Book of the Week #48

Live Free and Eat Pie! A Storyteller's Guide to New Hampshire by Rebecca Rule (Yarmouth, Maine: Islandport Press, 2008)

This book was in a pile of copy cataloging I was working on today, and it struck me as the perfect book for the week of Thanksgiving. Stories, laughing, and pie seem like a perfect Thanksgiving combo.

When I checked out the publisher's website I discovered Travels With Becky -- Rebecca Rule's blog. I also discovered that she will be reading tonight at 7pm at the River Run Bookstore. If the rain prevents you from hearing her tonight, she has several other events coming up which are listed on the blog as well.

Ladybug Voting Deadline

The deadline for sending in your Ladybug Picture Book Award voting results is one week from today - December 1, 2008. Votes recieved after that day will NOT be counted, so please send your completed tally sheet right away. The winning book will be announced on this blog in December (as soon as all the votes are counted).

Weekend Book Events

Friday, November 21, 2008

• Poet Charlie Pratt will be at Water Street Bookstore at 7pm to share from his book Still Here.
• The policy-analyst, author, and activist Antonia Juhasz speaks on her latest book, The Tyranny of Oil: The World's Most Powerful Industry-And What We Must Do To Stop It at RiverRun Bookstore at 7pm.
• At 7pm Rebecca Courser from the Warner Historical Society will be reading from the Civil War diaries of Joseph Rogers at MainStreet BookEnds.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

• New London residents, Mary Kuechenmeister and Brinker Ferguson will autograph their new adventure book for kids (grade 3 and up), Sam and the Silver Stones at Morgan Hill Bookstore at 10am.
• Yakov Zilberberg to sign his Soviet themed fiction at 11am at the Toadstool Bookshop in Milford.
• Author Jim Griffin will be discussing his newest western books for kids Ranger's Revenge and Big Ben Death Trap at noon at Borders Books, Keene.
• Dan Snow, author of Listening to Stone, will be at the Toadstool Bookshop in Keene at 2pm.
• Gary Braver, author of Skin Deep will be at Barnes & Noble, Portsmouth at 1pm.
• Fritz Weatherbee will at Barnes & Noble, Manchester at 2pm and will also be telling stories from his latest book, Taken for Granite at Water Street Bookstore at 6pm.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

• Poet (and past NH Letters About Literature judge) Mimi White will be reading at 4pm at Gibsons.

2008 National Book Awards

The National Book Foundation has announced the winners of the 2008 National Book Awards:

• Fiction: Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
• Nonfiction: Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Young People's Literature: Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
• Poetry: Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)

Book of the Week #47

My Antonia by Willa Cather (first published in 1918).

"I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were
sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the 'hands' on my father's old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake's
experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world."

Thus begins this novel, thought by many to be Cather's best -- about the life of a spirited girl, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants, growing up on the Nebraska prairie in the 1800s.


What does this have to do with New Hampshire?

According to a letter Cather wrote June 9, 1943 to Harrison T. Blaine, she wrote much of this novel in a tent that had been pitched in a field between High Mowing (owned by Blaine's mother at the time the of the letter) and Stony Brook Farm. Cather was staying at the Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey, NH at the time. According to the Willa Cather Archive, this letter is owned by the Jaffrey Public Library.

2009: The Year of Readers

If you are looking for a project for 2009 how about reading for a good cause? (Granite State Reads, and the Center for the Book at the NHSL are both worthy causes -- hint, hint)

The Year of Readers is a really simple concept, and a really cool one. From their site:

"In 2009 I want to spread my love of reading throughout the world. The Year
of Readers aims to bring people who enjoy books together to have fun
bringing literature into the lives of others. From the 1st January 2009
until 31st of December 2009 I will be running an international read-a-thon
that will be open to anyone who reads. It doesn’t matter what kind of books
you read or how many you read as long as you’ve got your nose in a book in
2009 you can join in."

Basically the idea is the same as a walk-a-thon but you get to read books instead of walking as a way to raise money for a charity. And even better, it will be a book related charity. The site also includes buttons you can put on your site to direct people to the project (like the one above).

Book of the Week #46

The Many Roads to Paradise by Dianalee Velie. (Middleborough, MA: Rock Village Publishing, 2006)

I came across this volume by poet and Newbury, NH resident Dianalee Velie at the recent New England Library Association conference. This is the third published collection of peotry by Ms. Velie and includes, among many others, the poem "The Eighth Day" which I especially liked.

Here are the first few lines:

So after God rested,
He got out His checklist,
looked at His creation
and laughed.
Revision would be a challenge.

Book of the Week #45

The Innocent Victim: A Franco-American Civil War Novel by Adélard Lambert ; translated by Margaret S. Langford in collaboration with Claire Quintal (Bennington, Vt.: Images from the Past, 2008)




Originally published in 1936 as a serialization in the Ottowa newspaper Le Droit this is the story of a French Canadian couple separated by the Civil War. The story begins in 1899 with the discovery of a skeleton beneath a Manchester, NH building. Margaret S. Langford, a professor of French at Keene State College translated the novel into English.



In his foreword Robert Perreault suggests that this novel might find readers among "lovers of historical fiction or of mysteries, students of Québécois or immigrant history, Civil War enthusiasts, New Englanders, Franco-Americans, residents of Manchester or of Lowell -- where more of the action takes place -- and anyone seeking a few hours of literary enjoyment." (p. xvi)



In addition to the novel, this volume includes information on the author; the real-life mystery of the discovery of the skeleton; and a bibliography and resource lists on Franco-American history and literature.



Thanks to Images from the Past publisher Tordis Ilg Isselhardt for providing me with a copy of this book!

It's Almost Time to Vote!

Now that it is November it is time to vote for the Ladybug Picture Book Award! If you haven't visited the Ladybug website yet to get your ballots and tally sheets so you can be a voting site, now is the time. The deadline for sending in your votes is December 1, 2008. The winner should be announced here on our blog before schools close for winter break in December.

Thanks to donations from the book publishers, two lucky voting sites have won sets of the 2008 Ladybug Picture Book Award nominees. Leigh Maynard from the Hopkinton Town Library won a set of books in the Ladybug Raffle at the CHILIS Fall Conference and Wentworth Elementary School was randomly selected from the 2007 Ladybug tally sheets as the winner of a second set of books.