The Short List

The National Book Critics Circle Award finalists were announced in San Francisco on Jan. 12th. Winners will be announced on Thursday, March 6th in New York. There are six main categories for their choice of best book of the year. Here are the finalists:

Fiction:
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
In The Country of Men by Hisham Matar
The Gravediggers Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins

Nonfiction
American Transcendentalism by Philip Gura
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington
Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

Biography
Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal
Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
Ralph Ellison by Arnold Rampersad
The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 by John Richardson
Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin
Autobiography
Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone by Joshua Clark
Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat
The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 by Joyce Carol Oates
Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky
Anna Politkovskaya: Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia

Poetry
Elegy by Mary Jo Bang
Modern Life by Matthea Harvey
Sleeping and Waking by Michael O’Brien
The Ballad of Jamie Allan by Tom Pickard
New Poems by Tadeusz Rozewicz

Criticism
Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints by Joan Acocella
Once Upon a Quniceanera by Julia Alvarez
The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi
Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

Bridget Quinn Carey, energetic and visionary Director of the Essex Library for 8 years, is leaving to become the Director of the Buffalo and Erie Library System. Her friends, staff, and hundreds of patrons are grateful for the wonderful Library that her hard work and dedication helped to build.

Please join us at a Farewell Open House at the Essex Library, Friday, February 15, 3-5 p.m., to thank her for her exemplary service to the town, and to wish her good luck!

Read the Buffalo News article about Bridget here .

The Essex Library will present a documentary program on Tuesdays in March (4th, 11th, 18th and 25th) at 2p.m. in the Library’s Program Room. Please call (767-1560) or stop in to the Library to reserve your space.

Documentaries can educate, inflame, propagandize, or sanctify. Also, uniquely, they can take us into other worlds, the closed lives and secret societies that coexist with ours. The four films chosen for this series all provide a glimpse into hidden places. A toxic family tug-of-war is played out against crumbling grandeur. Two young men from the ghetto vie to escape it, without losing themselves along the way. Amish teenagers face a dangerous, fascinating passage to adulthood via worldly temptation. And an odd, tragic loner finds himself – but loses his life – through his obsession with grizzly bears.

Astonishingly intimate, human-scale and revelatory, these films are quirky gems, like the people who inhabit them. You will never forget them.

GREY GARDENS

Directors: Albert and David Maysle, 1975

Weirdly compelling, funny, tragic; GREY GARDENS became a cult phenomenon, and even spawned a Broadway musical. Welcome to the world of Big and Little Edie Beale; Jackie O’s eccentric, reclusive cousins. Living together in the moldering splendor of their East Hampton mansion, this toxic mother and her middle-aged daughter spar, reminisce, and eerily entertain us, with all the can’t-look-away fascination of a slow-motion car crash. Not to be missed.

HOOP DREAMS

Director: Steve James, 1994

HOOP DREAMS caused an Academy firestorm when, despite uniformly glowing reviews, it was eliminated for Oscar consideration on a technicality. The film tells the parallel stories of two talented inner-city kids with dreams of professional basketball glory, each trying to cope with the pressure cooker environment of scholastic athletics, and the realities of family life on Chicago’s mean streets. Filmed over a five-year period, it’s considered a classic of the genre.

DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND

Director: Lucy Walker, 2002

Most of us know no more about the Amish than we can glean from books or a casual encounter – which goes a long way to explaining the fascination of Devil’s Playground. The film explores a little-known Amish coming-of-age rite, called Rumspringa. Believing as they do in adult baptism, the Amish require that their young people make an informed decision whether to stay in the community, or to choose the “English” (our) path, and withdraw. For this one time in their lives, Amish youth are allowed to sample freely from the dangerous attractions offered by the modern world; sex, drugs and rock and roll. And they do. The film follows a group of Amish teens struggling with their choices. Moving, surprising, illuminating.

GRIZZLY MAN

Director: Werner Herzog, 2005

Another major Academy kerfuffle occurred when this much-praised documentary was refused Oscar consideration for containing too much archival footage. Hertzog weaves together an extraordinary portrait of a difficult, complex man, amateur naturalist and wildlife advocate Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell, who spent 13 summers filming himself and his beloved grizzly bears in Katmai National Park, slowly unravels mentally until he comes to believe that he has become one of them. His fate, which seems inevitable from the outset, is only part of the story. Hertzog’s combination of Treadwell’s footage with interviews and his own musings make a fascinating film, and bring a strange, alienated, yet ultimately sympathetic man, back to life.

Some of the most important and prestigious awards for children’s literature were announced Tuesday at the annual mid-winter conference of the American Library Association. The Caldecott Medal (for most distinguished picture book for children) was awarded to The Invention Of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.

Caldecott Honor Books were:

Henry’s Freedom Box: A True Story From the Underground Railroad, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, written by Ellen Levine;

First the Egg, by Laura Vaccaro Seeger;

The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, by Peter Sis and

Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity, by Mo Willems.

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village, written by Laura Amy Schlitz, won the Newberry Medal which honors the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature.

Newberry Honor Books were:

Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis

The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt

Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson

The Library will be closed on Monday, January 21st in honor of Martin Luther King Day.

Christopher Paul Curtis has won the 2008 Scott O’Dell Award for Elijah of Buxton, a novel set in 1860 and narrated by an 11-year-old who is a first-generation free-born child, living in a Canadian town just north of Detroit, Michigan. The award honors a work of historical fiction and includes a $5,000 prize for the author. It was established in 1982 by Scott O’Dell, author of The Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Curtis, no stranger to awards or to historical fiction, won the 2000 Newbery Medal for Bud, Not Buddy, set in Depression-era Michigan, and was awarded a 1996 Newbery Honor for The Watsons Go to Birmingham–1963.

There are some additions and changes to some of our upcoming programs:

1. The Thursday afternoon Knitting Club for children in grades 3-6 will commence on Thursday, January 17th at 5p.m.

2. The First Monday Book Club is making a permanent change to the Second Monday Book Club and will meet again on Monday, February 11 to discuss The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer.

3. The Essex And The Sea Series will kick off on Sunday, February 3rd with a visual parade of the greatest sailing photographs ever taken in America, selected from Mystic Seaport’s Rosenfeld Collection. We will follow that up on Sunday, February 10th with a behind-the-scenes look at the treasures of the Mystic Seaport Museum. The Program will close on Sunday, February 24th with a slide show of breathtaking photographs of Connecticut lighthouses by noted author and photographer Jeremy D’Entremont.

Students may cast their votes for the 2008 Nutmeg Book Awards at the Essex Elementary School. For a look at the nominees go to: http://www.nutmegaward.org/2008/index.htm

I had my first patron request in 2008 for tax forms yesterday. The Library hasn’t received any paper forms or instruction booklets yet so while we wait for those to arrive, here are some links for those of you who prefer to download forms now:

For Federal Government tax forms and information, go directly to the IRS website: http://www.irs.gov/ The most requested forms are a click away at the top left of the page.

For Connecticut State tax forms and information, go to the Connecticut Department of Revenue Services website: http://www.ct.gov/drs/taxonomy/ct_taxonomy.asp?DLN=41128 Links to tax forms for individuals and businesses are near the top in the middle of the page.

We’re starting two Knitting Clubs at the Library.

Knitting With Home-Schoolers on Wednesdays at 1-1:45pm starts on Wed., January 23rd in the Children’s Room. Home-Schooled children are invited to come learn how to knit a warm, winter scarf with Molly Osborne. All equipment and supplies will be provided.

The Knitting Club for children in grades 3-6 will be held on Thursdays from 5-5:45pm beginning on January 24th. Molly Osborne will lead the group in knitting a warm, winter scarf. All materials and equipment will be provided for this project.

Please call the Library to let us know you’re coming so we may plan accordingly…767-1560 or e-mail Molly at: mosborne@essexlib.org