New and Featured Books for 11/19/2012:

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:

The Stockholm Octavio by Karen Engelmann

The Old Gray Wolf by James D. Doss

Eleven Pipers Piping: A Mystery by C. C. Benison

A Christmas Garland by Anne Perry

The Last Man by Vince Flynn

The Sanctuary by Ted Dekker

Amazing Grace by Danielle Steel

The Woes Of A True Policeman by Roberto Bolaño

Secrets by Danielle Steel

V Is For Vengeance by Sue Grafton

Murder, She Wrote: Madison Avenue Shoot by Donald Bain

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

City Of Saints by Andrew Hunt

The Woes Of A True Policeman by Roberto Bolano

The Sweet Life: The Serial by Francine Pascal

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

NON-FICTION:

Cigars, Whiskey, & Winning: Leadership Lessons From General Ulysses S. Grant by Al Kaltman

Friendkeeping: A Field Guide To The People You Love, Hate, And Can’t Live Without by Julie Klam

Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield

A Gift Of Hope: Helping The Homeless by Danielle Steel

“If She Weren’t My Best Friend, I’d Kill Her!” – How Women Drive Their Girlfriends Crazy by Merry Bloch Jones

Meet Me At The Emotional Baggage Claim by Lisa Scottoline and Francesca Serritella

Strong In The Rain: Surviving Japan’s Earthquake, Tsunami, And Fukushima Nuclear Disaster by Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill

The Archaeology Of Consumer Culture by Paul R. Mullins

The Particle At The End Of The Universe: How The Hunt For The Higgs Boson Leads Us To The Edge Of A New World by Sean Carroll

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life And Turbulent Times Of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw

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Please note that books mentioned here 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, OR call us, OR send us an email at robinsbaselibrary@gmail.com and  we’ll put your name on the reserve list for when the item returns.

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Previous New/Featured books for Adults:

11/01/12.

10/19/12.

10/16/12.

10/12/12.

10/11/12.

09/21/12.

New and Featured Books for 11/01/2012:

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:

The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom

A Wreath Of Snow by Liz Curtis Higgs

We Are What We Pretend To Be: The First And Last Works by Kurt Vonnegut

Into The Woods: Tales From The Hollows And Beyond by Kim Harrison

Batman, The Dark Knight, vol. 1: Knight Terrors by David Finch and Paul Jenkins

Bowl Of Heaven by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven

Noughties by Ben Masters

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Wild Girls by Mary Stewart Atwell

Try The Morgue by Eva Maria Staal

Death In The Floating City by Tasha Alexander

Zoo Time by Howard Jacobson

Care Of Wooden Floros by Will Wiles

Murder, She Wrote: Domestic Malice by Donald Bain

What Happens At Christmas by Victoria Alexander

A Fool’s Gold Christmas by Susan Mallery

The 13th Day Of Christmas by Jason F. Wright

NON-FICTION:

Some Girls, Some Hats, And Hitler: A True Love Story Rediscovered by Trudi Kanter

The Price Of Politics by Bob Woodward

Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger

The Man Who Saved The Union: Ulysses Grant In War And Peace by H. W. Brands

The End Of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe

Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom Of Power by Craig Unger

Bad Habits: Confessions Of A Recovering Catholic by Jenny McCarthy

Grace: More Than We Deserve, Greater Than We Imagine by Max Lucado

Does This Church Make Me Look Fat? – A Mennonite Finds Faith, Meets Mr. Right, And Solves Her Lady Problems by Rhoda Janzen

The Book Of Job: When Bad Things Happened To A Good Person by Harold S. Kushner

Bailout: An Inside Account Of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street by Neil Barofsky

Uggie: My Story, as barked to Wendy Holden

Netflixed: The Epic Battle For America’s Eyeballs by Gina Keating

The Story Of Ain’t: America, Its Language, And The Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published by David Skinner

We Killed: The Rise Of Women In American Comedy – A Very Oral History by Yael Kohen

Human Game: The True Story Of The “Great Escape” Murders And The Hunt For The Gestapo Gunmen by Simon Read

The Liberal War On Transparency: Confessions Of A Freedom Of Information “Criminal” by Christopher C. Horner

Master Of The Mountain: Thomas Jefferson And His Slaves by Henry Wiencek

* * *

Please note that books mentioned here 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, OR call us, OR send us an email at robinsbaselibrary@gmail.com and  we’ll put your name on the reserve list for when the item returns.

* * *

Previous New/Featured books for Adults:

10/19/12.

10/16/12.

10/12/12.

10/11/12.

09/21/12.

Reading material for 06/11/12:

from here.

Some reading material from around the internet:

“You are not special” graduation speech sparks buzz.

27 bits of wisdom from 2012 commencement addresses.

Fortunately NPR’s Car Talk will be going away soon.

Nose jobs are on the decline.

Mr. Rogers gets autotuned.

We are creating the culture of distraction.

RIP Ray Bradbury.

A video interview with Kurt Vonnegut from 1991.

Five things that Joe Hill has never done as a writer but would like to try.

10 famous authors whose lives would have made awesome books.

Natasha Trethewey is the next U.S. Poet Laureate.

A survival guide for book tours.

30 books everyone should read before turning 30.

Censoring Ray Bradbury.

500 free movies online: Great movies, classic movies, indies, noir, westerns, etc.

27 popular network shows that premiered in the summer.

25 things you didn’t know about Mad Men.

The trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Inception recreated with legos and stop motion camerawork.

Bill Murray explains his legendary fight with Chevy Chase.

Listen to a rare 1960s interview with Stanley Kubrick for The New Yorker.

The brainstorming myth.

Here are 12 bookstore cats.

Disneyworld hikes up its prices.

Neutrinos can’t beat the speed of light.

The Librarian and the Hot Rod Shop.

This Smart Bed makes itself after you get up.

The virtues of daydreaming.

* * *

Previous online reading material:

06/04/12.

04/30/12.

04/23/12.

04/16/12.

04/09/12.

Reading material for 03/26/12:

from here.

Some reading material from around the internet:

Amazing new photos of the Titanic.

Starbucks to release their own energy drink.

Rainbow-striped Jello Easter eggs.

Mystery booms in Wisconsin.

Just how big is Wal-Mart?

What you need to know about Mad Men season 5.

A new painting by Van Gogh has been discovered.

A child’s wardrobe that actually leads to Narnia!

from here.

Retina display!

Watch all of Mass Effect 3‘s different endings.

A nice review of Angry Birds Space.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on being a meme.

10 things that are smarter than you’d expect.

Historic photos of female scientists at work.

Social media will probably not democratize the world.

Play the interactive 8-bit Mad Men game.

Watch celebrities read their follower’s meanest tweets.

Young people are losing interest in cars.

Suzanne Collins is Kindle’s best selling author of all time, and 29 of the 100 most highlighted passages on the Kindle come from The Hunger Games trilogy.

Speaking of which: the film version of The Hunger Games opens huge.

Defending the thesaurus.

A previously unreleased Kurt Vonnegut novella was released last week.

How does 1Q84 stack up against Haruki Murakami’s other classic novels?

Famous lost novels.

A list of Irish heroes in Jame Joyce’s Ulysses.

Dreamily eerie Alice In Wonderland drawings.

Robert Louis Stevenson on the books that have inspired him.

via Entertainment Weekly.

A nice Game Of Thrones featurette  to get you caught up for the show’s return on April 1.

Some hilarious audience notes from a 1980s screening of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome.

Could Hawkeye from The Avengers be the world’s worst archer?

This is what Carrie looks like in The Sex And The City prequel.

They’re making a Hannibal Lecter TV show.

Meet the new companion on Doctor Who, and learn some details from the upcoming season.

An oral history of The Sopranos.

Many buyers fooled by The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo‘s DVD joke.

The beginning of the end of HBO?

A bizarre picture from a Chinese dog show.

Why cats can survive falls that would kill any other animals.

How does the brain secrete morality?

A brief guide to pop culture in 1966.

10 great songs from 1966.

Chick-Fil-A threatens the guy who made the “Eat More Kale” t-shirts, he fights back with a Kickstarter documentary.

Cell division humor.

Even Geraldo Rivera’s son is ashamed of his father’s comments, re: Trayvon Martin and hoodies.

Pictures of toddlers being best friends with their dogs.

An impossible font.

* * *

Previous online reading material:

03/12/12.

03/05/12.

02/27/12.

02/20/12.

02/13/12.

Author quotes: Burning books.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. once said, “We must be careful what we pretend to be,”  which is one of my favorite quotes of all time, but Vonnegut was a highly opinionated and prolific author and essayist, and he was always a good source for a good quote or a witty turn of phrase.

The other day I got into a conversation with a few patrons not just about the need for intellectual curiosity in people, especially in this day and age, but the need for constant access to the tools that could inspire and grow that curiosity in these modern times, and it reminded me of something Vonnegut had said a few years before his death (in 2007):

“While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

And still on the subject of books: our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what’s really going on.”

-from A Man Without A Country, his 2005 memoir/essay collection.

You can find an excerpt from the book over at The Guardian, which includes the portion the above text comes from. Much of this book, and in particular this excerpt, are very political with Vonnegut discussing his disappointment in the then-current political climate of the country. Whether you agree with Vonnegut’s politics there or not, you have to admire that there are some nuggets of common sense true for all people, and that he always maintained a strong humanistic outlook on life.

Also, on a side note, in the paragraph preceding the above quote Vonnegut references Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, his documentary about the September 11 attacks and everything after, and reminds us that the title of the documentary is a reference/parody of Ray Bradbury’s great, classic science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. That novel refers to the fact that 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point, at which paper and the information on it will burn.

The gist of it is this: Not to toot our own horn (too much) but libraries curate and cultivate information, and with information comes intelligence, which is never a bad thing and always in short supply. The library is a resource that you should never let go to waste.

by Eddie Campbell, from here.

Elsewhere on the internet:

Vonnegut’s obituary in The New York Times.

15 things Vonnegut said better than anyone else ever has or will.

Venus On The Half-Shell by Philip José Farmer under the name “Kilgore Trout.”

Vonnegut’s advice for writers.

Vonnegut’s story diagrams.

“Harrison Bergeron,” Vonnegut’s classic short story.

An interview with Vonnegut in The Paris Review.

“2BR02B,” a 1962 short story that appeared in Vonnegut’s third collection, Bagombo Snuff Box.

“The Big Trip Up Yonder,” a short story that appeared in Vonnegut’s first two collections under different names.

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis.

Dave Eggers reviews Vonnegut’s first collection of unpublished fiction.

At the library we have quite a few books both by Vonnegut and about his life and work, including When Mortals Sleep, a posthumous release of previously unpublished short fiction by the author, as well as And So It Goes – Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, a new biography of the author by Charles J. Shields, and…

Vonnegut And Hemingway: Writers At War by Lawrence Broer, which draws interesting parallels between these two literary artists, who previously might have been only been coupled together by how vastly different they were. Both were born under the spectre of hereditary insanity, forged in wartime experiences, and used their writing as a means of therapy and survival. And how much more fitting to see them linked, since Hemingway was our quoted author last week? I hope you’ll come and check them out.

And even more reading material.

Some reading material from around the internet:

8 actors who look exactly the same on every movie poster.

Science fiction’s predictions for 2012.

Taco Bell has a breakfast menu?

The thrill of blaming others.

Twitter adopts country-specific censorship regime.

Human nature and the neurobiology of conflict.

How old does Google think you are?

Retailers resort to offering refunds to customers for positive reviews online.

There’s a mysterious object at the bottom of the Baltic sea.

Facebook about to go public.

An intimate look at the youth of Egypt in the ongoing revolution.

Polish lawmakers don Guy Fawkes masks to sign ACTA.

Political contributions from the financial sector have increased 700% since 1990.

A bookworm’s guide to casting The Corrections.

The new trailer for Game Of Thrones‘ second season.

The MPAA is “not comfortable” with the internet.

Shirley MacLaine has been cast the Dowager Countess’ nemesis on Downton Abbey.

The best and worst of Sundance 2012.

from here.

J.R.R. Tolkien snubbed by the 1961 Nobel jury.

The wise words of E. B. White.

The 10 most expensive books in the world.

An interview with Michael Ondaatje.

Best practices for Fair Use in libraries.

Literature’s greatest mustaches.

Visionaries from the paperback revolution.

Interesting books coming out in 2012.

Vladimir Putin has some books that he’d like you to read.

The alternate titles of famous books.

Great science fiction authors who never wrote sequels or trilogies.

Language is hardwired to be optimistic, even if people aren’t.

10 of literature’s trippiest books.

from here.

7 things you didn’t know about Joan Of Arc.

Was Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous anatomical chart actually a collaborative effort?

This is what happens when you ask Stephen Hawking for the secret to time travel.

The social networks of the Stone Age.

Volcanoes seen from space.

A truly bizarre headline: “Indonesian man arrested for kicking woman he thought was a ghost.”

How NASA kept astronauts from swearing on the moon.

The world’s giant trees are dying off rapidly.

When did Rome really fall?

An optimistic history of the next 40 years.

New and Featured Books for 12/19/11:

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:

Mrs. Jeffries And The Mistletoe Mix-Up by Emily Brightwell

While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut

The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell

A Discovery Of Witches by Deborah Harkness

The Unwritten, vol. 1: Tommy Taylor And The Bogus Identity by Mike Carey and illustrated by Peter Gross

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

The Evolution Of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale

Tricked, written and illustrated by Alex Robinson

NON-FICTION:

In The Womb by Peter Tallack

Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life Of Walter Payton by Jeff Pearlman

America The Vulnerable: Inside The New Threat Matrix Of Digital Espionage, Crime, And Warfare by Joel Brenner

And So It Goes – Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields

The New Supply Chain Agenda by Reuben E. Slone

Lost In Shangri-La: A True Story Of Survival, Adventure, And The Most Incredible Rescue Mission Of World War II by Mitchell Zuckoff

A fascinating true story based on the crash of a US military plane called The Gremlin Special. The term “Shangri-La” is the name of a fictional utopia and comes from James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. This book has been listed as amongst the best non-fiction of 2011 by both Salon magazine and The New York Times. We have the American hardcover edition of the book, the cover of which you can see above, but I think I much prefer the British edition’s cover:

Margaret Mitchell, Reporter, edited by Patrick Allen

Clark Howard’s Living Large In Lean Times: 250+ Ways To Buy Smarter, Spend Smarter, and Save Money by Clark Howard

Colossus: Hoover Dam And The Making Of The American Century by Michael Hiltzik

Black Power In Dixie: A Political History Of African Americans In Atlanta by Alton Hornsby Jr.

Dreaming Of Dixie: How The South Was Created In American Popular Culture by Karen L. Cox

You can watch an interview with the author here, via BookTV.

How I Got This Way by Regis Philbin

* * *

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 the item returns.

* * *

Previous New/Featured books:

12/17/11.

12/16/11.

12/15/11.