3/18/24

Book of the Week (3/18/2024)

Northern Voices: Forty Years on the Poetry Beat by Mike Pride (Bauhan Publishing, 2024)

 

3/15/24

Upcoming Local Author Events!

"BOOKport" Local Author Celebration in Newport

The Richards Free Library is having a local author celebration this Saturday, March 16th, 2024 from 10-2:00 pm. They will be hosting 11 authors from around the Newport, NH area and throughout NH. The featured authors write everything from poetry to children's books, and more!

Derry Author Fest
1 2 3 Grow!


Saturday, April 6, 2024 from 10 am to 4 pm at the Derry Public Library 

Derry Author Fest is a day of writing workshops, panels and networking for aspiring authors, dreamers and dabblers alike. As an attendee, you can stay all day, half day, or just drop in for a session. Book sales and signings are interspersed in between workshops, so you will have time to buy books, support local artists and get some face time with teachers.

This year’s keynote speaker is Virginia Macgregor: Virginia was brought up in Germany, France, and England by a mother who never stopped telling stories. Her early years were those of a story-scribbling, rain-loving child. Her debut novel What Milo Saw was published to great acclaim and has so far been translated into 12 languages. She is also the author of The Astonishing Return of Norah Wells, Before I Was Yours, Wishbones, You Found Me, As Far As the Stars, and The Children’s Secret.


See the schedule and register to attend at: www.derryauthorfest.wordpress.com

3/11/24

Book of the Week (3/11/2024)

Wicked Weird & Wily Yankees: A Celebration of New England's Eccentrics and Misfits by Stephen Gencarella (Globe Pequot, 2018)

Incredible Stories of the Prophets, Vagabonds, Fortune-Tellers, Hermits, Lords, and Poets Who Shaped New England.

New England has been a lot of things—an economic hub, a cultural center, a sports mecca—but it is also home to many of the strangest individuals in America. Wicked Weird & Wily Yankees explores and celebrates the eccentric personalities who have left their mark in a way no other book has before. Some folks are known, others not so much, but the motley cast of characters that emerges from these pages represents a fascinating cross-section of New England’s most peculiar denizens. Look inside to find:

  • Tales of the Leather Man and the Old Darned Man, who both spent years crisscrossing the highways and byways of the northeast, their origins and motivation to remain forever unknown.
  • The magnificent homes of William Gillette and Madame Sherri, famed socialites who constructed enormous castles in the New England countryside.
  • William Sheldon’s apocalyptic prophecies and wild claims including that the American Revolution had hastened the end of the world and that he could—through his mastery of the “od-force”—prevent cholera across the eastern United States.
  • The mysterious fortune-teller Moll Pitcher whose predictions, some say, were sought by European royalty and whose fame made her the subject of poems, plays, and novels long after her death.
Stretching back to the colonial era and covering the development and evolution of New England society through the beginning of the twenty-first century, this book captures the rebel spirit, prickly demeanors, and wily attitudes that have made the region the hotbed for oddity it is today. --Publisher's blurb

3/4/24

Book of the Week (3/4/2024)

The Dog Who Ate the Vegetable Garden & Helped Save the Planet by Margaret Hurley (Guernica World Editions, 2019)

Using idiosyncratic broken sentences, a cross-genre stream-of-consciousness
narrative told by a cheeky vegan dog named Dori—a
real dog—whose zany and opinionated take on humans’ treatment
of animals is ironic, quirky, funny, sad, maddening, and deadly
relevant. Autobiography, history, and science are woven into the
narrator’s adventures to reveal and explain the destructive effects of eating animal flesh and secretions on humans and animals, and on the planet--that farming and slaughtering trillions of animals for food, annually, is the leading cause of environmental destruction (including Global Warming) and that eating animals causes the vast majority of debilitating and deadly illnesses in humans.-- Publisher's blurb

About the author:

Margaret (Meg) Hurley is an eco-feminist, animal-rights activist and vegan. She is a graduate of Wellesley College, and lives in New Hampshire with her husband (retired attorney), who is also an animal-rights activist and vegan.


2/29/24

Great Bay Book Group Community Discussion

Announcing an exciting opportunity to take part in a public book group discussion of the book, Small Town, Big Oil: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the Richest Man in the World- and Won by New Hampshire author David W. Moore!

Below is the press release with information about how to get involved:

We at the Great Bay Stewards (GBS), in conjunction with the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) are hosting a coordinated book reading and region-wide discussion about an epic battle fought 50 years ago here on the New Hampshire Coast. It was a fight against a proposed oil shipping terminal on the Isles of Shoals, an oil refinery in Durham, and a 10-mile pipeline between the two. Had it not been defeated, this massive development would have irrevocably changed our Seacoast region.

To commemorate this epic battle and reflect on its current relevance, we invite you to join us in reading David Moore’s excellent book this spring. Ask your local library, school, or book group to host a discussion about this environmental conflict – sometime around Earth Day – and participate in the Great Bay Book Group.

Download a discussion guide here and the action toolkit (coming soon) to help make the reading more meaningful. What can we learn from this amazing story to help us address today’s less visible – but equally serious – environmental challenges? 

If you would like to participate, please take this brief survey so we can best support your participation.

Join the FREE public book group discussion on Thursday, April 25th, 2024 at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth with the author, activists at the center of the story in the 1970s, and those at the forefront of environmental advocacy in our region today.

Tickets are free but reservations are required – click here to reserve your ticket.

Copies of Small Town, Big Oil are available at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth and Water Street Bookstore in Exeter for a 25% discount.

Please contact Veronique Ludington at vludington@gmail.com to request free copies of the book for library or classroom use, and to add your event to the list of participating groups.

For more information, please visit the Great Bay Book Group page.

Ladybug 2024 Shortlist

The first round of Ladybug Picture Book Award voting closed earlier this week and we are ready to move on to round 2.

We have heard from many school libraries that fitting ten nominees into the time between the start of school and the December voting deadline is often quite difficult. Based on this feedback, we are going to select 9 nominees this year which we hope will ease some of the stress of scheduling story times for each nominated book.

Ninety-three people weighed in on the long list of nominees and we have eliminated from consideration any title that did not get at least 9% of the total votes cast. This left us with a shortlist of 20 titles from which NH librarians are invited to vote for the 9 titles that they think should be nominated for the 2024 Ladybug Picture Book Award.

The Final Round 2024 Ladybug Nomination Survey is now open and will remain open until Sunday, 3/24/2024. 

PLEASE NOTE that you can only vote once from your device (phone, computer, whatever you use to browse the web) so don't preview the survey, as you will not be able to go back again to vote.

To help make sure as many people as possible in the NH library community have an opportunity to check out these books before voting for the final nominees we have linked each of the titles below to a video of the book being read. We did not create any of these videos; they are from a variety of sources. Where there was a version available read by the author we chose that, otherwise we chose the best depiction of the book that we could find.