National Book Award Winners for 2014

On November 19th, the National Book Foundation presented the winners of the National Book Award for 2014.  Ursula Le Guin received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters for her impact on American literature. Check out her remarks regarding book publishing in America which everyone is talking about!

Other winners that you may request from the library include:

Fiction

Redeployment by Phil Klay





Nonfiction

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos





Poetry

Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Gluck




 Start the New Year off with the winners and finalists of the National Book Award on your reading list!   SH

Andrew Carnegie Medal Shortlist for Fiction and Nonfiction Announced

The American Library Association has announced the finalists for the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Medal.  The books selected represent the best American adult titles published in the previous calendar year.  The winner will be announced at ALA's June meeting.  

In the meantime, here are great titles to add to your spring/summer reading list OR click on the links and reserve a copy at our library right now!  Remember we also offer these titles on Book on CD and Downloadable E-Book & Audiobook.

 

2014 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Shortlist

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. By Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital. By Sheri Fink.

On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History. By Nicholas A. Basbanes.

2014 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction Shortlist

Americanah. By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Claire of the Sea Light. By Edwidge Danticat.

The Goldfinch. By Donna Tartt.

SH

MASSBOOK MUST-READS ANNOUNCED

Support Massachusetts authors and read the books selected for the Massachusetts Must-Read list for
2014!  The four categories are Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Children's/Young Adult.  These books created by Massachusetts authors and books about Massachusetts have been chosen because they will lead to conversations in the community.

The titles currently available in Minuteman are linked to our catalog so you can place a request and read a summary of the book and it's reviews.  Contact the library if you would like to request a title that is not currently in the catalog.

Pick up one of these titles today and share with your friends and book groups.

Fiction
Along the Watchtower, David Litwack (Double Dragon)
The Celestials, Karen Shepard (Tin House)
The Hanging Judge, Michael Ponsor (Open Road Media)
News from Heaven, Jennifer Haigh (Harper)
Together Tea, Marjan Kamali (Ecco)
Vatican Waltz, Roland Merullo (Crown)

NonfictionBook of Ages, Jill Lepore (Knopf)
A Fort of Nine Towers, Qais Akbar Omar (FSG)
Breach of Trust, Andrew Bacevich (Metropolitan)
The Last Train to Zona Verde, Paul Theroux (HMH)
Margaret Fuller, Megan Marshall (HMH)
Miss Anne in Harlem, Carla Kaplan (Harper)






Poetry

Belmont, Stephen Burt (Graywolf)
Boy Singing to Cattle, Mark D. Hart (Pearl Editions)
Frost in the Low Areas, Karen Skolfield (Zone 3 Press )
Grass Whistle, Amy Dryansky (Salmon)
Inside the Splintered Wood, Myles Gordon (Tebot Bach )
Strange Borderlands, Ben Berman (Able Muse)
  

Children's/Young Adult
The Extra, Kathryn Lasky (Candlewick)
White Fur Flying, Patricia MacLachlan (McElderry/S&S)
Journey, Aaron Becker (Candlewick)
Garden Princess, Kristin Kladstrup (Candlewick)
The First Drawing, Mordicai Gerstein (Little, Brown BYR)
A Place for Turtles, Melissa Stewart (Peachtree) 





SH

Mass Book Awards 2013 announced in time for Summer Reading!

The Massachusetts Book Awards' mission is to highlight the work of our vital contemporary writing community and encourage readers to do some "close reading" of those imaginative works created by the authors among us.  

 We highlighted the MassBook "must reads" announced in March and are happy to provide you with the winners so you may add them to your summer reading list.  Click on the link and request today!

2013 Winners:

Fiction

The Technologists by Matthew Pearl.  (One of my favorite books.  The audio is quite good.)
A well-researched mystery set in 1868 which brings to life the history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's first senior class, the beginnings of the MIT/Harvard rivalry, and life in early Boston.

Non-Fiction
Brothers: George Howe Colt on his Brothers and Brothers in History by George Howe Colt.
An idiosyncratic and masterful blend of memoir and history featuring both the author’s three brothers and iconic brothers in history—the Booths, the Van Goghs, the Kelloggs, the Marx Brothers, and the Thoreaus.


Children's/Young Adult

Ocean Sunlight: How Tiny Plants Feed the Seas by Molly Bang and Penny Chisholm.
Explains how all life on the Earth depends, directly or indirectly, on light from the sun, and describes how all ocean life, from the tiniest plankton to great whales, including the creatures in the darkest depths, form a web that uses sunshine.

SH

2013 Edgar Award Winners Announced

The Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of the Edgar Award on May 2.  Three of the categories were Best Novel, Best First Novel, and Best Fact Crime.  You may also enjoy the nominees, so check out the list and place your requests.

The winners are:

Best Novel

Live by Night by Dennis Lehane
Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city's most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.  

Best First Novel

The Expats by Chris Pavone
When expat Kate begins to travel around Europe, she finds herself buried in layers of deceit so thick they threaten her family, her marriage, and her life. Intricate, riveting, and surprising, this thriller is of the highest caliber. 
This was a title discussed at the Wellesley Free Library Monday Night Book Group in May.

Best Fact Crime

Midnight in Peking: how the murder of a young Englishwoman haunted the last days of old China
by Paul French
Peking in 1937 is a heady mix of privilege and scandal, opulence and opium dens, rumors and superstition. The Japanese are encircling the city, and the discovery of Pamela Werner's body sends a shiver through already nervous Peking.  Two detectives—one British and one Chinese—race against the clock to solve the crime before the Japanese invade and Peking as they know it is gone forever. Can they find the killer in time, before the Japanese invade?

SH

Massachusetts Book Awards Must Read for 2013

The Must Read Books for 2013 have just been announced by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.  From this list of 2012 published books by a Massachusetts author or about a Massachusetts subject, a winner will will be chosen in late April to reign as the Mass Book winner for 2013 in each of 4 categories.

Some nominated books from each category include:

Fiction
The Art Forger by B. A. Shapiro
The Technologists by Matthew Pearl

Non-Fiction
Brothers by George Howe Colt
Autumn in the Heavenly by Stephen R. Platt

Poetry
Shortly Thereafter by Colin Halloran 
What is Amazing by Heather Christle

Children's/Young Adult
Red Thread Sisters by Carol Antoinette Peacock
There Goes Ted Williams--the Greatest Hitter that Ever Lived by Matt Tavares

Don't wait to check out the other titles and place your requests for these titles.  

If you have read any of these, which would you place your vote for to win this wonderful award?  Please leave a reply here to promote your favorite title!

SH

Goodreads announces Best Titles for 2012

If you love to read and haven't discovered or used Goodreads yet, now is a great time to see what they have to offer with the GoodReads Choice Awards. 

This 2012 Best Books list is voted by readers.  Take a look.  It may help with your choices for gifts as well as what you should read next!

SH

Best Books for 2012

It's Holiday shopping time and you may want to check out the best books of the year to give to your best friend or a loving family member for those long winter evenings?  Try the following recommendations from popular lists!

Publishers Weekly Best Books 2012

Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Books of 2012 (Nonficton list will be released on December 3 at same link)

Library Journal Best Books of 2012 by Genre The index for genre you want is on the right side of the page

Amazon Best Books of the Year Editors Picks

Massachusetts Book Awards 2012 and Must-Reads.   There is a link to download the entire list for fiction and nonfiction.

National Book Awards 2012 List includes the winners and finalists

Happy Reading!!!  SH

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

First Carnegie Medal for Fiction and Nonfiction Winners Announced

If you love to read books from award lists, try the winners of the first ever Carnegie Medal for Fiction and Nonfiction:

Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright.

The momentous drama of everyday life; the volatile connections between people for those entangled in an adulterous affair; the wry, accurate take on families, marriage, and brittle middle age. With The Forgotten Waltz Enright turns her attention to love, following another unforgettable heroine on a journey of the heart.

Catherine the Great by Robert Massie

Massie presents a reconstruction of the eighteenth-century empress's life that covers her efforts to engage Russia in the cultural life of Europe, her creation of the Hermitage, and her numerous scandal-free romantic affairs.  SH

Edgar Award Winners Announced

2012 Edgar Award Winners were announced Thursday, April 26 by the Mystery Writers of America.  Below are the nominees and the winner for the Best Mystery Novel for 2012.  You may find other category nominees and winners by clicking here.  

Be sure to place your requests for these award winning mystery titles today by clicking on the titles.

Gone by Mo Hayder  2012 WINNER

Investigating a serial carjacker whose actual targets are young children in back seats, Jack Caffery teams up once again with police diver Sergeant Flea Marley, whose life is endangered by a discovery in an abandoned, half-submerged tunnel.

1222 by Jane Holt

From Norway's bestselling crime writer comes a suspenseful locked-room mystery set in an isolated hotel where guests who are stranded during a monumental snowstorm begin turning up dead.

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

Yasuko Hanaoka thought she had escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day, the situation quickly escalates and Togashi ends up dead. Yasuko's next-door-neighbor Ishigami offers his help, not only disposing of the body, but plotting the cover-up as well. 

Field Gray by Philip Kerr

While working for a crime boss in Cuba, Bernie Gunther is swept away to Germany as bait to catch Eric Mielke, the East German head of the dangerous Stasi (state security agency).  Part mystery, part war novel, this title is the latest in the Bernie Gunther series.

The Ranger by Ace Atkins
Army Ranger Quinn Colson of Alabama returns from Afghanistan to a place overrun by corruption. He finds his uncle, the county sheriff, dead by suicide, but others whisper murder. In the days that follow, it will be up to Quinn to discover the truth, not only about his uncle, but about his family, his friends, his town, and not least about himself. And once the truth is discovered, there is no turning back.

SH

2012 Edgar Allen Poe Award Nominees

Mystery Writers have announced the 2012 Edgar Award Nominees. Start reading (or listening or watching) now so you can weigh in on your choice before the winners are announce on April 26. Perhaps you will find some new authors and even tv shows to follow.

Nominees include:

Adult Novel
The Ranger by Ace Atkins
Gone by Mo Hayder
The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Hegashino
1222 by Anne Holt
Field Gray by Philip Kerr

YA Novel
Shelter by Harlan Coben
The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson
The Silence of Murder by Dandi Daley Mackall
The Girl is Murder by Kathryn Miller Haines
Kill You Last by Todd Strasser

TV Episode
"Innocence" - Blue Bloods"The Life Inside" - Justified"Part 1" - Whitechapel"Pilot" - Homeland"Mask" - Law & Order: SVU

When you find one of the nominees you really enjoyed, share your thoughts here so others may be enticed as well. If you recommend one of the tv shows, let us know.

SH

National Book Award Winners announced for 2011

National Book Award Winners for 2011 were announced on November 16, 2011. Perhaps some of them will end up on your holiday list.

They include:

FICTION Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Taking place over a 12 day period during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Salvage the Bones is revelatory, real, and muscled with poetry.


NONFICTION The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt An innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript (On the Nature of Things by Lucretius), plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

POETRY Head Off & Split by Nikky Finney





YOUNG PEOPLES' LITERATURE
Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai
Through a series of poems, a young girl chronicles the life-changing year of 1975, when she, her mother, and her brothers leave Vietnam and resettle in Alabama.

A list of the winners and finalists may be found on the National Book Award website. Make your request for these and other finalists at your library today!

SH

I have written before about how many YA books are great for Adults. Now is your opportunity to check out what teens have nominated as some of the top books of the year. Teens now have the opportunity to vote through September 16th for their favorite title to narrow the list down to the Top Ten Best YA books in the past year. These will be announced during Teen Read Week October 16-22. If you know a teen, encourage him/her to take part in this voting opportunity!

Below is the list of titles in contention for a spot on the Top Ten list. Try some of them and you too may be hooked!

• Bachorz, Pam. Drought. Egmont USA. 2011. (978606840160).
• Beam, Cris. I Am J. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. 2011. (9780316053617).
• Beaudoin, Sean. You Killed Wesley Payne. 2011. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. (9780316077422).
• Black, Holly and Justine Larbalestier. Zombies vs. Unicorns. Simon & Schuster/Margaret K. McElderry Books. 2010. (9781416989530).
• Card, Orson Scott. The Lost Gate. Tor Books. 2011. (9780765326577).
• Clare, Cassandra. The Clockwork Angel. Simon & Schuster/Margaret K. McElderry. 2010. (9781416975861).
• Collins, Suzanne. Mockingjay. Scholastic. 2010. (9780439023511).
• Collins, Yvonne. Love, Inc. Disney/Hyperion. 2011. (9781423131151).
• Condie, Ally. Matched. 2010. Penguin/Dutton. (9780525423645).
• Cremer, Andrea. Nightshade. Penguin/Philomel. 2010. (9780399254826).
• Fitzpatrick, Becca. Crescendo. Simon & Schuster Children’s. 2010. (9781416989431).
• Grant, Michael. Lies. 2010. HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen Books. (9780061449093).
• Hawkins, Rachel. Demonglass. Disney/Hyperion. 2011. (9781423121312).
• Hakwins, Rachel. Hex Hall. Disney/Hyperion. 2010. (9781423121305).
• Kagawa, Julie. The Iron King. 2010. Harlequin. (9780373210084).
• Lore, Pittacus. I Am Number Four. HarperCollins. 2010. (9780061969553).
• Moore, Peter. Red Moon Rising. Disney/Hyperion. 2011. (9781423116653).
• Nelson, Jandy. The Sky is Everywhere. 2010. Penguin/Dial Books for Young Readers. (9780142417805).
• Oliver, Lauren. Before I Fall. HarperCollins/HarperTeen. 2010. (9780061726804).
• O’Neal, Ellis. The False Princess. Egmont USA. 2011. (9781606840795).
• Patterson, James. Angel: A Maximum Ride Novel. Little, Brown & Company. 2011. (9780316036207).
• Pearce, Jackson. Sisters Red. Little, Brown and Company. 2010. (9780316068680).
• Smith, Cynthia Leitich. Blessed. Candlewick Press. 2011. (9780763643263).
• Westerfeld, Scott. Behemoth. Simon Pulse. 2010. (9781416971757).
• White, Kiersten. Paranormalcy. HarperCollins/HarperTeen. 2010. (9780061985843).

SH

Historical Fiction and Horror Genre Award Winners

Summer is here and the following are two you may want to add to your reading list.

If you like Historical Fiction, the Walter Scott prize winner, The Long Song, should be on your list. Andrea Levy creates the memoir of a 19th century Jamaican woman who has the opportunity to taste freedom after the end of slavery.



Horror fans must add the Bram Stoker award winner, A Dark Matter, by Peter Straub, a well-known name in the Horror genre. Straub pens the tale of a man who tries to help traumatized family and friends come to terms with a horrific night in the 1960s that has haunted all of them since. By revisiting this event the group the evil confronted on that night in the sixties is reawakened and unpredictable events occur. Be prepared to sleep with the lights on. SH