The Short List

The Essex Library will host a one-woman play entitled The Secret Life Of Louisa May Alcott on Sunday, April 13th at 4 p.m. Talented actor and playwright, Ruth Crocker, will bring history to life as she draws from Alcott’s diaries, letters and journals to provide a humorous, intimate portrait of the author. The event is free but seating is limited. To register, or for more information, call the Library at 767-1560.

A Mystic native, Ms. Crocker has performed for all ages as a singer, actor and storyteller. About the process of performing this play she says, “Exploring the lives of women through research, writing and play creation is an endlessly rewarding and fascination process. It is a way to understand the events in women’s lives that sparked and nourished the creative process down through the ages.”

The Library and the Essex Land Trust will co-host the finale to the Library’s Environmental Film Series by presenting a brief film followed by a discussion about fighting global warming. The event will take place on April 29^th at 7pm in the Library’s Program Room and will focus on what Connecticut residents can do at the local level to halt the impact of greenhouse gases. The film will be followed by a discussion with Josh Friedman, a member of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment outreach team. To register or for more information, contact Paul Greenberg at 767-7355.

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is hosted by The Cushing Library Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection and Institute for Scientific Computation at Texas A&M University. The ISFDB is a community effort to catalog works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It links together various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, and forthcoming books. It also has a list of top 100 science fiction novels as voted by users.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi

The Baen Books (publisher of many popular science fiction authors) website allows users to read sample chapters, figure out the order of books in a series and when the next book in a series is due out.
http://www.baen.com/

And finally, io9.com is a blog about everything science fiction including books and movies. It’s written and maintained by people who are definitely, happily, obsessed with science fiction. Reminder: Don’t be shy about letting us at the Library know if there are any sci-fi materials you’d enjoy borrowing. E-mail us at: staff@essexlib.org

http://io9.com/

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the recent media, you might have already learned that the Oscars were literally inundated–literally. Movies that were adapted from books took home more than a handful of the golden statuettes last night. The big winner was No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy which was adapted for the screen by those famous Coen Brothers (Ethan and Joel), who, by the way, have recently bought the rights to film Michael Cabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Given how good the book is, it could be a great movie. Other books that brought home the gold last night included Atonement by Ian McEwan, The Bourne Ultimatum by Robert Ludlum, There Will Be Blood which was adapted from Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears A Who will be in theaters in March but you can read the book right now. Lessons in tolerance, responsibility and courage are in full swing here and there’s nothing wrong with that. Who wouldn’t want this dignified pachyderm as a best friend when he stands by the motto: “After all, a person is a person, no matter how small.” And don’t forget Horton’s 1940 debut in Horton Hatches The Egg when he proved true with “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant: an elephant’s faithful one hundred per cent.”

Some 137 titles have been nominated by libraries around the world for the 2008 International Impac Dublin Literary Award, which carries a prize of 100,000 euros (about $US146,000) for the best literary work of the year. The Guardian has fun discussing some of the titles on the longlist, which it calls “a monster.” The shortlist will be announced April 2 and the winner on June 12; stay tuned.

Lucette Lagnado, a senior special writer and investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has won the $100,000 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. The Jewish Book Council, which administers the award, noted: “In the memoir, Lagnado chronicles her family’s heartbreaking tale of their exodus from Egypt and eventual resettling in Brooklyn.

Tom Sleigh, who teaches in the creative writing program at Hunter College, has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Space Walk. The award recognizes “a work by an emerging poet, one who is past the very beginning but has not yet reached the acknowledged pinnacle of his or her career.”

The winners of the $50,000 2008 Lincoln Prize for American History which is administered by Gettysburg College are:

• The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics by James Oakes
• Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

The Nutmeg Book Awards were announced the other day. These awards are “chosen by Connecticut’s youth” in two categories: the intermediate list is aimed at children in grades 4-6 and the teen list is aimed at kids in 7th and 8th grades. This year The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan won in both categories.

Other finalists in the teen category included:

Emako Blue by Brenda Woods; Down The Rabbit Hole by Peter Abrahams; Sea Of Trolls by Nancy Farmer; Revenge Of The Witch by Joseph Delaney; In Darkness, Death by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler; Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson; Shackleton’s Stowaway by Victoria McKernan; The River Between Us by Richard Peck and Bucking The Sarge by Christopher Paul Curtis.

Other finalists in the intermediate category included:

Escaping The Giant Wave by Peg Kehret; Shredderman Secret Identity by Wendelin Van Draanen; White Star: A Dog On The Titanic by Marty Crisp; The 7 Professors Of The Far North by John Fardell; A Bear Named Trouble by Marion Dauer; Project Mulberry by Linda Sue Park; Ravenmaster’s Secret by Elvira Woodruff; Hatching Magic by Ann Downer; and Jackie’s Wild Seattle by Will Hobbs.

The Connecticut Library Association has selected the Essex Library’s two blogs, The Short List and The In-Site Bank, for their 2008 Publicity Award.

The Essex Library will be presented with the award during the Connecticut Library Association’s Annual Conference scheduled for April 29, 2008. The winning blogs will be showcased at the Conference during a presentation led by Essex Librarian Ann Thompson.

“Ann developed the concept for the blogs,” said Essex Library Director Bridget Quinn-Carey, “she also designed, implemented and continues to update the spots on an almost daily basis. We are so proud of her creative work and for putting our Library on the cutting edge of interactive Web services.”

The CLA Publicity Awards accepts nominations annually from member libraries for materials designed by their library to promote a library concept or event. A panel of two or more designers/artists and a representative from the library field selects the winning entries. Entries are judged for content, originality and design.

At the Grammy awards the other night, Senator Barack Obama won best spoken word album for his narration of his book Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. He beat out two former presidents, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, finalists for Giving and Sunday Mornings in Plains, respectively. Clinton and Carter have both won Grammys previously; Hillary Clinton has won one, too. This is Obama’s second Grammy; the first was for Dreams From My Father.

The best spoken word album for children was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, narrated by Jim Dale.