What books are next to be seen at the movies?

With 5 of the 9 films nominated for an Oscar based upon books,

what books will be featured next at the movies?

Monuments Men:  allied heroes, Nazi thieves and the greatest treasure hunt in history by Robert Edsel and Brett Witter (February 7)

Vampire Academy by Rachel Mead (February 14)

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin (February 14)

Divergent by Veronica Roth  (March)

Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo (April)

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (May)

Make your book (or audio) request now so you will be ready for your night at the movies!  SH

Ann Patchett Recommends....

Many of you may not know that Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto, owns a bookstore in Nashville named Parnassus.  At the American Library Association meeting in June, she offered attendees a list of books she recommends to her customers that I thought might be of interest to all of you.  The books she recommends are:

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Coming of age in middle America, eighteen-year-old Rosemary evaluates how her entire youth was defined by the presence and forced removal of an endearing chimpanzee who was secretly regarded as a family member and who Rosemary loved as a sister.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
Marra has written a brilliant debut novel that brings to life an abandoned hospital where a tough-minded doctor decides to harbor a hunted young girl, with powerful consequences. 

Claire of the the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat
From the best-selling author of "Brother, I'm Dying" and "The Dew Breaker: " a stunning new work of fiction that brings us deep into the intertwined lives of a small seaside town where a little girl, the daughter of a fisherman, has gone missing. 

A Day at the Beach: recollections by Geoffrey Wolff
In these autobiographical essays, Wolff shares with the reader the wisdom of an alert man learning through the unsettling collisions of time, place, and local custom, and through the force of hardship and hazard, to bring his many disparate selves together --
with astonishing high-stakes candor and dazzling literary agility.

Old Filth by Jane Gardam
Filth is a lawyer with a practice in the Far East. A few remember that his nickname stands for Failed In London Try Hong Kong. But Old Filth is not as pompous as people imagine, and his past contains many secrets and dark hiding places. 

The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling
Pagford is a town at war.  Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity, and unexpected revelations? Rowling's first novel for adults is blackly comic, thought-provoking, and constantly surprising. 

The Patrice Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope and Mother's Milk by Edward St. Aubyn
This single volume brings together the first four Patrick Melrose novels by Booker Prize Finalist Aubyn. The collection includes "Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope," and "Mother's Milk." The novels take the reader into the world of the English upper class as they
follow Patrick Melrose's story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery.  Beautifully written.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
This is a story of a boy and his painting.  Theo lost his mother in an explosion and came into possession of a dutch painting entitled "The Goldfinch" that has the biggest impact on his life.  As an adult he is led into the dark world of art theft.  The novel has well-drawn characters, beautiful prose, and takes the reader through loss, love, and the world of art.

Take Ann Patchett's recommendations or check out our booklists here on the blog or our Pinterest site.  Enjoy!  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

Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced!

The 2013 Pulitzer Prize Winners for Letters, Drama, and Music have been announced and we now
have more wonderful titles for our wish lists.  Be sure to place your requests today.

The 2013 winners are:

Fiction
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson.

follows a young man's journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world's most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. 
  

History


Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall
Tapping into newly accessible diplomatic archives in several nations, distinguished scholar Logevall traces the path that led two Western nations to lose their way in Vietnam. 

Biography
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss

.
Born to a black slave mother and a fugitive white French nobleman in present-day Haiti, Alex Dumas (father of the writer Alexander Dumas) was briefly sold into bondage but then made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. 

General Nonfiction

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys by Gilbert King
Shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”


Poetry
Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds.
Through verse, the author carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending.  Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love's sight; the surprising physical bond that still exists between a couple during parting

SH

Earth Day--April 22

Celebrate Earth Day 2013 (April 22) by stopping by the 2nd floor

display table and picking up a book, book on CD, or DVD.

The display is entitled Oh What a Beautiful World and features topics on geology, geography, gardening, early humans, animals, environment, energy, AND even some fiction focusing on these topics...or at least with related words in the title.

Some titles you might enjoy are:

Books
Adventures in Tornado Alley:  The Storm Chasers
The Neandertal Enigma
K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain
Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
Global Climate Change: The Book of Essential Knowledge
Dust:  A History of the Small & the Invisible
The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

Book on CD
Silent Sea
World Without End
Global Warming:  Global Threat
Terminal Freeze
Journey to the Center of the Earth

DVD
HumanPlanet: The Complete Series
Ape to Man
Ascent of Man
The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey (6 vols)
Dirt: The Movie

Stop by the display and find what else is waiting for you....

SH

I Hunt Killers

Book Review: I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga

I woke up the other day to a text from my oldest friend that said: “You need to read I Hunt Killers right now!”

This friend also happens to be a librarian so I took her advice and immediately put a hold on the book. I started and finished the book the day I checked it out of the library.

The story follows young Jasper “Jazz” Dent, the teenage son of Billy Dent - who is declared by the novel as the most notorious “super-serial killer” of all time. While Billy raised our protagonist Jazz, Billy murdered a record number of people; all the while teaching young Jazz the finer psychology behind murder. The novel introduces teen Jazz to the reader four years after Billy’s capture. In addition to the average struggle that accompanies most teens, Jazz has to deal with the remains of his father’s brainwashing. Jazz learned skills like manipulation, spotting “prospect” kills, and how to interact with the world without leaving evidence. Skills which prove beneficial to Jazz, a teen who just wants to live an average (as possible) life. If that weren’t enough for Jazz to deal with – a body was just found in his town with eerily similar traits to his father’s early killings. Jazz will have to use every trick his father ever taught him to catch this copy cat killer before it is too late.

A definite must read for anyone who loves stories with surprising endings and great character development.

The sequel Game is due out April 16, 2013.

Click the link and place the book on hold today!

~Jason

Google Doodle: Celebrate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Google celebrates what would have been the 61st birthday of Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with this great Google Doodle. The Doodle features Ford Prefect's Towel, and the Guide itself - telling you not to panic.

Have you read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
Are you a fan of towels?
Do like the number 42?
Stop in the library to check out a copy of the book, eBook, or borrow the DVD today!

Read the books for 26 movies premiering in 2013

Read the books for 26 movies premiering in 2013

With the news waves saturated with the Golden Globes winners and Oscar nominations, we know that movies are very popular.  If you love to read the books that movies are based upon, it's time to start reading as 26 new movies fitting this bill have already been announced for 2013!

Waiting for us in the near future is Catching Fire, the sequel to the best seller Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and the movie of the same name.  Other authors getting the nod are Donald Westlake, Joe Hill, Joseph Finder, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Orson Scott Card, and more.  

Check out the link to plan your reading list now!

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

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

 

 

The Map of Time

The Map of Time
     by Félix J.Palma

     Published to massive acclaim in Spain, Set in Victorian London, FÉlix J. Palma's rollicking page-turner boasts a cast of real and imagined literary characters and cunning intertwined plots. To save innocent lives--including that of his own wife, H. G. Wells the author of The Time Machine must discover the truth about purported incidents of time travel. The mysteries involve an aristocrat in love with a murdered prostitute from the past; a woman bent on fleeing the strictures of Victorian society by searching for her lover somewhere in the future; and a fourth-dimensional plot to murder celebrated authors in order to steal their fictional creations. Awarded the 2008 XL Ateneo de Sevilla Novela Prize the Map of Time is an audacious historical fantasy executed with uncommon skill. It is a story full of love, adventure, and extraordinary imagination.

The Map of Time is really three interconnected stories which build on each other.  There is a little more romance in this book, than you will find in many time travel stories.  Although slow at times, the author had some interesting ideas and the chapter with the elephant man I found quite moving.  

Tyson

ARRRRRR I'm geARRRing up for talk like a Pirate Day

Argggggg September 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day (no, really it is - check the website.) Still not convinced? check their Flickr photostream!

Ever since I saw the movie Hook, I have always had a soft spot for pirates. I watched that VHS so many times the tape ripped. I am fairly certain I quote this movie 2+ times a week. In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I thought I would share some of the more jovial pirate/pirate related items that we have here at the Wellesley Free Library.

Books:
The pirate queen : Queen Elizabeth I, her pirate adventurers, and the dawn of empire
The pirate wars
Pirate: a novel
search through our catalog for more books on pirates and pirate related fiction

Movies:
The Pirates! Band of Misfits
Pirates of the Caribbean Movies:
    Curse of the Black Pearl  
    Dead Man's Chest
    At World's End
    On Stranger Tides
and many more, check our catalog and search by material type: DVD

Children's:
Your life as a cabin boy on a pirate ship
Pirate boy
Jake and the Never Land Pirates. Peter Pan returns
and many more! Head to the Children's room to find more pirate related books and DVDs!

Want to really get into the spirit? Switch your Facebook language to Pirate by going to:
Account Settings > Language > English (Pirate)and therrrrrrre ya have it Matey!

Find your Inner Pirate with the Official Talk Like a Pirate Personality Inventory

!!!***UPDATE***!!!
As I am new here, I am learning new things every day. I JUST learned the online language resource Mango, provided by the Wellesley Free Library, has pirate lessons. Check them out yourself! Head to http://www.wellesleyfreelibrary.org/ on the left hand menu choose Online Resources Scroll down to M - or use M navigation on the right hand side - to Mango

 
Have a great International Talk Like a Pirate Day buccaneers!

~Jason 

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