What's new in mystery and fiction?

Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich
We can't get enough of these Stephanie Plum novels.

Shadow Creek by Joy Fielding
Crazed killers wreak havoc in the Adirondacks.
 
Two Graves by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
FBI Agent Aloysius Pendergast discovers that his wife Helen -- who he thought was dead -- is alive.  Then she's kidnapped and he must go looking for her.
maf

Densho Encyclopedia

In February 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the military to evacuate all people of Japanese ancestry from the west coast of the United States. Over 100,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were forcibly relocated to a handful of detention centers, until their release in 1945. Of course the Library has a wealth of materials (including the classic Farewell to Manzanar) on the relocation, but now there is a free online encyclopedia devoted entirely to the subject. Denshon includes images, videos, documents and interviews and is intended for high school and college students.
--RL

November Featured Online Resource is CQ Researcher

The place to turn for clear information on hot topics and issues is CQResearcher.  Each topic, whether political, economic or social, provides in depth research, statistics and charts, and a pro/con feature to illustrate positions on an issue.   

Topics recently covered include Mormonism, the new Health Care Law, the Euro Crisis and Supreme Court Controversies. Take advantage of this unique tool and stay up to date with the important issues of our time!  SH

Happy Birthday Bram Stoker!

Check out the Google Doodle for today:

Today is Bram Stoker's 165th birthday! Celebrate his birthday by sinking your teeth into his most famous work, Dracula.

Dracula is one of my 'all-time' favorite novels, and if you have not read it, I suggest giving it a try. While popular culture seems to spit out a new vampire novel every month, none of them have the depth that this novel possesses. It was not the first vampire novel, however it remains the foundation for a great deal of vampyric myth. Beyond the monster legend, Dracula is a book about colonialism, post-colonialism, immigration, and the role of women in Victorian Society. It is interesting to think about the fact that Stoker, an Irishman, wrote Dracula, a book about an outside force invading England and literally bleeding it dry, shortly after the Irish Potato famine. There was an immense amount of hostility toward England, as they continued to export goods out of Ireland during the worst times of the potato blight, essentially bleeding Ireland dry. Much of Irish literature has been explained as pre or post famine, and this novel is very interesting to read knowing it is post-famine.
In the novel Dracula starts out as the colonized when an Englishman named Jonathan Harker travels to his home in the Carpathian Mountains to purchase the estate. While Harker is trapped in the estate of Dracula, Dracula travels to England and preys upon the Victorian women. The colonizer (England), becomes the colonized when Dracula turns a few of the English characters in the book into vampires. I have a great deal more to say about this book, but I am afraid I have already given so much of the plot away! Check out the book youself and stop by the Reference Desk sometime and let me (Jason) know what you thought!

Books on Stoker and Dracula
The new annotated Dracula
The essential Dracula

Further Information:
Dracula : between tradition and modernism by Senf, Carol

Potato Famine:
The great Irish potato famine by Donnelly, James S. Jr



The United States of YA

Created with the contributions of readers, EpicReads has made a fairly awesome map of YA books.

You can see the full post here

I am looking forward to tackling this list. I have read a number already, but now that I see this list I cannot resist reading them all. How many of these have you read? What do you think about the full list?

~jh

And God Spoke to Abraham Lincoln

Disunion Blog

The New York Times DISUNION Blog follows the Civil War as it happened 150 years ago.  In a recent post by by EDWARD J. BLUM and PAUL HARVEY which talks about how President Lincoln received a letter from God.  

“I am your Heavenly Father and the God of all Nations,” it began. God had particular explanations and instructions for the president, whose entire term of office had been defined by war. “I am the cause for the disruption between the North and the South,” he continued, and the point was to destroy the “horrible state of affairs” that man’s “selfish nature” had brought. “I am not partial and have no respect of persons.” Coming just weeks after the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, the letter made it clear that God wanted to destroy slavery. For further instructions, God told Lincoln to gather six of his best men and meet in person “my instrument the Messenger of Peace the Christ of this day.”  Lincoln did not believe the letter was from God, of course; as he suspected, it came from a local religious devotee named Lydia Smith, who believed herself to be God’s medium.

To read the entire post click HERE.
 
Today a President has staff to go through his mail and is less accessible then he was 150 years ago.  Still I picture Lincoln writing at his desk or reading about military strategy not answering "crank" letters or being influenced by the great awakening.

Tyson

 

Classic foreign film on DVD

Many of our classic films on VHS have now been replaced on DVD format. Come in and browse this new collection of older titles.  A sampling:

 

Which are your favorites? Any suggestions for purchase? We would love to hear from you!

-DB 

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

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

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

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 

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

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

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

 

 

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