If I Had the Time...

These new non-fiction titles all have some connection to water! I'd love to read them...if I only had the time!
Thames: the Biography by Peter Ackroyd.
This 215-mile river flowing through London is exquisitely explored in all its misery and majesty. As a Dickens lover and a huge fan of Clare Clark's novel The Great Stink, I know I would enjoy this biography of a river which has been a playground, an attack route, an artistic inspiration, a power source, a royal stream, and even a sewer.

The Gulf Stream: Tiny Plankton, Giant Bluefin, and the Amazing Story of the Powerful River in the Atlantic by Stan Ulanski.
This fascinating blend of science and history delves into the marine life, the transport properties, and the notables who've studied this "ocean conveyor belt" which can even been seen from space. Ponce de Leon discovered it, and Columbus used it, as did the real pirates of the Caribbean and later slave traders. Benjamin Franklin experiemented with its temperature differences in order to chart the stream's boundaries and perhaps speed up delivery of the mail.
Discover its major role in the development of East coast America.

Weather Matters: an American Cultural History Since 1900 by Bernard Mergen.
Hurricanes, floods, tsunamis and other stormy conditioons are examined for their enormous social and cultural impact. Weather, after all, is always a topic of conversation in America. Our inability to control nature, its unpredictability, its politics (Katrina), and even weather lore and humor and the marketing of weather are delightfully explained here.

Bridges: 3000 Years of Defying Nature by David J. Brown
Not on the subject of water, per se, but over the subject of water is this grand coffee table volume. With over 300 photos and illustrations, the author relates the origins, engineering, structure, materials, and design principles of over 100 of the world's greatest bridges. Arranged chronologically, this is a delightful (and fairly non-technical) book for an architecture or civil engineering buff. I adore going over the Zakim bridge in Boston so I loved this book!

Looking For a Good Book?

We have just issued the 2008 Librarians' Choice bookmark which lists many of our favorite books this year. The New York Times has also come up with their own list of notable books of 2008. If you can't come in to pick up your book mark; here is a virtual copy. (Click on the image to make it larger.)

Pirates Take 60 English Men, Women, and Children Captive

I am not talking about the modern day piracy off the coast of Somalia, but of a little known raid that took place in 1625. Barbary Pirates stormed a church in Penzance, Cornwall, ruthlessly taking the congregation to sell as slaves. Jane Johnson was inspired to write The Tenth Gift by this old family tale of a stolen ancestress. The novel is actually the intermingled stories of Julia, a modern day Englishwoman who finds the scribbled notes of one of the captives, Cat Tregenna, in a very old book of embroidery patterns. Julia is so intrigued by Cat's story that she travels to Morocco to find out the truth of what happened to Cat and the faithful lover who struggled to rescue her. This atmospheric audio book transported me to the hot, dusty streets of exotic Morocco, just the ticket during a cold, grey New England day.

You Might Be A Librarian If.....

Seattle Librarian Danielle Dreger-Babbitt has done better than Jeff Foxworthy with her "You Might Be a Librarian If" column. I confess some of the things are accurate: alphabetized spice cabinet- guilty, change Scrabble to Trivial Pursuit and its dead on, but I have no pets named after authors.

There is a Librarian here who owns a Nancy Pearl action figure and secretly longs to be on a book cart drill team. Can you guess who she is? And are you at heart a Librarian?

You might be a librarian if:
You compulsively reshelve items and straighten shelves when browsing at Barnes and Noble
You alphabetize your spice rack (and everything else)
You own more cardigans than shoes
You own cats named "Ernest, "Kerouac," or "Flannery"
You have a secret desire to be on a bookcart drill team
You know the Dewey Decimal System by heart
Nancy Pearl is your idol and you own her action figure
You go on vacation and visit other libraries
You don't have a Netflix account and borrow all of your music and movies from the library instead
Your home library has just as many books as a small public library
You were totally blogging and social networking before 2003
You read banned books
You can kick everyone's butt at Scrabble

The Christmas Wars

Every year about this time a struggle begins at the Circulation Desk between those who would happily listen to Christmas carols from September onwards and those of us who more sensibly prefer Christmas to begin a week or so before Christmas Day. A compromise has been crafted declaring no Christmas music shall be played at the Desk until after Thanksgiving Day. We have brought up hundreds of Christmas books and CDs from storage so you are more than welcome to start your holiday celebrations whenever you desire.

So how about it; are you a "can't get enough of Christmas" kind of person, or a "let's keep it special by limiting it to a couple of weeks" person?

Holiday Hours

The Library will close at 5:30 Wednesday evening. We will open again on Saturday from 9 to 5. We will be closed on Sunday due to Dover's Holiday Parade.
The Library staff wishes you a wonderful Thanksgiving.

No Stress Christmas Shopping

Christmas shopping doesn't have to be stressful...you can do it right here at the library. We have quite a Christmas sale corner near the front desk with great ideas for gift giving. Dover maps, note paper, library book bags, copies of the Port of Dover hardcover book and paperback copies of the Marlinspike are all for sale, benefiting the Friends of the Library. In addition you can purchase a "Hidden Treasures of Dover NH" jigsaw puzzle or a "Factory on Fire" DVD and support Dover's Main Street organization. We also have the "Great Blaze (a look back at Dover's Deadly 1907 Mill Fire)" DVD for sale. So if your Christmas gift list is longer than Santa's and a mall is your worst nightmare, shopping at the library could be the way to go.

Obama is the new Oprah!

Isn't it nice to have a president-elect who is a reader? As a dad, he's already read all the Harry Potter books with his girls and, according to reports, is now tackling the popular Twilight series with Malia. On the campaign trail he showed he was familiar with Michael Pollan's books on food and Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World.

But our new president has something even more magical...he's acquired 'The Oprah Touch" for sending books to the top of bestseller lists. As he ascends to the presidency, Barack Obama has been reading about Lincoln and FDR, specifically Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment: FDR's 100 Days and the Triumph of Hope. These two books were published in, respectively, 2005 and 2006, yet they are currently #13 and #120 on Amazon's top sellers list! Our library copies are out in circulation and there are four holds on Goodwin's title.

I wonder what Michelle Obama is reading? Any guesses?

Twilighters Rejoice!

There has been a lot of buzz and press about today's release of the movie Twilight. The movie is, of course, based on the wildly popular Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. But what is a twilighter (if you don't know what this is see our August 13th post) to do after you having read all the Stephenie Meyer's books and seen the movie? Luckily the vampire genre is flourishing and here are few good books that you can sink your teeth into! (I couldn't help myself.)

Bloodline: a novel by Kate Cary
Blue Bloods Series by Melissa De la Cruz
The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod by Heather Brewer
Cirque du Freak Series by Darren Shan
Midnight Predator by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
Marked by P.C. Cast (The House of Night Series)
My Swordhand is Singing by Marcus Sedgwic
Night Road by A. M. Jenkins
Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
The Silver Kiss by Annette Curtis Klause
Suck It Up by Brian Meehl
Sucks to Be Me by Kimberly Pauley
Sweetblood by Pete Hautman
Tantalize by Cynthia Leitich Smith
Thirsty by M.T. Anderson
Vampire Academy Series by Richelle Mead
Vampire Kisses Series by Ellen Schreiber

If I had the time...

Things I probably won't get to do but might if only I had the time to read these books:
Smoking Food, a beginner's guide by Chris Dub; Manage your life with Outlook for Dummies by Greg Harvey; Getting into Guinness: one man's longest, fastest, highest journey by Larry Olmstead; Preserving food without freezing or canning. And, something interesting for the man in my life to do if he had time to read this: 50 Fish to catch before you die by John Bailey.

A Salute to Library Pages!!!

Our two-week annual booksale is now over and we are offering all the "leftovers" for free. I've uploaded some pictures of the messy remainders. We make only feeble attempts to bring order to the booksale and you can see how bad it gets at the finale.

This morning, as I was bemoaning the clutter, I was reminded of the 2007 bestseller by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, which explored what would happen to the Earth if humans disappeared. If you're not familiar with that book's premise, it's that man-made structures and systems would quickly degenerate if people weren't there to maintain them and that nature would quickly take over. There was a similarly-themed documentary on The History Channel this year called "Life Without People." Wow, I thought, this same phenomenon happens on a smaller scale in our own library!

Library pages are the often-unsung heroes who reshelve all returned materials and keep our dozens of stacks and bookshelves in near-perfect Dewey Decimal or alphabetical order so we can all find what we're looking for. Our booksale started out looking like this:

but, in just a fortnight, degenerated into this:

Yes it may be true that librarians can obsess about keeping order, but without our constant attention to where items are located, chaos would soon reign. The library would have few satisfied customers if our 100,000+ books looked like those remnants in the booksale! So here's to you Joanne, Sara and Kristen, our library's hard-working and dilgent pages who fight the never-ending battle against misshelving, book-tossing, and general unkemptness!

Good Book Buys

Although our annual book sale is officially over, we have an on-going mini sale in our Internet Room where you can purchase nearly new hardcovers, paperbacks and media for $1 to $3 (hint: Christmas is coming). We also have a great selection of specially priced "collectible" books for dabbling antiquarians (hint, hint: Christmas IS coming!).

The (not really) Bestsellers' List

There's "THE" Bestsellers' List, and then there's "yours"! Here are the books you checked out most this past year that didn't make it to the top of the charts nationally. For fiction you really liked the light stuff:
Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner, Deep Dish by Mary Kay andrews, and Getting Rid of Bradley byJennifer Crusie . However you balanced your fun with some serious nonfiction: Glimpses of heaven: true stories of hope and peace at the end of life's journey by Trudy Harris, Her last death: a memoir by Susanna Sonnenberg, and Mollie Katzen's recipes--Salads by Mollie Katzen.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Driving in to work today I heard an interesting segment on NPR about the Swedish author Stieg Larsson . Stieg Larsson wrote a trilogy of books with the first one being The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which is currently #17 on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction list. I have not read the book myself, but a couple of my colleagues have been raving about it. What I didn't know is that Stieg Larsson died in 2004. When Knopf picked up the rights for publishing it in the United States they needed to use some inventive marketing techniques since they had an unknown author who could not do book tours. First they starting giving out advance copies to booksellers, and basically to anyone who asked. They went so far as to take an ad out in the New York Times Book Review telling readers if they wrote asking for a copy they would get one in the mail. They also made use of bloggers. The books were already popular in Europe and so getting the book into the hands of some influential book bloggers was important. When the book was finally published it had glowing blurbs on the back from Michael Connelly, Lee Child and Harlan Coben, and debuted at #4 on the New York Times Best-Seller List.

The King of Gross Out Grosses Himself Out

I just read about Stephen King's latest book of short stories "Just After Sunset", which apparently includes a story about which Mr. King said "I even grossed myself out." Wow that is saying something! But this started me thinking, didn't he retire at one point? In fact in 2002 he declared that "he would stop writing." Well since 2002 he has published more books that the average writer does in a lifetime. Just imagine how many books he would have published if he wasn't "retired". Crazy Stephen.

Remembering Michael

When I was ten years old my dad took me to see The Andromeda Strain. I remember sitting very tensely in the dark movie theater, barely breathing, watching the riveting, horrifying tale play out. I can still see the figures in their astronaut suits walking through the eerily quiet town, past citizens who had dropped mid step. It was my first experience with one of the maestros of thrillerdom, Michael Crichton. Since then he has written many bestsellers that were often turned into movies; Jurassic Park, Sphere, Congo, The Great Train Robbery, Timeline, and The Terminal Man, to name just a few.

Sadly, the world lost a great story teller Tuesday when Michael Crichton passed way. He will be missed.

If I had the time...

My latest list of newly-received non-fiction which I'd read...if I had the time:

Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia
by Patrick Tracey (a journey to trace his two sisters’ illness)

Alphabet Juice: the Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences: with Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory by Roy Blount Jr. (witty, punny wordplay)

Fabergé’s Eggs: the Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire by Toby Faber (the tale of the czar’s 49 bejeweled eggs)

Getting Into Guinness: One Man’s Longest, Fastest, Highest Journey Inside the World’s Most Famous Record Book by Larry Olmstead (why do people do this? Olmstead explains the obsession.)

The Big Necessity: the Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George (Sanitation as a central challenge to human development)

Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces by Robert Clark (Story of the 1966 flood in Florence which killed 33 and damaged over 14,000 artworks.)

The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren by Jonathan Lopez (Bio of a phony paintings peddler and his Nazi ties)

Unforgettable Walks to Take Before You Die by Steve Watkins & Clare Jones (I’ve done two of them!)

Writing on Stone: Scenes from a Maine Island Life by Christina Marsden Gillis (a summer resident of Gotts Island, SW of Mt. Desert, for 40+ years)

Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes by Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein (originated as zany schtick on NPR’s Weekend Edition)

Voting in Dover

Just in case it slipped your mind, national and state elections are being held Tuesday, November 4. The polls will be open in Dover from 7AM to 7PM. The City Clerk's office has posted a list of voting locations. You can also look at sample ballots for your ward. Not sure what ward you are in? Use the Street Finder.

November--Time to Vote!

The Ladybug Picture Book Award, a project of the Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library, is designed to promote early literacy and honor the best in recent children's picture books. Each year, a committee of children's librarians from around New Hampshire selects 10 picture book titles and during the month of November, New Hampshire children from preschoolers to those in third grade vote to select the award winner. The winning picture book is announced at the end of the year and the author and illustrator receive a crystal award created by Pepi Herrmann Crystal.

Children in preschool through third grade are invited to choose their favorite picture book from the 2008 list of nominees. Ballots and tally sheets are available in the Children's Room and on our website. All votes MUST be received at the Center for the Book (mailing info is on the tally sheet) by December 1, 2008.

Haunted Dover

Curious about what ghosts roam through Dover on All Hallow's Eve? You might be surprised at what you find...