Folklore: Fact & Fiction Display

Photo found via Compfight courtsey of JKonig
Photo found via Compfight courtsey of JKonig

Come to Todd Library to take a look at our current display that focuses on werewolves, witches, and vampires.  We’ve got books and articles on these topics in case you want to do some Halloween reading.  While you are in the library make sure you add your favorite scary movie to our poster board!

 

Wired Magazine’s 7 Essential Life Skills (aka Learning 2.0)

Have you read about Wired Magazine’s 7 essential skills for life (that you, ahem, supposedly didn’t learn in college)?

Here they are:

1.     Statistical Literacy -Making sense of today’s data-driven world.
2.     Post-State Diplomacy – Power and politics, sans government.
3.     Remix Culture – Samples, mashups, and mixes.
4.     Applied Cognition – The neuroscience you need.
5.     Writing for New Forms – Self-expression in 140 characters.
6.     Waste Studies – Understanding end-to-end economics.
7.     Domestic Tech – How to use the world as your lab.

Read More http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/09/ff_wiredu/all/1

National Book Award Nominees, 2010

Here are the National Book Award Nominees, for 2010:

Fiction

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Alfred A. Knopf)

Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.)

Nicole Krauss, Great House (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Lionel Shriver, So Much for That
(Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Coffee House Press)

Fiction Judges: Andrei Codrescu, Samuel R. Delany, Sabina Murray,
Joanna Scott
, Carolyn See

Nonfiction

Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
(Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group)

John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq
(W.W. Norton & Co/The New Press )

Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War
(Doubleday)

Nonfiction Judges: Blake Bailey, Marjorie Garber, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Seth Lerer, Sallie Tisdale

Poetry

Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)

Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Viking Penguin)

James Richardson, By the Numbers (Copper Canyon Press)

C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon Press)

Monica Youn, Ignatz (Four Way Books)

Poetry Judges: Rae Armantrout, Cornelius Eady, Linda Gregerson,
Jeffrey McDaniel
, Brenda Shaughnessy

Young People’s Literature

Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker (Little, Brown & Co.)

Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird
(Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group)

Laura McNeal, Dark Water (Alfred A. Knopf)

Walter Dean Myers, Lockdown
(Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer
(Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Young People’s Literature Judges:Laban Carrick Hill, Kelly Link,
Tor Seidler
, Hope Anita Smith, Sara Zarr

For more info, see http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010.html

“Why would you want to read that; it’s dumb,”

Carla Cohen, owner of the Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington DC – one of my favorite bookstores in the country – recently passed on.  Before moving on…she had the following interaction with one of her customers (this anecdote is from a tribute shared on the Politics & Prose website):

Cohen sometimes responded to customers in a less-then-politic way: “Why would you want to read that; it’s dumb,” she would say to a customer asking for a book of which she disapproved. “You would enjoy this a lot more — and it’s a far better book.”

Now that is a bookseller, par excellence: she knew her stuff (books) and her customers.

Farewell Carla, I appreciate all that you have taught me (Adam) from afar.