Man-Booker Longlist Announced

The judges for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction have announced the longlist for this year’s prize. The longlist of 13 books, often referred to as the ‘Man Booker Dozen’, was chosen from 112 entries; 103 were submitted for the prize and nine were called in by the judges.

The titles are:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
From A to X by John Berger
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

Chair of judges, Michael Portillo, commented: “With a notable degree of consensus, the five Man Booker judges decided on their longlist of 13 books. The judges are pleased with the geographical balance of the longlist with writers from Pakistan, India, Australia, Ireland and UK. We also are happy with the interesting mix of books, five first novels and two novels by former winners. The list covers an extraordinary variety of writing. Still two qualities emerge this year: large scale narrative and the striking use of humour.”

The 2008 shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 9th September at a press conference at Man Group’s London office. The winner will be announced on Tuesday 14th October at an awards ceremony at Guildhall, London.

Now in its 40th year, the prize aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The Man Booker judges are selected from the country’s finest critics, writers and academics to maintain the consistent excellence of the prize. The winner of the Man Booker Prize receives £50,000 and both the winner and the shortlisted authors are guaranteed a worldwide readership plus a dramatic increase in book sales.

The Last Lecture At The Library

“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
~~ Randy Pausch

The Essex Library is proud to feature a special showing of Randy Pausch’s phenomenal “The Last Lecture”, on Wednesday, August 27th at 7p.m. Admission is free.

At Carnegie Mellon University’s “Last Lecture” series, professors are asked to share with the audience what wisdom they’d choose to impart to the world, if they knew it was their last chance. When computer science professor Randy Pausch was asked to give such a lecture, he didn’t have to imagine. He had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

But the lecture he gave–”Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”–wasn’t about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because “time is all you have…and you may find one day that you have less than you think”). It was about living. Funny, incisive, surprising, “The Last Lecture” has been viewed over six million times on the Internet. It has spawned an international best-seller that’s on the summer reading list for high schools across the country. Its author has been featured on Oprah and in a Diane Sawyer television special. Don’t miss this opportunity to see and discuss “The Last Lecture” with someone who matters to you. Call the Essex Library at 767-1560 for reservations.

Summer Buggy Movies Continue

On Wednesday, July 30th at 3 p.m., the Essex Library will continue its Summer Buggy Movie series with ‘A Bug’s Life‘ (rated G) starring the voices of Dave Foley, Kevin Spacey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Hyde Pierce. Popcorn and juice will be provided.

The Summer Buggy Movies series will continue in August with the following films:

August 6 – “Spiderwick Chronicles” Rated PG

August 13 — “Ant Bully” Rated PG

August 20 — “Arthur And The Invisibles” Rated PG

August 27 — How To Eat Fried Worms” Rated PG

All movies will be shown on Wednesdays at 3 p.m. in the Program Room; admission is free.

Fly, Ladybug, Fly!

On Tuesday, July 29th, from 4-5 p.m., the Essex Library will be hosting a craft time with Merry Coleman. Merry will be showing children how to decorate bug boxes and doing a ladybug craft. As if that weren’t enough fun, there will be a LIVE Ladybug release in the Library’s gardens!

New Release Alerts Service

Our New Release Alerts Service isn’t new, but we wanted to refresh your memory about what a great thing it is. There are thousands of books published in the US every month; many will go unnoticed but others will quickly become bestsellers which also are highly sought-after in libraries by patrons.

The New Release Alerts page on our website is updated every month with 15-20, or so, books to be released by publishers in the next 60-90 days which we believe will be of popular interest to our patrons. We provide a link to each of these books in our catalog which allows patrons to put a hold on the book even before the Library has its copy–and perhaps before the 200 other interested patrons get in the queue. Nice, right?

The New Release Alerts also include books which are expected to be bestsellers even though they’re not by A-List authors or coming from well-known publishers. Recent examples include: The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, The Beach House by Jane Green and Love The One You’re With by Emily Giffin.

Click here to see July’s New Release Alerts.

Welcome To The Essex Staff Kim Sheridan!

Join us in welcoming new staff member Kim Sheridan to the Library. No newcomer to the area, Kim was born and bred right here in town. She studied Library Science as an undergrad and just received her Masters of Library Science, both from Southern Connecticut State University. You’ll see Kim working behind the Circulation desk most days and she’s also organizing our music CD collection.

When not here at work, Kim enjoys collecting rare and out-of-print books as well as gardening. Be sure to say hello the next time you’re at the Library.

Joe Nocera’s (New York Times Columnist) Best Business Books Ever

Joe Nocera is The New York Times’ Talking Business columnist. He also writes a business-oriented blog at The Times called Executive Suite. A few years ago he asked his regular readers for suggestions for the best business fiction books. Unable to come up with a sufficient list of fiction, he turned his eye toward non-fiction books; narrative non-fiction, that is, and consulted a few other business-minded authorities for their advice. They agreed on the following list as the very best business books. If you have a title you feel has been unfairly excluded, you can let him know at the original blog post.

“Barbarians At The Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar ~~ a rollicking account of KKR’s leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco.
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis ~~ (even though I’ve since become convinced that the anecdote that gives the book its title never happened).
The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon ~~ (Greatest dissection of the movie business ever written.)
The Box by Marc Levinson ~~ (Hard to believe you can write a great book about the rise and importance of the shipping container, but he pulled it off.)
Indecent Exposure by David McClintick. (Published in 1982, it single-handedly created the business narrative genre).
The Go-Go Years by John Brooks ~~ (The best book by the most elegant writer to ever make business his subject.)
The Kingdom and the Power by Gay Talese ~~ (Yes, the subject is The New York Times, but how can you leave it off any list of great business books?)
Titan by Ron Chernow ~~ (Chernow’s magisterial biography of John D. Rockefeller.)
Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich by Godfrey Hodgson, Bruce Page and Charles Raw ~~ (Hard to believe that this committee of authors could write a sensational narrative about the rise and fall of Bernard Cornfeld, but that they did.)
Disney War by James Stewart ~~ (”Best corporate psychoanalysis I’ve ever read,” says John Huey.)
The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald ~~ (Forget his Enron book, “Conspiracy of Fools.” This book, about the strange saga of Mark Whitacre and Archer Daniels Midland, is his masterpiece.)
Father, Son and Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond by Thomas J. Watson and Peter Petre ~~ (The only great ghost-written C.E.O. autobiography ever written. No one else — not even Lee Iacocca or Jack Welch — even comes close.)
When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein ~~ (Another one of those “how-did-he-do-it?” books: this account of the fall of Long Term Capital Management, which by all rights should be a tough slog, is crackling good read.)
Greed and Glory on Wall Street by Ken Auletta ~~ (This book, about the crack up of Lehman Brothers, has a great cast of characters, starting with Steve Schwartzman.)
The Smartest Guys in the Room by Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean ~~ (O.K., O.K., they are former colleagues of mine, and I was deeply involved in editing this book — but I have to say, I think it turned out pretty well!)”

Read Fiction. It’s Good For You!

Liam Durcan is a writer whose most recent novel is Garcia’s Heart. He lives in Montreal and works as a neurologist. Recently, he wrote an essay for The Globe And Mail entitled: You’ve Got Me Under Your Skin. He asserts that reading fiction is good for us, not because it teaches life lessons but because it immerses us in other minds and other experiences. He goes on to defend this contention with evidence from a recent study conducted by University of Toronto psychologists where subjects who read a short story in The New Yorker scored higher on social reasoning tests than those subjects who read an essay from The New Yorker. Read the entire article if you’d like to learn more about why reading fiction is good for you.

50 Greatest Books

The Globe And Mail is a Toronto-based Canadian newspaper which is running a series of articles in their Books section called 50 Greatest Books. Each week one of the 50 books selected is reviewed and dissected for its greatness; their aim–generally successful, is to make you want to read the book. Read Books Editor Martin Levin’s full introduction to the series here.

“A great book is adjudged a great book over time by virtue of offering things — astonishing ideas, unforgettable characters, imaginative sublimity, glorious prose — that cannot be got elsewhere, and that tell us something new about the human (or other) condition.

“The 50 will not be ranked in order,” he wrote. “We figure just choosing them is adventurous enough. The entries will be derived from discussions among members of our panel of experts (as if anyone’s really expert). Their carefully guarded identities will be revealed only at the end of the series, when readers will be invited to engage with them more directly. Each entry will be written by someone with knowledge, usually extensive knowledge, of the book in question.”

You can select from the 27 essays published so far on the update page of the series here.

Best Thriller Of 2008

The winners of the 2008 Thriller awards were announced last week at the annual ThrillerFest gala. The 2008 Thriller Award Winners include:

For Best Novel:
THE GHOST by Robert Harris

For Best First Novel:
HEART-SHAPED BOX by Joe Hill

The 2008 Thriller Award Nominees include:

For Best Novel
NO TIME FOR GOODBYE by Linwood Barclay
THE WATCHMAN by Robert Crais
THE CRIME WRITER by Gregg Hurwitz
TROUBLE by Jesse Kellerman

For Best First Novel
INTERRED WITH THEIR BONES by Jennifer Lee Carrell
BIG CITY, BAD BLOOD by Sean Chercover
FROM THE DEPTHS by Gerry Doyle
VOLK’S GAME by Brent Ghelfi