Book of the Week #13

Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets. Rick Agran, Hildred Crill, Mark DeCarteret, editors. (Oyster River Press, 1999)

Since National Poetry Month begins this week, a collection of poems by Granite State poets seemed an obvious choice for this week's book. From a review in UNH Magazine: "It would be impossible and beside the point to draw wide-sweeping conclusions or make generalizations about what it is to be a poet and live in New Hampshire, or to be New Hampshire and live in poetry. It is enough to say that the book contains remedies for anything that might ail you ..."

Clippings from the Blogosphere

• "Find your local library with a text message" This is a really cool application! It worked for my zip code, pointed me right to the Manchester City Library. Using it to find your own local library seems a little silly to me, but it will be great when I am in a strange place and want to find the local library.

• In Britain there is an award given annually for the oddest book title.

• Just One More Book! will begin the Rock Stars of Reading video series on March 31. LISNews has a nice overview of what the series is all about.

• Science Fiction and Fantasy book award lists are out and the Nashua Public Library did a nice job of summarizing the 2009 nominees.

• The NY Times reports that Netherland has won the PEN/Faulkner Award.

• If you haven't had enough book awards yet, the Orwell Prize (the pre-eminent British prize for political writing) also announced its shortlist recently.
  
  
• Have you ever sold a book to a used bookstore (or given it away, or returned it to the library) with your bookmark still in it? Well many people have and there is a blog about these Forgotten Bookmarks. My favorite is the poem.
  

A Party at Time of Wonder

Time of Wonder at Water Street Bookstore (Exeter) will be hosting the premiere party for Michael Sullivan's book, The Sapphire Knight! There will be ice cream cupcakes, balloon swords, storytelling, juggling and much more. Michael Sullivan, author of the Escapade Johnson series, will be reading from his new book, the first in the Bard Series, and will be training everyone on how to be a real bard. The party starts Friday April 3rd at 3:30 pm.

White Birch Books is 17!

On Saturday, April 4, 2009 White Birch Books is hosting an ALL DAY PARTY AT THE BOOKSTORE to celebrate their 17th year and they want you to join them. In her invitation Laura Lucy said there would be "... storytime with surprise guest at 10:30, music by the incomparable Stacy Sand starting at 2 p.m., prizes and discounts all day, delicious cake and several stray balloons. I think that about sums it up! Stop by - even if it's just to say hi and sign our Bookstore Testimonial page. It's going to be a lot of fun and we're going to be over-the-top giddy - we would love to see you!"

Clippings from the Blogosphere

• The Orange Prize for Fiction is awarded to the woman who, in the opinion of the judges, has written the best, eligible full-length novel in English. The Orange Prize for Fiction 2009 long list has been announced.

• Washington Post's review of Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult.

• The Man Booker International Prize recognizes one writer for their achievement in fiction. The 2009 contenders have been announced.

Recognizing Top LAL Participation

Thanks to generous donors, the Center for the Book at the NH State Library was able to award $50 to the libraries of the New Hampshire schools with the highest level of participation at each competition level in Letters About Literature 2009. Participation was calculated as the percentage of students at the school (in the grades elegible for that competition level) who entered letters (with the name of the school clearly written on the entry coupon) in the 2009 Letters About Literature competition. We used the 2007-2008 School Enrollments by Grade from the NH Department of Education website in our calculations.

Congratulations!

Level 1 - Marlborough School (96.67% participation)
Level 2 - Marlborough School (85.71% participation)
Level 3 - Stratford Public School (29.79% participation)

Book of the Week #12

Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007)

Lehrer, a former NH resident, will be at Gibson's on March 26, 2009, at 7 PM discussing his latest book, How We Decide.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist came out a few years ago (it is available in paperback) and was widely praised.

From Publisher's Weekly: "With impressively clear prose, Lehrer explores the oft-overlooked places in literary history where novelists, poets and the occasional cookbook writer predicted scientific breakthroughs with their artistic insights. The 25-year-old Columbia graduate draws from his diverse background in lab work, science writing and fine cuisine to explain how Cézanne anticipated breakthroughs in the understanding of human sight, how Walt Whitman intuited the biological basis of thoughts and, in the title essay, how Proust penetrated the mysteries of memory by immersing himself in childhood recollections. Lehrer's writing peaks in the essay about Auguste Escoffier, the chef who essentially invented modern French cooking."

Lehrer talked briefly about living in NH when he was a guest on NHPR's Word of Mouth last January discussing How the City Hurts Your Brain.

Notes from my Inbox

There have been a number of interesting book-related items in my email recently:

• Poet Stephen Redic has a poetry reading at the Candia Historical Society on Tuesday, March 24 at 7 pm. He will read from his new book, tell the stories behind his work, and take any questions. For more information, you can contact Norma Lewis at 603-483-2350. The event is on Rt 27 in Candia, NH at the Historical Society.

• Borders "has long supported the cause of literacy and learning and strives to recognize each teacher, homeschooler, professor, religious educator, and school and public librarian’s efforts to share the love of books and knowledge with their students through our Educator Appreciation Week event. We honor your hard and rewarding work with an “apple” of our own by welcoming teachers and librarians Thursday, March 19 – Wednesday, March 25. You’ll enjoy a 25% savings on personal and library purchases of books, CDs, DVDs, cafe items, gifts & stationery and more* when you bring in your current Classroom or Educator Discount Card, educator ID or pay stub."

• The 2nd Annual New Hampshire Literacy Day will be April 11, 2009 at Merrimack Valley Middle and High School 106 Village Street (ROUTE 3), Pennacook, NH. Sponsored by the Granite State Council of the International Reading Association this is a "Family Day of Literacy with activities for all ages!"

• Red River Theater (Concord) will be showing The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians through Film (96 min/Canada/2007) in the Screening Room, April 12-18, (tickets on sale April 1). "This film is being shown in conjunction with National Library Week, April 12-18, in partnership with the Concord Public Library. The first full-length documentary film to focus on the work and lives of librarians. Using the entertaining and appealing context of American movies, the film holds some surprises for people who may think they know what librarians do."
  

Ladybug Picture Book Award Nominees

The Ladybug Picture Book Award committee has chosen the nominees for the 2009 Ladybug Picture Book Award. New Hampshire children, from preschool to third grade, will select the winning picture book when they vote in November 2009.

• Bats at the Beach by Brian Lies (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
• Bear's Picture by Daniel Pinkwater & D. B. Johnson (Houghton Mifflin, 2008)
• Bedtime at the Swamp by Kristyn Crow & Macky Pamintuan (Harper Collins, 2008)
• Big Chickens Fly the Coop by Leslie Helakoski & Henry Cole (Dutton, 2008)
• Little Blue Truck by Alice Schertle & Jill McElmurry (Harcourt, 2008)
• Tadpole Rex by Kurt Cyrus (Harcourt, 2008)
• Those Darn Squirrels! by Adam Rubin & Daniel Salmieri (Clarion, 2008)
• Too Many Toys by David Shannon (Blue Sky, 2008)
• A Visitor for Bear by Bonny Becker & Kady MacDonald Denton (Candlewick, 2008)
• Waking Beauty by Leah Wilcox & Lydia Monks (Putnam, 2008)

Voting materials will be posted on the Ladybug web page in June. If you want to get ahead of the crowd you can go ahead and order your Ladybug Stickers anytime.

Join us in a Celebration of NH Poets

In honor of National Poetry Month the Center for the Book at the NH State Library will host an online Celebration of New Hampshire Poets.

Each day in April we will feature a different Granite State poet on our blog. A variety of poets have signed up to participate in our celebration -- many whose work you probably already know, and some who may be a wonderful new discovery for you. If you read the Book Notes blog then you will see the National Poetry Month postings.

If you want to help us to promote New Hampshire poets, you can join in the celebration by adding our NH Celebrates Poetry widget to your own blog, website, or FaceBook page and have the poetry posting appear automatically in the widget throughout April. To get the widget, visit http://nhbookcenter.blogspot.com/, look at the right-hand panel of the blog, and click on the getwidget link below the NH Celebrates Poetry widget which is the second item from the top of the panel.

Book of the Week #11

Big If by Mark Costello (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002)

A family living in Center Effing, NH has two children: one grows up to be a computer genius working on a game called Big If and the other becomes a Secret Service agent guarding the Vice President as he runs for President. This novel is the story of those children as adults. Much of this novel takes place in NH and much of it is odd -- yet very familiar. For example, the household with an answering machine message that contains, during primary season, all the political positions of the family members so that pollsters won't have to call back.

There was an interview with the author -- who lives in Massachusetts -- on Powells. com and another on Identity Theory.

Congratulations to the 2009 LAL NH Semi-finalists!

Letters About Literature -- a reading and writing promotion program where students write a letter as if to an author explaining how the author's work changed their view of the world or of themselves and prizes are awarded for the best letter in each state -- had it's biggest year yet here in New Hampshire. There were 802 letters received from New Hampshire students. Fifty-five New Hampshire semi-finalists were selected across the three competition levels by a panel of judges working on behalf of the Library of Congress. Those letters are being reviewed by a panel of judges here in New Hampshire who will select the winning letters for New Hampshire which will be announced by the end of March. The Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library will award $100 to each first place winner. State winners will advance to the national competition where they could win a $500 Target GiftCard and a $10,000 Letters About Literature Reading Promotion Grant for their community.

Clippings from the Blogosphere

These are assorted items I came across in the book/library blogs I looked at this week. They are not generally specific to New Hampshire, but struck me as interesting. Please leave a comment, or send me an email and let me know if you think "Clippings" should become a regular feature on this blog.

• An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education (3/13/09) about the dangers of making writers -- like Virginia Woolfe -- icons.


• The New York Times posted an audio archive of author readings and interviews. The featured authors are mostly modern ones and include Russell Banks and John Irving. If you would rather listen to a President, Kurious Kitty pointed out recently that Roosevelt's fireside chats are available for your listening pleasure via the internet.
  
• Library Journal's 2009 Movers & Shakers List includes Nancy J. Keane of Concord, NH. Congratulations Nancy!
  
• A Dysfunctional Reading Quiz from the Guardian. As anyone who knows my tastes in novels could predict, I did very poorly on this quiz about dysfunctional families in literature.
  
• An article from The Times (of London) about what we are reading in these troubled times. I'm not sure American readers are making all the same choices, but I agree that if you haven't read Fitzgerald recently, you should.
  
• Why good pages are essential to a library.
  
• On March 13th, 2009 the World Wide Web turned 20.
  
• The Morning News and Powell's Books bring you the 5th annual Tournament of Books - a literary alternative (or supplement) to NCAA March Madness. Today's match is Home v. My Revolutions as judged by Witold Riedel.

It must be spring -- the book awards have begun!

Late last week the National Book Critics Circle announced the winners of its book awards, covering books published in 2008.

Here are excerpts from their announcement (the links were added by me):

For the first time in the organization’s 35-year history, the NBCC chose to give a dual prize in one category, poetry. The co-winners were Juan Felipe Herrera’s Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press) and August Kleinzahler’s Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Strauss).

Roberto Bolaño’s monumental 2666 (Farrar, Straus), a tale of love and violence set within the framework of the fictional town of Santa Teresa, Mexico, that’s widely regarded as the late author’s masterpiece, won the fiction award. Fiction committee chair Marcela Valdes called the work “a virtuoso accomplishment that ranks with Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian as one of the trenchant and kaleidoscopic examinations of evil in fiction.”

The general nonfiction award went to Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War (Knopf), a you-are-there account of bravery, suffering, and insanity as the Iraq war grinds on—a book that both exemplifies and transcends war reporting.

The biography award went to Patrick French’s The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul, a deft and unsparing look at a great but contentious author. The autobiography award went to Ariel Sabar’s My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin), the story of Sabar’s journey to rediscover his father and his father’s homeland in Iraq among the last remaining speakers of Aramaic, a language now almost lost.

The criticism award went to Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press), an insightful and well-researched work on a subject not often treated.

The NBCC also awarded the Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing to Ron Charles of the Washington Post Book World, who in his acceptance speech celebrated the critic’s job of helping people find good books. The Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award was given to the Pen American Center, whose job, insisted introducer Andrew Delbanco, has never been more urgent.

This is the last day to get a deal on Writers' Day

Writers' Day, sponsored by the New Hampshire Writers' Project brings together more than 300 writers and publishing professionals for a full day of learning, networking and fun. This year it will be on Saturday, April 18, 2009 at The Derryfield School in Manchester and Meredith Hall will be the keynote speaker. Registration is required and the early bird rate expires at 4pm today (Monday, 3/16/09)

The Ladybug and the Snow

Several people have asked me recently about the titles nominated for the 2009 Ladybug Picture Book Award. Unfortunately, because there has been a snowstorm every time the Ladybug nomination committee was planning to meet, there is not yet a finalized list of nominated titles. As soon as the committee is able to meet the list of nominated titles will be announced.

Book of the Week #10

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner's, 1925)

Writing in the Washington Post in 2007 Jonathan Yardley explained the signifigance of this novel, "Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that it is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers."

But what makes this a New Hampshire book? The Big Read: Southern New Hampshire Reads The Great Gatsby makes it THE New Hampshire book at the moment, at least in the southern part of the state.

"The Great Gatsby may be the most popular classic in modern American fiction. Since its publication in 1925, Fitzgerald's masterpiece has become a touchstone for generations of readers and writers, many of whom reread it every few years as a ritual of imaginative renewal. The story of Jay Gatsby's desperate quest to win back his first love reverberates with themes at once characteristically American and universally human, among them the importance of honesty, the temptations of wealth, and the struggle to escape the past. Though The Great Gatsby runs to fewer than two hundred pages, there is no bigger read in American literature."
(quoted from The Big Read website)

The festivities kick off with a party on March 20, 2009 (6-9pm) at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester. Tickets are $25 and must be purchased in advance. Some events are already going on, so check out the full event calendar.

Beth Krommes at Toadstool Books

Peterborough resident and artist Beth Krommes won this year's Caldecott Medal. She will be visiting the Toadtool Bookshop in Peterborough to sign her books and discuss her work on Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 2pm.

The House in the Night, a picture book for the very young, written by Susan Marie Swanson, features Beth Krommes' striking black and white illustrations illuminated by the yellow glow of a house light in the night. This is the title that won the 2009 Caldecott Medal.

David Macculay Exhibit at the Currier

A new exhibit opened at the Currier today, Building Books: The Art of David Macaulay. Author and artist David Macaulay has demystified the workings and origins of everything from simple machines to elaborate architectural structures. A favorite with readers of all ages, this Caldecott Medal-winning artist is the subject of this exciting exhibition that takes an in-depth look at Macaulay's artistic process and extensive body of work, including The Way Things Work, Castle, Cathedral, City, Mill, Ship, and Mosque. The exhibition presents over 100 original works of art, studies, sketchbooks, book dummies, manuscripts and correspondence, artifacts including hand-built ship models), and more. It runs through June 14, 2009. Mr. Macaulay was a guest on NHPR's Word of Mouth earlier this week.

Book of the Week #9

Escapade Johnson and Mayhem at Mount Moosilauke by Michael Sullivan; illustrations by Joy Kolitsky (Carlsbad, CA: Big Guy Books, 2006)

One of several adventures by New Hampshire's own Michael Sullivan featuring Escapade Johnson. This one is "about the field trip the fifth-grade of Sanbornton Elementary School took to climb Mount Moosilauke, complete with bear poop, a poisonous belt, teddy bear underwear, and a peanut butter sandwich that saved the day."

Pizza for Poetry

On Tuesday, March 10 from 5-9:30pm Flat Bread Pizza in Portsmouth, NH will be holding a fundraising night for JAZZMOUTH: The Seacoast Poetry& Jazz festival. All you need to do is go to Flatbread ,bring friends, and eat pizza (and take-out food counts too.) A Portion of all profits go to JAZZMOUTH which will be held in Portsmouth on April 23-26, 2009. Highlights of the 2009 festival include special guests: Mose Allison, David Amram, Donald Hall, and Bob Dorough. And at The Music Hall, a rare Screening of "Cachao: Uno Más", a documentary about legendary Cuban musician Israel "Cachao" López.