LC Hosting an LAL Webinar for Educators

Join the Library of Congress Letters About Literature team on Wednesday, October 25, 2017 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time for a one-hour webinar exploring 25 years of best practices of the Letters About Literature program. Certificates for CEUs will be available upon completion of the live program. Register here.

Book of the Week (10/16/2017)

Erin Bakes Cake: Make + Bake + Decorate = Your Own Cake Adventure! by Erin Gardner (Emmaus, Penn. : Rodale Books, 2017).

NH Lakes Region author and self-taught pastry chef, Erin Gardner returns with another fun and creative cake recipe book sure to make your mouth water!

Erin Gardner's cake recipes share a delicious, time-saving secret: they're all the same. Why play the guessing game of sifting through dozens of recipes when all you need are just a few that contain hundreds of variations--572, to be exact! The cakequations in Erin Bakes Cake teach you how to combine her cake, buttercream, cookie, and candy recipes in endless mouth-watering ways. Erin's cake recipes aren't sorcery--they're science. They all share similar ratios of ingredients that add tenderness, strength, or flavor. You don't have to be an expert. Everyone can learn to make a great cake!
Erin Bakes Cake provides the building blocks for constructing a great cake, and then offers endless ways those blocks can be reassembled. Erin shares the baking tips she learned as a professional pastry chef and wedding cake baker, what tools to use, how to perfect the cake's finish, and other tricks of the baking trade. She then shows you how to make gorgeous and intricately decorated cakes by elevating simple, but delicious, ingredients like candy, cookies, and chocolate. Erin's created cake designs that are festive, chic, and easy to recreate at home without the use of hard-to-deal-with fondant.
And best of all, you can make every recipe your own! The Any Veggie Cake cake can be transformed into a classic carrot cake, zucchini cake, or sweet potato cake. A creamy cake filling isn't limited to buttercream with the inclusion of recipes for caramel, ganache, marshmallow, and more. A chocolate birthday cake recipe can be reimagined as red velvet or chocolate toffee. Elements of crunch, like peanut brittle, honeycomb candy, or even cookie crumbles, can be sprinkled onto your cake layers for tasty added texture. --Water Street Bookstore website

Join Erin at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, NH on Wednesday, October 18, 2017 at 7:00 pm where she will be doing a Q&A plus a demonstration!

What Romance Did You Love?

We are taking a survey to decide which romance novel by a NH author we should feature in next summer's Route One Reads project. To participate in the survey go to https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Rt1RomanceNH
and let us know which of the dozen books we are considering (pictured above) you like best. You can only vote once, so consider your choice carefully! The survey will close at  11:30pm on Sunday, October 29, 2017.

Book of the Week (10/9/2017)

Strange Weather: Four Short Novels by Joe Hill (Harper Collins, 2017).

New Hampshire's own Joe Hill will be at Gibson's Bookstore on Tuesday, October 24th, 2017 at 7 pm to present Strange Weather: Four Short Novels.

A collection of four chilling novels, ingeniously wrought gems of terror from the brilliantly imaginative, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman, Joe Hill."One of America's finest horror writers" (Time magazine), Joe Hill has been hailed among legendary talents such as Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, and Jonathan Lethem. In Strange Weather, this "compelling chronicler of human nature's continual war between good and evil," (Providence Journal-Bulletin) who "pushes genre conventions to new extremes" (New York Times Book Review) deftly expose the darkness that lies just beneath the surface of everyday life.
"Snapshot" is the disturbing story of a Silicon Valley adolescent who finds himself threatened by "The Phoenician," a tattooed thug who possesses a Polaroid Instant Camera that erases memories, snap by snap.
A young man takes to the skies to experience his first parachute jump. . . and winds up a castaway on an impossibly solid cloud, a Prospero's island of roiling vapor that seems animated by a mind of its own in "Aloft."
On a seemingly ordinary day in Boulder, Colorado, the clouds open up in a downpour of nails--splinters of bright crystal that shred the skin of anyone not safely under cover. "Rain" explores this escalating apocalyptic event, as the deluge of nails spreads out across the country and around the world.
In "Loaded," a mall security guard in a coastal Florida town courageously stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero to the modern gun rights movement. But under the glare of the spotlights, his story begins to unravel, taking his sanity with it. When an out-of-control summer blaze approaches the town, he will reach for the gun again and embark on one last day of reckoning.
Masterfully exploring classic literary themes through the prism of the supernatural, Strange Weather is a stellar collection from an artist who is "quite simply the best horror writer of our generation" (Michael Kortya). -- Publisher's blurb

3 on a Theme: Mt. Washington

• Cog Days: A Boy's Life and One Tragic Summer on Mt. Washington by Joe McQuaid
• Mount Washington: Narratives and Perspectives edited by Mike Dickerman
•  Marty on the Mountain: 38 years on Mount Washington by Martin Engstrom