Want a book review?

People are always asking us about books that are on our shelves and whether or not the book is good.  Many times, one of the staff has either read the book or that particular author, so we can give an opinion, but not always.  Our own library catalog offers a bit of a blurb on each new book that we enter into our system, but what if you want to know a bit more about a book?

I came across a site that offers book reviews, done often by professional book reviewers as well as just avid readers,  and has detailed information about authors, even offering interviews done with authors through the years.  The site is called Mostly Fiction Book Reviews and you can stop by to see if a book you’ve been wanting to read is really as good as you hoped.

You can find book awards lists, suggestions for kids, award winners  as well as many other ways to search the site.  It isn’t a flashy site and you might not find what you want, but it is worth a look if you are serious about reading reviews before reading a book.

What is this thing called “book”??

For our regular frivolous Friday the 13th, here is a great comic by the creative minds of Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins at the Penny Arcade.   I think it says quite a bit about the world we live in today!

The Big Read books

Here is a list put forth by The National Endowment for the Arts in the US. It lists the top 100 books, and asks how many you’ve actually read. How they came to the top 100 books isn’t clear, and I’d question the list somewhat but here it is:

(The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.)

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I haven’t read that many on the list, I must say, but at least I’ve read more than the 6. So many of these books have been made into movies now that we all probably know the stories, however.

How many have you read?

Books by email

http://www.dailylit.com

The idea to this website is pure genius. You don’t have time to read a book? No problem! We read emails all day long, so why not have a book emailed to you……in installments! You can choose from any of the full-text books that are in public domain (classics and the like) which are absolutely free, or a more current one of your choice for a small fee. Then, you choose how often you’d like to read the installments and presto…they arrive in your inbox! You can read more than one installment at a shot, or choose to read some online, its up to you. But before you know it, you’ll have read that book you’ve always meant to read! Interesting idea…….

A book and a comment

Everyday, we have patrons come into the library and either tell us how much they loved a book they’d just read, or how much they loathed it. Last week, one of our patrons came in, threw her bag of books on the desk and started complaining about how every book that she had taken home the week before was just ridiculous. Now, wouldn’t it be nice to know this before taking home a book?

Book reviews can be found in many places…..magazines, newspapers, television, online etc. And often, people will choose a book based on a review they heard somewhere. But wouldn’t it be nice if the reviewer was someone who shared similar experiences and lifestyle? Maybe the book I enjoy is not the book that someone living in a huge city would enjoy. Maybe experiences and lifestyle really do influence the ways in which we react to literature. And the idea of an instant review, one that you could see while you were browsing through the books at the library, might make for a new way to choose your weekly reads.

So, wouldn’t it be interesting if someone could read a book from the library and be able note their comments on the book right there, as sort of a personal book review? I don’t think we’d want someone to actually write in the book (this is HIGHLY frowned upon at the library!), but to have a way in which we could rate a book that would either fit into the book itself or the catalogue record. This is probably something that will happen in the distant future where patrons will be able to record their thoughts on a book, for other patrons to read. I know that I’d enjoy seeing what someone else thought of a book before I actually checked it out of the library. It might make me think twice if several readers from our library thought it could be passed over.

Could this be something applied to our library catalogue? Sort of an interactive online database where you could look up a book in the library and read reviews from other patrons right there. I think that could be an interesting feature that readers could benefit from. You could check a book out, read it and then log in and record your thoughts into the database so that anyone searching for that book in our library could read the review. Maybe just a star-rating system? Who knows.

Do you think you’d benefit from being able to read reviews right on the catalogue database? Would you write your own reviews?

The art of letter writing

A few years back, Shirley and I were talking at work about her genealogy. She is very enthusiatic about her research and is always telling us about new things she’s discovered about her family history (check out her genealogy help pages on the right hand side of this page). One of the things we talked about that day was a group of letters that a relative had passed on to her, written by a great grandmother, I believe (it may have been even further back than that….I’ll have to ask.) But what we discussed was the contents of these letters, talking about what was going on in this person’s life at the time, just common things about running the farm and who had been ill. The letters were sent back and forth as a sort of conversation across the miles, much like we’d have on the phone or through email today. The difference though, is that they are a “permanent” record of the lives during that time.

We were lamenting that the past few generations have lost the art of letter writing, that we don’t have any of these records now of our lives, telling how we felt during certain events or what exactly took place. Years from now, there probably won’t be any record of emails we sent to Aunt Lucy or text messages to Dad about being late for dinner. So how will the next few generations know what we were all about as people? How will they know what we did from day to day and how we felt about our lives? Unless you keep a written diary, there probably won’t be any data that your great, great grandchildren can access. They’ll never know that you were heartbroken about losing a close friend, or elated at buying your first home. It will all be lost.

That conversation started me thinking about my little niece who was only a year or so old at the time. I thought, what can I do for her that will help her to understand what our lives are like today, what her family is like and going through during her young years? So I started a journal for her. I began writing her letters talking about just those things, as well as including pages on anything that I thought she might find interesting about her family history. She might never be told that her great grandmother had a red velvet chair that everyone in our family coveted. Or that her grandfather helped to deliver milk as a young boy. There are things that just might not be asked, and even if she is told, will her children know? Will theirs? I’m hoping that this journal will be something she’ll keep and pass along someday, as a bit of a record of my generation.

Laura, one of the mommies who comes to storytime with her children, passed along an article to me from her university alumni magazine. It tells of a new book written by Jenna Bailey called “Can Any Mother Help Me?”which was born out of a loose papers that she found while looking for an idea on which to write her thesis. The pages were from a magazine that a group of women known as the Coopperative Correspondence Club (or the CCC) created as a way to talk about issues that affected them as wives and mothers. The letters they wrote back and forth were written using pen names so that the women could vent freely and other women would write responses on the pages, much like blogs use comments today. Instead of an online discussion group that you might find today, these mother found ways to help each other through correspondence. Ms. Bailey even managed to get many of these mothers together years later to meet for the first time. To find out more about the author or the book, you can go to her website here.

I found it interesting that the only book we have in our library which is specifically about the art of writing letters, called “The Art of Letter Writing” by Lassor A. Blumenthal

was published in 1977, well before we all started using the internet for our general correspondence. Of course there are books which can help you write a cover letter for a resume, and ones which will guide you with the proper formatting of a letter, but your word processing program can do the same things for you.

Where will this all go? Will we lose letters entirely? What do you think?