Wednesday, October 31, 2012

What's new in mystery and fiction for November?

Here are some new titles for November:


Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
It's 1972 and MI5 is conducting an operation called Sweet Tooth, which aims to fund artists and writers with "correct" political views. 

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin 
Jesus' mother is the narrator in this re-imagining of the last days of Christ's life.

Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro
Munro's latest collection of stories highlight moments in life when things change forever. 

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
This new novel by Kingsolver centers around Dellarobia Turnbow, raising a family on a farm in Tennessee. 

maf

Monday, October 22, 2012

Not your typical Library...

 
 Hernando Guanlao is a sprightly man in his early 60s, with one abiding passion - books.
In his public library-less city, he decided to create his own. Feel free to stop by Balagtas Street to borrow, keep, lend or donate books.
--RL

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Book Award Winners--Nobel & Massachusetts Book Award



I know that many of you add prize winners to your reading list so this post will expand the number of titles that you must read!  Not only is the Nobel Prize winner listed below, but please enjoy the MassBooks of the year, including the list of must reads for 2012.

With the absence of a winner for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, these titles fill a need right now for personal reading as well as holiday giving!

2012 Nobel Prize winner for Literature--Mo Yan who the Nobel Committee describes as""who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".  To learn a bit more about his writing try this article from the New York Times. 


Try requesting and reading two of Mo Yan's works:



Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
During Mao's Land Reform Movement of 1948, the beneficent landowner is robbed of his property, then put to death. He endures prolonged torture in hell before he is allowed to return to Earth and his own farm in the form of animals who relate their feeling of the culture and politics that in in place.

The Republic of Wine
When Chinese special investigator Ding Gou'er hears persistent rumors that there is cannibalism in the province known as the Republic of Wine, he is dispatched by his superiors to learn the truth.  Wild, bawdy, politically explosive, The Republic of Wine is both mesmerizing and exhilarating, proving that no repressive regime can stifle true creative imagination. 

2012 MassBook Award Winners

Fiction--Alice Bliss by Laura Harrington
A profoundly moving, uplifting contemporary novel about those who are left at home during wartime and a teenage girl bravely facing the future. 



Nonfiction--Killer Stuff and Tons of Money by Maureen P. Stanton
The story of one dealer's journey from the populist mayhem of flea markets to the rarefied realm of auctions, and reveals the rich, often outrageous subculture of antiques and collectibles.


MassBook 2012 Fiction Must Reads and MassBook 2012 Nonfiction Must Reads  will offer you 24 recommended lists!  

These titles may leave you wishing for a long winter so you can read them all!  SH

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Jurassic Problems


Sad news everyone, group of researchers determined the half life of DNA is 521 years, thus shattering my dreams of seeing a real-life dinosaur. The paper, which appears in The Proceedings of the Royal Society measured the decay of 158 fossils (if you would like, you can read the entire depressing paper exciting news here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.1745) and finally proved that humans could not extract DNA from mosquitoes stuck in amber to replicate dinosaurs. This means no real-life Jurassic Park. But do not despair over this news, the Wellesley Free Library has numerous fiction and non-fiction books, movies, and audio recordings to feed your love of dinosaurs.

Jurassic Park Trilogy
DVD Youth Feature
Jurassic
Jurassic Park: a novel
Fiction Crichton, M.
The Kingfisher
dinosaur encyclopedia

J 567.903 Benton 
\
Dinosaur Food
J 567.9 Matthews
Doctor Who and
the Dinosaur Invasion

[sound recording]
Youth CD Fiction 


Find these and other books of interest through the Minuteman Library Catalog

~jh 

Saturday, October 13, 2012

New Audiobooks

 



Our newest audiobooks are now displayed to your left as you enter the Media Room on the first floor of the main library.  Come in and browse our entire audio collection including books on CD, MP3s, Playaways and a small collection of books on cassette. Many of our titles are also available on Overdrive to download as an ebook or audioook. A few of our recent titles:


















-DB

Friday, October 12, 2012

Looking for titles for your book club to read?

What should your book group read next?  Here's a list of suggestions from the American Booksellers Association:



The Fall ’12 Indie Next List for Reading Groups | Bookselling This Week

maf

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

A Real Flying Saucer?

The USAF has just declassified it's 1956 plan to build a flying saucer.  The plan called "USAF project 1794" can be seen here.  To find out more about UFO's try these books.



  Need to Know: UFOs, the Military, and Intelligence
by Good, Timothy

Fact: In 1945, the US military recovered an alien spacecraft. Fact: The United States shot down several flying disks in the late 1940s, a period marked by an unprecedented wave of unexplained aircraft crashes. The facts have continued only to mount over the past six decades in the classified files of military and intelligence agencies worldwide.


UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record
     by Kean, Leslie

 An Air Force major is ordered to approach a brilliant UFO in his Phantom jet over Tehran. He repeatedly attempts to engage and fire on unusual objects heading right toward his aircraft, but his missile control is locked and disabled.  Kean draws on this and other incidents to separate fact from fiction and to lift the veil on decades of U.S. government misinformation.


Witness to Roswell : Unmasking the 60-Year Cover-up
     by Carey, Thomas J.; Schmitt, Donald R.; Davids, Paul (Foreword by)

 Witness to Roswell will hold you spellbound as you read the actual eyewitness testimony to an amazing event: the recovery of a UFO in 1947 just outside of Roswell, New Mexico. Witnesses will not only reveal that the alien crew were placed in body bags and packed in dry ice, but, most astonishing of all, that one of the crew survived the crash. 


Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base
     by Jacobsen, Annie

Area 51 is the nation's most secret domestic military facility. It is located in the high desert of southern Nevada, seventy-five miles north of Las Vegas. Its facilities have been constructed over the past sixty years around a flat dry lake bed called Groom Lake.

 

 Beyond UFOs: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Its Astonishing Implications for Our Future
     by Bennett, Jeffrey O.

Beyond UFOs shows why the very quest to find alien life can help us to grow up as a species and chart a course for the stars.  The quest for extraterrestrial life doesn't happen only in science fiction. 

Tyson 



 

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Credo Reference is the Featured Online Reference for October



 Credo Reference is your place to look for Reference E-books that are available to you 24/7.  

Not only does it search 600+ reference titles covering a wide range of topics, Credo also searches images, videos, Google Books, e-journals, and our library catalog and subscription resources,  The results are displayed in a well-organized topic page. 

If you are writing a paper, this resource will create a Concept Map to aid you in your organization or simply direct you in where to begin your research.  Try it out today.     SH