enjoy from this list of some of the new and novel offerings of the short form, essays and stories, from the library catalog.

Essays and Miscellany

Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London by Mohsin Hamid

The Expo Files: Articles By the Crusading Journalist Stieg Larsson by Stieg Larsson

Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms edited with an introduction by Alan Ziegler

Ham - Slices of a Life: Essays & Stories by Sam Harris

What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Jo Walton

I See You Made An Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories From the Edge of 50 by Annabelle Gurwitch

Study in Perfect: Essays by Sarah Gorham

100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater by Sarah Ruhl

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontes, and the Importance of Handbags by Daphne Merkin

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit

Spent: Exposing Our Complicated Relationship with Shopping edited by Kerry Cohen

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair edited by Graydon Carter

The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison

Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East by Nathan Deuel

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm

Short Stories

Lucky Alan: And Other Stories by Jonathan Lethem

A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction by Terry Pratchett

Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman

High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread by Joyce Carol Oates

Karate Chop: Stories by Dorthe Nors

The Strange Case of Rachel K by Rachel Kushner

Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet

Wallflowers: Stories by Eliza Robertson

The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons by Heather A. Slomski

Now We Will Be Happy by Amina Gautier

American Innovations by Rivka Galchen

The Wilds by Julia Elliott 

Crow Fair: Stories by Thomas McGuane

Links

A Short History of the Short Story [Prospect]

A Brief History of the Short Story in America [Critical Mass]

In Praise of the American Short Story [New York Times]

A brief survey of the short story [Guardian series]

17 Personal Essays That Will Change Your Life [Buzzfeed]

150 Great Articles and Essays [The Electric Typewriter]

An Accidental Fan

I came home from work one day to find my husband sitting on the couch, watching a Nickelodeon cartoon.  I sat down next to him in a state of annoyed curiosity to see what this nonsense was all about.  It turned out to be, as I suspected, obnoxious!  And he kept doing it!  What's worse, I got drawn in and found myself on the couch for a full episode, slightly annoyed, but also intrigued by characters and a plot that seemed to be deepening.  After another episode, I didn't even find the show obnoxious, but funny and endearing - completely kid friendly, but apparently also fun for adults.  Before I knew it, I was in love with the epic little show:  Avatar, The Last Airbender!

Here's the background: the earth is divided into four nations: airbenders, earthbenders, firebenders, and waterbenders.  Individuals from these realms have mastery over their namesake element, but the nations are not at peace with one another.  To make a bad situation worse, the Avatar, the peacekeeper of all the nations, master of all four elements, has been missing without a trace for 100 years.  At the inception of the series, a brother and sister discover the Avatar frozen in ice, and they free him.  What follows is a rollicking adventure that takes the trio to the corners of the world and the edges of themselves.

The 3 season series ended all too soon for me, but the ending was a satisfying one.  I was excited to discover that there is a sequel series in progress called The Legend of Korra, and began to watch it after taking a break to recover from the epic-ness that was Avatar. (I am still a little surprised at how attached I became to a Nickelodeon cartoon - even as a kid I didn't like cartoons).  The Legend of Korra continues the story of the Avatar, with plenty of references to the original story, 70 years after Avatar, The Last Airbender ends.  It, too, is a high quality show.  The bad news is, our DVD collection does not include The Legend of Korra.  The good news is, we have Avatar, The Last Airbender! 

We also have copies of the comic book series that sprang up, which takes place after the Avatar cartoon episodes end, and before The Legend of Korra begins.  These are entitled the same as the cartoon they are based on, and they are just as good because after so many episodes of Avatar, you can imagine the characters' voices as you read (or is that just a weird thing I do?). 

Another product of Nickelodeon's show was a 2010 movie of the same title.  I cannot recommend the movie, however.  Even watching the trailer told me, among other things, that the movie has little semblance to the show, and where is it similar, it simply does not possess the same likeability.  In fact, on Rotten Tomatoes, a site where critics rate movies as "rotten" or "fresh," the movie was decidedly rotten, with only 6% rating it positively.  To be fair, it would be difficult to successfully cram 3 seasons of a great show, with lots of character development, taking place over lots of time, neatly into an hour and forty minute block of time.  And, hey, if you're not going to bother with the cartoon series, it's possible the movie wouldn't be so bad.  You can find out for yourself, because we do have copies.

Take a look at all of the above by clicking these links to our catalog:

The Cartoon Series On DVD

The Comics

The Movie

Is there anyone else out there who has fallen in love with a cartoon (book, movie) they thought they would hate?  Please share in the comments!

Also, check out Lomas Tramway's Graphic Novel Book Club!

African-American History Month: Books for Children & Teens

February is African-American History Month! To honor this event, we've taken a page from Left Bank Books' Black Lives Matter reading list* with our attempt to compile a list of books for children and teens which provide "history and context" for issues of race in the United States. Our list, like Left Bank Books', is also not comprehensive, but reflects some of the offerings on this topic available in the library catalog. You will find more titles using a subject search of African Americans History Juvenile or Civil Rights History Juvenile. 

Is there a book you'd like to recommend for young readers?  Let us know in the comments! 

Easy 

Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins by Carole Boston Weatherford

Freedom Summer by Debbie Wiles

Seeds of Freedom: The Peaceful Integration of Huntsville, Alabama by Hester Bass

Sugar Hill: Harlem's Historic Neighborhood by Carole Boston Weatherford

Harlem Renaissance Party by Faith Ringgold


Children's

Many Thousand Gone: African Americans From Slavery to Freedom by Virginia Hamilton

One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker by Patricial Hruby Powell

My Name is Truth: The Life of Sojourner Truth by Ann Turner

Harlem Hellfighters by J. Patrick Lewis

The Girl from the Tar Paper School: Barbara Rose Johns and the Advent of the Civil Rights Movement by Teri Kanefield

Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up By Sitting Down by Andrea Davis Pinkney  

Harlem Summer by Walter Dean Myers

Courage Has No Color: The True Story of the Triple Nickles - America's First Black Paratroopers by Tanya Lee Stone

Seven Miles to Freedom: The Robert Smalls Story by Janet Halfmann 


Young Adult


The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Steve Sheinkin

Because They Marched: The People's Campaign for Voting Rights That Changed America by Russell Freedman

Fire in the Streets by Kekla Magoon

No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson


Links

A Guide to Teaching and Talking about the Civil Rights Movement With Books for Children & Teens [Scholastic]

The Black Lives Matter Reading List: Books to Change the World [MPR News]
 
Black Lives Matter: A Reading List [Left Bank Books] *