Mystery Lovers Rejoice! 2011 Edgar Awards Announced

Make your list now to enjoy the 2011 Edgar Award Winners and Nominees. The Mystery Writers of America made the announcement to honor the best mystery fiction, non-fiction and television shows from 2010 on April 28, 2011

The winners by category are:

Best Novel
The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton. Traumatized at the age of eight and pushed into a life of crime by reason of his unforgiveable talent--lock picking--Michael sees his chance to escape, and with one desperate gamble risks everything to come back home to the only person he ever loved, and to unlock the secret that has kept him silent for so long.


Best First Novel by and American Author
Rogue Island by Bruce DeSilva
Someone is systematically burning down the neighborhood Mulligan, an old school newspaper man grew up in, people he knows and loves are perishing in the flames, and the public is on the verge of panic. With the whole city of Providence on his back, Mulligan must weed through a wildly colorful array of characters to find the truth.

Best Paperback Original
Long Time Coming by Robert Goddard
An intricate plot involving a man thought to be killed in WWII, his nephew, and the quest of a family trying to retrieve paintings and diamonds that belonged to a fleeing Jewish diamond trader in 1939. Lots of twists and turns in this suspenseful incorporation of mystery, intrigue, and history.

Best Fact Crime
Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime and Complicity by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry
The adjectives associated with the University of Washington's 2000 football season-mystical, magical, miraculous-changed when Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry's four-part expos of the 2000 Huskies hit the newspaper stand: explosive chilling (Sports Illustrated), blistering (Baltimore Sun), shocking appalling(Tacoma News Tribune), astounding(ESPN), jaw-dropping (Orlando Sentinel).

Best Critical/Biographical
Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the honorable Detective and his Rendezvouz with American History by Ynute Huang
The author uses the Charlie Chan character and the man who was the model for the character, Honolulu Detective Chang Apana, to examine the treatment of Asians in U.S. history and culture, including Hollywood and the government.

SH

2010 National Book Award Winners Announces

The 2010 National Book Award Winners were announced last night, November 17--More titles for your Holiday Gift List! Check out the website to enjoy interviews with the winners as well as a video of the ceremonies.


Fiction Winner

Lord of Misrule--Jaimy Gordon
Lord of Misrule is a darkly realistic novel about a young woman living through a year of horse racing at a half-mile track in West Virginia, while everyone's best laid schemes keep going brutally wrong.

Nonfiction Winner

Just Kids--Patti Smith
In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

Poetry

Lighthead--Terrance Hayes
From an award-winning poet, a new collection in which the political and the personal converge in innovative and beautiful ways.



Young People's Literature

Mockingbird--Kathryn Erskine
Ten-year-old Caitlin, who has Asperger's Syndrome, struggles to understand emotions, show empathy, and make friends at school, while at home she seeks closure by working on a project with her father.

SH

Library Journal's Top 10 Best Books for 2010

For the first time, Library Journal has selected the Top 10 Best Books from Fiction and Nonfiction publications for 2010. If you are looking for a great read during the holidays or to purchase for family and friends, try one of these!

Library Journal's Top 10 Best Books for 2010.


American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen --"Terroir" is French for taste of place. In this book, a James Beard Award-winning author explores many of the North American foods that depend on place for their unique flavor, including salmon from Alaska's Yukon River and honey from the tupelo-lined banks of the Apalachicola River. (641.013 Jacobsen)

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham--Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties denizens of Manhattan's SoHo, are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy until her much-younger look-alike brother shows up for a visit. Like his legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, Cunningham's masterly new novel is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. (Fiction Cunningham M.)

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen--From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections comes a darkly comedic novel about family. Franzen's intensely realized characters struggle to learn how to live in an ever-confusing world--one with the temptations and burdens of liberty, the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, and the heavy weight of empire. (Fiction Franzen J.)

How To Live, Or, a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell--A spirited and singular biography (and the first full life of Michel Eyquen de Montaigne in English for nearly 50 years) that relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. (Biography Montaigne, M.E. de)

Room by Emma Donoghue--Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, "Room" is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another. (Fiction Donoghue, E.)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Crown)--Skloot brilliantly weaves together the story of Henrietta Lacks--a woman whose cells have been unwittingly used for scientific research since the 1950s--with the birth of bioethics, and the dark history of experimentation on African Americans. (616.02774 Skloot)

The Passage by Justin Cronin--In just 32 minutes, a military experiment gone wrong would unleash a virus that would change the world forever as man fears darkness, death, or a life of the undead. A whole new approach to a post-apocalyptic world which taps into the frenzy of vampirism found in fiction. (Fiction Cronin, J.)

The Tiger by John Vaillant--A haunting, gripping exploration of predators and prey, and an intimate portrait of a remarkable animal increasingly threatened by interaction with humans, this work recreates the hunt for a man-eating tiger across the forbidding landscape of Russia's Far East. (599.756 Vaillant)

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson--With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells the story of the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, from 1915 to 1970, through the lives of three unique individuals. (304.8 Wilkerson)

Walker Evans: Decade by Decade text by James Crump--Walker Evans is best known for his Depression era photos and his collaboration with James Agee to publish Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which portrays three white tenant farmers in Southern Alabama during the depression. This book presents all of Mr. Evans photos, mainly rarely seen. (779 Crump) SH

The Book-lover's Lament

If you're reading this blog, there's a good chance you have a special relationship with books. By "books" I mean those rectangular things with paper pages all bound together with some sort of cover. You remember. Those who love books share a common affliction: the inability to "weed" your collection. Read this short column in Chronicle of Higher Education--not for practical tips to make the job any easier, but for some reassurance that you are not alone. And, even if you are not in the habit of reading the comments attached to blog entries, read these.
--RL

Oprah's 10 Terrific Reads of 2009

Oprah choses the following books as Terrific Reads of 2009.

Another list for your reading pleasure.

The Bolter. Osborne, Francis.

Dreaming in Hindi. Rich, Katherine Russell.

Little Bee. Cleave, Chris.

Blame. Huneven, Michelle.

Losing Mum and Pup. Buckley, Christopher.

Zeitoun. Eggers, Dave.

Say You're One of Them. Akpan, Uwem.

Some Things that Meant the World to Me. Mohr, Joshua.

The Invisible Mountain. De Robertis, Carolina.

Strength in what Remains. Kidder, Tracy


Reserve your copies today! SH

Publishers Weekly & Amazon release the Best Books of 2009

The Best of 2009 lists have begun! November 2 Publisher's Weekly announced its 100 Best of 2009 list and pared it down to the Top 10 Books of 2009. This way you may get a head start on your reading OR your holiday gifts.




Amazon, not to be left behind, added its Top 100 Editors' Picks for 2009 and Top 100 Customer Favorites for 2009 on November 2 as well.

Now it's your turn to make your list and request your picks from the Wellesley Free Library. SH

Book Lover websites

Are you always trying to remember what you have read? Looking for some lists of good books? You might be interested in trying out two websites that allow you to view OR make lists of your own.

22 books.
The creator of this website was looking for a list of Kurt Vonnegut's books one day and had trouble finding one. So he decided to make a site where booklists could be created and shared (or not if you want to keep yours private). He entitled it 22 books because this was how many books he found by Vonnegut. The site promises to offer more opportunities in the future.

This website allows you to

• find other book lovers' favorite books, award winning books, genre lists, etc.

• create your own book lists

• add a book cover picture (for those who tell a book by the cover)

• make comments

• insert you list(s) in a website

• share them with others on the website

• sort them by author or title or date read.

With this site you will never again have to guess if you have already read a book. Just check your lists!




For hard core book lovers who want more than lists, GoodReads allows you to not only find and create lists (40 million books so far), but you may write reviews, form groups, create trivia questions about titles, and join forumsor book clubs to chat about books. The lists offered here are tagged so it is easy for you to look at all of the lists that fit your search--fiction, nonfiction, science fiction fantasy, history, romance, childrens, young adult and more. For those young people searching for a good book this summer, there are ready-made lists for them to peruse. This site is well-known throughout librarydom so well worth checking it out!

Some of the popular lists found on LISTOPIA (I love this section title!) include the Worst Books of All Time, Best Books Ever, Best 20th Century Books, Best Science Fiction Books, and The Book was Better than the Movie, plus oodles more. YOU have the opportunity to VOTE on these lists so you become a participant in the community right away! This will be a site that will be bookmarked on my computer. How about you? SH