Blog Post
International Read Comics in Public Day!!
by anned
This Saturday, (August 28--the birthday of Jack “King” Kirby), join fellow comic book enthusiasts in dispelling a stigma. Read a comic book in a public setting—a park bench, a beach, a bus, your local library. Let strangers see you reading a piece of sequential art. Let the world know once and for all that Comics is not a genre, it's a format—there's something for everyone.
You can find comics to read in public at AADL.
Blog Post
Performance Network: Peggy Guggenheim comes alive on stage
by annevm
Until Sept. 6, Performance Network is staging Woman Before a Glass, a one-woman play by Lanie Robertson. In the much praised PN production, Naz Edwards plays art collector Peggy Guggenheim who tells her life story, covering the death of her father on the Titanic and saving art from the Nazi invasion of Paris. She also talks about her famous lovers, including Miro, Dali and Picasso. If you want to read about Guggenheim (1898-1979), try or her autobiography Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict.
Blog Post
Love is a Mix Tape
by Caser
The mix tape lives on! It's not spooled inside a 3"x4" piece of plastic any more; instead, it's on an iPod playlist or on sites like 8 Tracks, but the idea of assembling the perfect collection of songs to capture just the right moment in your life is alive and well. Rob Sheffield, writer for Rolling Stone magazine, believes in the magic of the mix tape. It helped him meet his wife, Renee, and their funny, real, and ultimately heartbreaking story is chronicled in his book, Love is a Mix Tape.
Rob Sheffield is unabashedly obsessed with music. On his variously themed mix tapes -- the Party Tape, the I Want You Tape, or the You Broke My Heart and Made Me Cry and Here Are Twenty or Thirty Songs About It Tape -- one might find anything from ELO to Biggie to Big Star to Eric Carmen, etc. There is no genre of music that Sheffield doesn't connect with on some level, which means there is a song (or at least a lyric) alluded to in this book for everyone. Almost every chapter is another year in his life with Renee, and each starts with the track list of a mix tape representing that year, from their first meeting in 1989 to her sudden, tragic death in 1997, and ending in the mid 2000s.
The adventures of these music geeks had me alternately laughing and crying as they trade vocals on Hall & Oates songs, dig through moldy vinyls, invent names for their imagined synth-pop duo, and find Jackie Kennedy's documentary LP, Portrait of a Valiant Lady, a solace for deepest grief. A great book for music lovers and anyone who's ever believed in true love.
Blog Post
Kid Bits - Mysteries Gr 3-6
by ryanikoglu
Andrew Clements is a genius of writing youth novels under 200 pages with storylines that can keep adults interested too !! He just began a new series --- Andrew Pratt & The Keepers Of The School. We The Children is the first book, so watch for follow-ups !
Clues incorporate compass skills, nautical concepts, a kids' sailing race, and "real 12 year olds" seeking answers to the history of their School and its Founder.
Clements is more tale-worthy than Magic Tree House and Jigsaw Jones series, which are great for developing readers in grades 1-3.
Clements would compare with Enola Holmes mysteries by Nancy Springer. Enola is the younger sister of Sherlock Holmes, who sleuths-in-disguise in late 19th century London, to hide the fact that she is a 14 and female.
Clements would also compare with more difficult mysteries by Blue Balliett such as Chasing Vermeer. Balliett's sleuths are younger, but the stories are more difficult as they play the math game Pentominoes within the storylines.
Blog Post
Author Birthdays: Parker & Bradbury
by marshd
August 22nd marks the birthday of authors Dorothy Parker and Ray Bradbury.
Dorothy Parker was an American poet and satirist, noted for being a "wisecracker". She was a founding member of the famous Algonquin Round Table, and was even put on the Hollywood blacklist for being a suspected communist in the McCarthy era.
Parker's poems were published in magazines such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. The Nation said that her voice is, "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity." The New York Times published an obituary for her in 1967. In it, Alden Whitman wrote, "Miss Parker was a little woman with a dollish face and basset-hound eyes, in whose mouth butter hardly ever melted. It was a case, as Alexander Woollcott once put it, of 'so odd a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.'"
Ray Bradbury is an American novelist, best known for writing the dystopian Fahrenheit 451. In honor of his sci-fi greatness, Wikipedia notes that "an asteroid is named in his honor, "9766 Bradbury", along with a crater on the moon called "Dandelion Crater" (named after his novel, Dandelion Wine)."
However, Bradbury also wrote fantasies, horrors, and mysteries. Among the horrors is Something Wicked This Way Comes, which tells the story of a pair of 13-year-old boys who encounter a creepy traveling carnival. Bradbury's mysteries include a trilogy, narrated by an unnamed screenwriter. The first is Death is a Lonely Business, and it focuses on a string of murders in Venice, CA.
Blog Post
Suggestions for Hunger Games fans
by ccamp
Attention Hunger Games fans! Worried that you won't have anything thrilling to read after Mockingjay comes out on Aug. 24? Fear not! Try one of these novels and immerse yourself in another disturbingly delightful dystopia!
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Feed by M.T. Anderson
The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines
The Diary of Pelly D by L.J. Adlington
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer
Exodus by Julie Bertagna
Unwind by Neil Shusterman
Salt by Maurice Gee
The Maze Runner by James Dashner
The Silenced by James DeVita
The Other Side of the Island by Allegra Goodman
Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Shade's Children by Garth Nix
Blog Post
Pet Rx
by ryanikoglu
Add Making Rounds With Oscar to the list of favorite animal-human stories!
The stories in this book are positively therapeutic.
Oscar is a cat who lives on the "3rd floor" of a nursing home in Rhode Island. He knows instinctively when the end of life is near. With feline manners, Oscar is a final comfort to patients of dementia AND their families, in ways no words can express.
For those who love animal stories such as:
Alex And Me about the scientist studying "animal intelligence" with Alex the African Grey Parrot.
Koko a Talking Gorilla documentary on DVD with interview of Director/Producer Barbet Schroeder.
Marley & Me: Life and love with the world's worst dog.
Blog Post
New Arrivals for Career Assistance
by cecile
Top 300 Careers: Your Complete Guidebook to Major Jobs in Every Field is a great guidebook for career changers, job seekers, students and employers. Culling information from the Occupational Outlook Handbook by the U.S. Department of Labor, this book gives an overview of employment projections through 2018, reviews major trends, has explanations of job descriptions and a job-match grid that helps in choosing a career. A fine resource to find out about jobs in every field.
Expert Resumes for Career Changers has over 100 resumes created by professional resume writers for careers in health care, technology, business management, sales, marketing, recreation, sports, education, performing arts, government and law enforcement. Packed with excellent examples and advice, it is an outstanding tool for revamping your resume or creating a totally new one.
Whether you are job hunting or preparing a presentation for work, Successful Presentation Skills is a book you will find very useful. Learn how to present your case with advice on structuring a presentation, choosing the right words and phrases, knowing your audience, understanding body language and gaining the confidence to bring your message home.
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #220
by muffy
Alright, this one is definitely not for you if you are heading for the airport.
The Crashers* - a crack-team of National Transportation Safety Board experts is assembled in haste to investigate when a passenger plane slams into the ground outside Portland, Oregon.
Led by Leonard "Tommy" Tomzak, a pathologist, the team needs to determine if it is a terrorist attack, or worse yet, a trial run for something more devastating to come very soon.
In the meantime, in LA, Daria Gibron, a former Israeli agent, spots a group of suspicious-looking men whom she is certain, are responsible for the plane crash.
"A fresh and utterly compelling thriller, an original mix of action, investigation and a brilliant cast of characters that grabs the reader in the way few novels can and fewer do." - A must-read debut by Dana Haynes, and will sure to please fans of the master of aviation thriller John J. Nance (Blackout) , and a readalike for Hard Fall by Ridley Pearson, the undisputed king of white-knuckle adventures.
A sequel is anticipated.
* = Starred reviews
Blog Post
Big Red Lollipop by Rukhsana Khan
by Tahira
Rubina is excited about going to a birthday party. Her little sister Sana insists on going and ruins everything. When the tables are turned, Rubina has a choice to let her sister suffer the same consequence or to help out. Rukhsana Khan’s The Big Red Lollipop is a well paced entertaining tale that will appeal to any child who has a little sister, or who wonders what it would be like if they did.