Book of the Week (April 30, 2007)

The Name of the Wind

By Patrick Rothfuss

On display on the new book shelf in the library and the featured title in a free book talk by the author at the Albertson Library on Wednesday, May 2 at 3:00 pm.

Publisher's Book Description: NOT TO BE MISSED: THE POWERFUL DEBUT NOVEL FROM FANTASY'S NEXT SUPERSTAR! Told in Kvothe's own voice, this is the tale of the magically gifted young man who grows to be the most notorious wizard his world has ever seen.The intimate narrative of his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, his years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-ridden city, his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, and his life as a fugitive after the murder of a king form a gripping coming-of-age story unrivaled in recent literature. A high-action story written with a poet's hand, The Name of the Wind is a masterpiece that will transport readers into the body and mind of a wizard.

Book of the Week (April 16, 2007)

April 19 is Support Teen Literature Day, a part of this week's celebration of National Library Week!

In the IMC - on the 3rd floor of the Library
Call Number: PZ 7 .K678337 Am 2006

American Born Chinese
By Gene Luen Yang


Gene Luen Yang has won the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award for his masterful graphic novel “American Born Chinese.” Yang draws from American pop culture and ancient Chinese mythology in his groundbreaking work. Expertly told in words and pictures, Yang’s story in three parts follows a Chinese American teenager’s struggle to define himself against racial stereotypes. “American Born Chinese” is the first graphic novel to be recognized by the Michael L. Printz Committee.

Yang, who began drawing comics in the fifth grade, is a high school teacher in the San Francisco Bay area. The annual award for literary excellence is administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association, and is sponsored by Booklist magazine. The award, first given in 2000, is named for the late Michael L. Printz, a Topeka, Kans., school librarian known for discovering and promoting quality books for young adults. (Source: Young Adult Library Services Association)

Book of the Week (April 9, 2007)

In the IMC on the 3rd floor
Call Number: PZ 7 .W6367 Fl 2006

Flotsam
By David Weisner

Winner of the 2007 Caldecott Medal, presented to the illustrator of the most distinguished American picture book for children.

Publisher's description: A bright, science-minded boy goes to the beach equipped to collect and examine flotsam--anything floating that has been washed ashore. Bottles, lost toys, small objects of every description are among his usual finds. But there's no way he could have prepared for one particular discovery: a barnacle-encrusted underwater camera, with its own secrets to share . . . and to keep.

In each of his amazing picture books, David Wiesner has revealed the magical possibilities of some ordinary thing or happening--a frog on a lily pad, a trip to the Empire State Building, a well-known nursery tale. This time, a day at the beach is the springboard into a wildly imaginative exploration of the mysteries of the deep, and of the qualities that enable us to witness these wonders and delight in them.

Book of the Week (April 2, 2007)

On Display on top of the New Book shelf collection until 4/13, then in the Leisure Reading Collection in the main library's lobby

Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu

By J. Maarten Troost

Publisher's Description: After his misadventures among the natives of heat-blasted Kiribati, memorably chronicled in The Sex Lives of Cannibals, it would be understandable for Maarten Troost to be in no hurry to return to the South Pacific. But then in a strangely appropriate place for a modern epiphany, the aisle of a Super Stop & Shop, he discovers that he feels remarkably out of place among the trappings of twenty-first-century American life, and longs to return to simpler days when a shortage of beer numbered among his chief concerns.So off again he goes, this time to Vanuatu, with his girlfriend-turned-wife, Sylvia. Like Tarawa, Vanuatu proves to be a fallen paradise, breathtaking in its beauty but also maddeningly backward. With his trademark sardonic wit, Troost relates his run-ins with Mother Nature (volcanoes, typhoons, earthquakes, giant centipedes) and the kava-besotted, clothing-optional lifestyle of the islanders. Perhaps as a result of these customs, Sylvia gets pregnant, and soon their son is born in slightly-more-civilized Fiji. As they contend with new parenthood in a country known for cannibalism and government coups, their boy begins to take quite naturally to island living, in complete contrast to his dad.A rip-roaringly funny account of life in the farthest corners of the world, Getting Stoned with Savages again reveals the wry appreciation of the absurd and infectious joy of discovery that make Troost one of the most engaging and original travel writers around.