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Looking for a good book to read on the beach this summer, a friend came across this NPR article: Audience Picks: 100 Best Beach Books Ever

Almost 16,000 NPR listeners cast some 136,000 votes in the Best Beach Books Ever poll. Said NPR, "Whether such a vote can determine literary quality, who can say? But there's one thing a multitude of book-loving NPR types can most definitely do, and that's pick a list of books that will appeal to... book-loving NPR types."

The poll produced a list of audience favorites, dubbed, "The 100 Best Beach Books Ever." Here are the top 10 from the list:
1. The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling
2. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
3. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
4. Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding
5. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
6. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Rebecca Wells
7. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
9. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flagg
10. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
Click here for the rest of the list.

Labels: NPR Best Beach Books Ever, summer reading lists

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Andrea Lewis
410-685-0095
alewis@mdhc.org


Maryland Humanities Council Announces One Maryland One Book Author Tour with James McBride, Author of Song Yet Sung

The Maryland Humanities Council is pleased to bring celebrated author James McBride to tour Maryland this September and October. McBride’s novel, Song Yet Sung (Find this book in our catalog), has been chosen as the 2009 title for One Maryland One Book, Maryland’s only statewide community reading program, which is now in its second year. McBride, an award-winning author, composer, and screenwriter, is also the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir, The Color of Water, and the novel, Miracle at St. Anna, which was recently made into a film directed by Spike Lee. Set on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the 1850s, Song Yet Sung weaves an intricate and gripping tale of escaped slaves, free blacks, and slave-catchers. The protagonist is an enslaved woman called The Dreamer, whose gift for visions of the future quickly reaches mythic proportions following her escape from a local plantation.�I am delighted. It has to be one of the proudest moments of my career,� said McBride on hearing of the selection of Song Yet Sung as Maryland’s book for 2009. “The fact that the book was chosen by native Marylanders means all that much more. Like many Americans, I had no idea that the Eastern Shore of Maryland was the gateway to freedom for so many; nor did I realize the depth and complexity of relationships that existed between blacks and whites at that time, all of which were played out in Maryland.�

McBride will kick-off his tour of Maryland at the 2009 Baltimore Book Festival, where he will speak at the festival’s Literary Salon. In addition to Baltimore City, McBride will visit seven Maryland counties. Baltimore tour date and location:
Baltimore Book Festival,
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Noon
Literary Salon
Mount Vernon Square (East Park), Baltimore
Information: 410-685-0095
(visit the website at www.onemarylandonebook.org for more tour dates)

In addition to McBride’s author tour, every Maryland jurisdiction will participate in One Maryland One Book by holding local programs in September and October at libraries, colleges and universities, high schools, museums, and bookstores. There will be over 100 events around the state, including book discussions, living history performances, author appearances, and writing workshops. Harford County Public Library will be participating. More information will be forthcoming. Updated event information will be posted on the One Maryland One Book calendar at www.onemarylandonebook.org.

One Maryland One Book, a program of the Maryland Center for the Book at the Maryland Humanities Council, is Maryland’s first and only statewide community reading project. One Maryland One Book is designed to bring together diverse people in communities across the state through the shared experience of reading the same book and participating in book-centered discussions and other related programming. All related public programming will take place in September and October 2009. One Maryland One Book is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, LSTA grant funds, through the Division of Library Development & Services, Maryland State Department of Education; Bank of America Foundation; Verizon; Constellation Energy; and Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts and in partnership with the Enoch Pratt Free Library and Barnes and Noble.

For more information or for organizations interested in partnering with the Maryland Humanities Council on this project, visit the website at www.onemarylandonebook.org or call 410-685-6161.

Labels: one maryland one book

Death Message by Mark Billingham Find this book in our catalog

"‘Delivering the death message’. That’s what coppers call it when they have to tell someone that a loved one has been killed. Now Detective Inspector Tom Thorne is receiving messages of his own. Photos of murder victims sent to his mobile phone. The killer is quickly identified as a man just released from prison; someone who believes he has nothing left to live for. But why is he sending these pictures to Thorne? The answer lies in Thorne’s past, with a man he himself sent away, for life. Even behind bars, the most vicious psychopath Thorne has ever faced is still a master at manipulating others to do his dirty work for him. Particularly his killings..."(plot description on Mark Billingham's official website)

This UK author's U.S. reputation will get a boost since the author's recent coup winning the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award for Death Message, featuring London copper DI Tom Thorne. Read more about the award... Mark Billingham won the first Theakston award for Lazybones, also available at HCPL.

Fans of police procedurals and of books about psychopathic master-mind serial killers, why not take a chance on a lesser-known author - an author who is one to watch!

Labels: crime fiction, Death Message, Mark Billingham, police procedural, Theakston award

The Man Booker Longlist has been announced. The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is sponsored by Man Group plc. and was first awarded in 1969. According to the official website, this internationally respected British award, "promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year. The prize is the world's most important literary award and has the power to transform the fortunes of authors and even publishers...."

Try these titles from the Longlist. Deemed to be among the finest in fiction, they would make excellent choices for book group discussions! You will find them in Harford County Public Library's catalog:
* The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
* The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey
* Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
* Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
* Love and Summer by William Trevor
* The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The shortlist will be unveiled September 8, and the winner named October 6 at a dinner at London's Guildhall.

Labels: Man Booker Longlist

Labels: RITA Awards

Looking for the latest news on Street Lit? I learned this titbit from Rollie Welch of Cleveland P.L. in Library Journal, 7/14/2009.

Rollie writes in his column, "The Word on Street Lit, " for LJ: Author Karen E. Quinones Miller... publishes a monthly e-newsletter that alerts readers to news of the African American literary world. Literary News and Views…That I Hope You Can Use covers the latest in street lit, urban fiction, general fiction, romance, and nonfiction. To subscribe, send an email to authorkeqm@aol.com with "Newsletter Subscription" in the subject line."

Labels: Street Lit

According to PW of 7/17/09, "Today, the independent film A Woman in Berlin opens in limited release, starring Nina Hoss, Yevgeni Sidikhin and Irm Hermann. It’s based on A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary by Anonymous (then a 34-year-old journalist who started the diary in April 1945, when the Russians were invading Berlin and the city's mostly female population was heading to its cellars to wait out the bombing), translated by Philip Boehm.� Find this book in our catalog.

Summary from our catalog: "For six weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman, alone in the city, kept a daily record of her and her neighbors' degradations, determined to describe the common experience of millions."

Labels: Berlin-history, books to movies, Woman in Berlin, World War II - history

The Abingdon Book Group had a summer open house this month & instead of reading a particular title, read whatever they wanted & then shared that book with the group.
Below is a short list of titles that they recommend.

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
This novel follows the lives of eight students who gather in Lillian’s Restaurant every Monday night for cooking class. It soon becomes clear, however, that each one seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen.

Lying with the Enemy by Tim Binding
This novel is set on the Island of Guernsey during World War II. It is partly a war story and partly a murder mystery, & follows the relationships between the islanders and the invading Germans.
Try this if you enjoyed The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Since it was first published in 1955, Gift from the Sea has enlightened and offered solace to readers on subjects from love and marriage to peace and contentment.

Fidali's Way by George Mastras
From Publishers Weekly
Nick Sunder, a disillusioned Boston lawyer, has been backpacking in Asia for more than a year when disaster strikes at the start of Mastras's stirring first novel: the police in Peshawar, Pakistan, arrest him for cutting his French girlfriend's throat. Innocent of the crime, Sunder escapes custody by killing a cop. He heads into the Himalayas on foot, and after several weeks arrives at a remote medical clinic in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, where he gets a job as an aid worker, falls in love with a female Muslim doctor and witnesses horrifying acts of terrorism. Mastras, a TV writer (Breaking Bad) who's trekked through Asia himself, delivers a winding, character-rich plot full of authentic detail and regional history. While sentimentality mars some passages, the odysseylike story grips. Though Sunder's naïveté can be distracting at times, readers will cheer him along his path toward spiritual renewal, guided by the wisdom and advice of the titular Fidali, whom he meets on his journey. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Colony by Anne Rivers Siddons
When Maude Chambliss first arrives at Retreat, the seasonal home of her husband's aristocratic family, she is a nineteen-year-old bride fresh from South Carolina's Low Country. Among the patrician men and women who reside in the summer colony on the coast of Maine, her gypsy-like beauty and impulsive behavior immediately brand her an outsider. She, as well as everyone else, is certain she will never fit in. And of course, she doesn't...at first.
This brilliant novel, rich with emotion, is filled with appealing, intense, and indomitable characters. Anne Rivers Siddons paints a portrait of a woman determined to preserve the spirit of past generations--and the future of a place where she became who she is...a place called Colony.

Labels: Anne Rivers Siddons, Fidali's Way, Gift from the Sea, Kashmir, Lying with the Enemy, Maine, Pakistan, The Colony, The School of Essential Ingredients

Frank McCourt, author of the memoirs Angela's Ashes, 'Tis and Teacher Man, died Sunday, July 19 at 78 in New York City. He had suffered from metastatic melanoma, according to the New York Times, which has a long obituary.

On scanning the obituaries, it seems to me that all writers highlight McCourt's gifts as a consummate storyteller. I remember how, when Angela's Ashes came out in 1996, people would recount to each other anecdotes from the book. They would laugh and cry at the same time at tales of Frank McCourt's growing up in grinding poverty in Ireland: some of the incidents in his life are shocking and tragic and yet told so outrageously and engagingly that they are funny and very human.

Here are links to Frank McCourt's memoirs in our catalog:
Angela's Ashes
'Tis
Teacher Man

Frank McCourt also co-authored some books:
Ireland ever / photographs by Jill Freedman ; texts by Frank McCourt and Malachy McCourt
Brotherhood / text by Tony Hendra; introduction by Frank McCourt
"A lively introduction by Frank McCourt reflects on the civil connection we feel with firefighters...."

And he wrote fiction:
Angela and the baby Jesus / by Frank McCourt
"When my mother, Angela, was six years old, she felt sorry for the Baby Jesus in the Christmas crib at St. Joseph's Church near School House Lane where she lived.... * * * *Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes is a modern classic. Now he has written a captivating Christmas story about Angela as a child -- often cold and hungry herself -- compelled to rescue the Baby Jesus and take him home."

Labels: Frank McCourt, Ireland, Memoirs

Julia Blackburn's The Three of Us won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for memoir and autobiography. Find this book in our catalog

Labels: authors - memoirs, Julia Blackburn, Memoirs, mothers and daughters, PEN/Ackerley Prize, The Three of Us

A Celebration of the 60th National Book Awards

On July 7th, to celebrate the 60th National Book Awards the Foundation and its partners announced a campaign to select the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction. This year for the first time, the public will choose the best of the Fiction winners from the 59 years of the National Book Awards. 74 of the 77 books are still in-print and available. These are by well known authors, many of whom are still read today. Click here for more about the 60th anniversary celebration.

A Book a Day for 77 Days

The National Book Foundation is currently presenting a book-a-day blog on the Fiction winners from 1950 to 2008. The blog began July 7th and will run to September 21st, starting with Nelson Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm, ending with Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, and including works by Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Alice McDermott. Visit every day; then, on September 21st you will have a chance to select The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction and win two tickets to the 2009 National Book Awards, the first time in its history the Awards will open to a public vote. Read on...

Labels: National Book Awards 2009

Labels: International Thriller Writers, Thriller Awards

A Short History of Women, by Kate Walbert Find this book in our catalog

Perhaps it is the title of the book or its actual length (just over two hundred pages), but somehow, Kate Walbert has managed to capture in succinct episodes the way women and their history – both personal and political – are dismissed by society. Each chapter focuses on a woman of the same family, following ancestors and descendents from the late 19th century into the 21st century, collectively building a short history. While the various women fight for their place in that history, they repeatedly find dismissal or obscurity as the result of their efforts. Beginning with Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a British suffragist who starves herself to death as an act of protest over her being denied the vote, the women by turns fight for social justice or simply their place in the world and then slip off into obscurity or finally give up and no longer bother to struggle. Dorothy Townsend Barrett futilely protests the war in Iraq and blogs to a narrow audience, while Liz drinks her afternoons away, and Caroline responds anonymously to her mother’s blog posts. Hope does remain with the reader, however, as Dorothy “Dora� Barrett-Deel, of the most recent generation, reveals her feminist leanings in a curriculum vitae of sorts in which she includes both a reference to her great-great-grandmother’s act of ultimate rebellion and mention of Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf among her favorite authors. The fact that she changes her name, however, does not move her far enough to freedom from the patriarchy, since it is only her first name that she willfully shifts, while her last name remains the hyphen of two males of the family, her father and her grandfather. It does, however, move her farther from her own matriarchal lineage. Still, one almost wishes that Walbert had taken the reader a bit more along in the life of the young Dora, she of the changed identity, to see just what she might have done to shift our world towards a more just and fair environment, stamping her place among those whose significance is lauded because they were born not women, but men, whose histories are assumed to be long and significant simply by their gender.

Submitted by D. L. S.

Labels: Kate Walbert, short history of women, Women-Fiction

On June 29th, Good Morning America and Parade Magazine announced their summer picks. Read more about GMA's Hot Summer Reads...

Here is the list (click on titles to follow links to our catalog)
Thrillers:
Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child
The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly
The Neighbor by Lisa Gardner
Killer Summer by Ridley Pearson
Guardian of Lies by Steve Martini
The Defector by Daniel Silva
Relentless by Dean Koontz (earlier working title: The Other Side of the Woods)
Above the Law by Tim Green
Fiction:
In the Kitchen by Monica Ali
The White Queen by Philippa Gregory
South of Broad by Pat Conroy
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe
Non-Fiction:
Losing Mum & Pup by Christopher Buckley
Not Becoming My Mother by Ruth Reichl
Paul Newman: A Life by Shawn Levy
Rocket Men by Craig Nelson
Light Fiction:
Black Hills by Nora Roberts
Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner
The Castaways by Elin Hilderbrand
Mercury in Retrograde by Paula Froehlich
Queen Takes King by Gigi Levanger Grazer

Labels: summer reading lists

Labels: African-American history, Founders, Founding Fathers, Washington

Thriller fans - These are some of the new thrillers ordered and newly acquired by Harford County Public Library for July - just in time for beach reading!
* TRY FEAR by James Scott Bell
* KILL ZONE by Vicki Hinze
* NO MERCY by John Gilstrap
* GREEDY BONES by Carolyn Haines
* MISSING MARK by Julie Kramer
* KILL HER AGAIN by Robert Gregory Browne
* FADE TO BLACK by Leslie Parrish
* HOUSE SECRETS by Mike Lawson
* RED BLOODED MURDER by Laura Caldwell
* THE APOSTLE by Brad Thor
* BREAKPOINT by JoAnn Ross
* OUTCAST by Joan Johnston
* THE BONE FACTORY by Nate Kenyon
* THE ODDS by Kathleen George
* FUGITIVE by Phillip Margolin
* UNDONE by Karin Slaughter
* THE DEVIL'S COMPANY by David Liss
* FREE AGENT by Jeremy Duns
* CRIMINAL KARMA by Steven M. Thomas
* FAN MAIL by P.D. Martin
* THE MISSING INK by Karen E. Olson
* DUST TO DUST by Heather Graham
* EVERYWHERE SHE TURNS by Debra Webb
* DEAD DOCKET by Mitchell Graham

FYI you thriller fans - ThrillerFest 2009 will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City July 8 - 11. Read more in the International Thriller Writers newsletter The Big Thrill...

Labels: Thrillers

Book Jacket
"Far North" takes the reader on a quest through an unforgettable arctic landscape, from humanity's origins to its possible end. Haunting, spare, yet stubbornly hopeful, the novel is suffused with an ecstatic awareness of the world's fragility and beauty, and its unexpected ability to recover from our worst trespasses.

In this post-apocalyptic, dystopian view of a future where heat and starvation have caused people to flee to the far north, Makepeace, the sheriff and maybe last survivor of a failed city lives in solitary isolation. Following a series of events, Makepeace decides to venture out into the greater world to discover what is happening there. This world is a very dangerous place peopled by thugs, robbers, murderers and slave traders. Makepeace is captured and sold into a slave camp but manages to escape after five years, only to reach "the Zone" a huge, empty and radioactive city also filled with anthrax. Through Makepeace's eyes, the author shows us not just the brutality of this world, but also its beauty and the enduring hope that humanity will survive. This novel is thought-provoking as the reader asks "what would I be prepared to do to survive?" What makes us human, and what does it take to remove the constraints that civilized society places on us? From the beginning there are surprises, twists and turns enough to keep the reader turning the pages and wondering if Makepeace will make it home again.

Publisher's Weekly gave this novel a starred review.

If you like this book, you might like these.
Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road', John Wyndham's 'Chrysalids' or Margaret Atwood's 'Oryx and Crake'.

Labels: Far North, future world, Marcel Theroux, post-apocalyptic

Labels: Cookbooks