The Starry Night.

If you’ve got a few minutes to kill and you’re in our area, stop on by and help us with our puzzle. We set this out as a collaborative project for our library patrons and we’re enjoying working on it so far, but we’d enjoy it more if you’d join us.

We’ve been wanting to put a puzzle out for a while now, something for us all to do a little bit of at a time, something that would be both rewarding and challenging…

So with that in mind we figured: Why not start with the best? So here we have The Starry Night, 1889, by post-impressionist master, Vincent Van Gogh.

You can find out more about Van Gogh through both Wikipedia and Artble and the Museum Of Modern Art, and find a gallery of his work here. And here you’ll find analysis on The Starry Night, as well as at the Musée d’Orsay.

Here’s what the puzzle is supposed to look like:

So come and help us finish it?

New and Featured Books for 12/15/11:

Come and check out these and some of the other new books and materials (or at least new to us) added to our library collection…

FICTION:

Kill Alex Cross by James Patterson

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin

The Christmas Wedding by James Patterson

Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston

Micro is the second posthumous book from Crichton. Apparently about a third of it was written before his death in 2008 and when it was found in his archives (along with 2009’s Pirate Latitudes, which we also have), his publisher hired author Richard Preston to finish the book based on Crichton’s notes and research.

Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

11-22-63 by Stephen King

As The Pig Turns by M. C. Beaton

Kill Me If You Can by James Patterson

Three new James Patterson books!? That’s crazy, right?

The Litigators by John Grisham

Batman: The Black Mirror by Scott Snyder with art by Jock and Francesco Francavilla

A Clash Of Kings by George R. R. Martin

Shock Wave by John Sandford

NON-FICTION:

Back To Work: Why We Need Smart Government For A Strong Economy by Bill Clinton

Skyjack: The Hunt For D. B. Cooper by Geoffrey Gray

A fun look into this fascinating bit of true crime history. You can find reviews at The Washington Post and USA Today and check out the book’s official website.

Boomerang: Travels In The New Third World by Michael Lewis

Seriously… I’m Kidding by Ellen DeGeneres

One Nation Under AARP: The Fight Over Medicare, Social Security, And America’s Future by Frederick R. Lynch

The Swerve: How The World Become Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

The winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction. Here are some book reviews from NPR and The New York Times. And you can listen to the author reading from his book over at Vanity Fair.

Columbus: The Four Voyages by Laurence Bergreen

I Didn’t Ask To Be Born (But I’m Glad I Was) by Bill Cosby

Empty Pleasures: The Story Of Artificial Sweeteners From Saccharin To Splenda by Carolyn De La Peña

* * *

Please note that books could be checked out between the time they end up on the blog and when you come to check them out. If you don’t see the items you’re looking for then please come up to the front desk and we’ll put your name on the reserve list for when item returns.

Our blog.

Hi there. As the previous post said, Welcome! Thanks for checking out our new blog.

Bear with us as we slowly bring the blog to life. We should be fully up and running and alive and kicking in January but we wanted to sneak in at the end of this year and get a few posts out there. To dip our toe into the waters of the blogosphere, if you will.

Both this blog and our official website have been in the planning stages for months, but we don’t have to tell you how planning and implementing are two different things altogether. So give us a little time (and lots and lots of feedback, please) and we’ll get the hang of this.

Some of the desired goals of this blog are to make the library more accessible to you even when you’re not physically in the library, to let you hear from the staff, to inform you of programs and events of the library, to get more involved with what the library is doing if you so choose, to advertise some of the great new materials we hope to be offering you, and maybe even share with you a few anecdotes and items to read and check out from around the internet.

Long story short: Check back on us occasionally. We hope to have interesting things for you.

A small example: Before I could finally allow myself to click “Publish” on this post I had to agonize for quite a while about the start of the second paragraph to this post. Was it “Bare with” or “Bear with”? I asked a few people, and for every person who said “Bare” the next would say “Bear.” Sigh. According to the internet, the tie breaking vote is for “Bear.” Bear meaning “something you have to struggle with” (or a large forest-dwelling creature that is nothing but fur and teeth and will most likely devour you and your picnic basket) and Bare implying “undressing and revealing,” which is a subject for other blogs out there. So, “Bear” it is. And that’s fine with me, if for nothing else because it lets me put post this picture:

We hope to see you around.

Hello World! And thanks for checking out our blog…

Welcome to the Blog for the Robins Air Force Base Library! Come on in…