What’s New @ AFPLS

Now that Fall feels like it has officially arrived with leaves falling off trees, overcast skies, and blustery breezes, the desire for comfort foods has set in. If you’re anything like me you crave steaming bowls of yummy homemade soup, stew, chili, and my personal favorite, gumbo, all winter long. But this year I’ve decided I need a little inspiration to try a few new recipes to spice up my old favorites. Here are a handful of excellent cookbooks to help us all create that perfect bowl of comfort. As always, you can check the AFPLS catalog here for these and other titles. Bon appetit!

• The Daily Soup cookbook
      Vitetta-Miller, Robin
• The ultimate chili cookbook : history, geography, fact, and folklore of chili
      Jameson, W. C.
• Simply chilis, chowders, and stews
      Munson, Carol
• Real stew : 300 recipes for authentic home-cooked cassoulet, gumbo, chili, tagine, curry, minestrone, bouillabaise, stroganoff, goulash, chowder, and much more
      Wright, Clifford A.
• All-time favorite soup & stew recipes
      Liles, Jean Wickstrom
• Fresh from the vegetarian slow cooker : 200 recipes for healthy and hearty one-pot meals that are ready when you are
      Robertson, Robin (Robin G.)

Looking for something warm to drink to go along with your meal? Check out these titles for some tasty ideas. Cheers!

• Hot drinks : cider, coffee, tea, hot chocolate, spiced punch, spirits
      Heiss, Mary Lou
• Some like it hot : 50 drinks to warm your spirits
      Burrows, Holly
• Green tea : 50 hot drinks, cool quenchers, and sweet and savory treats
      Heiss, Mary Lou

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If you happen to be in Atlanta this Halloween, the Global Access Department of the Central Library has much and in many languages to frighten and delight.  We have ghosts, witches, epic struggles between good and evil, a few of the walking dead and some who are simply possessed (on page or screen, that is).

Books

Check Ðêm buom ma: tuyên t•âp truyên ma Viêt Nam by Ngô Tu Lâp (Vietnamese)
Kyoden kaiicho by Takahashi Katsuhiko (Japanese)
Li kuei hsien hsing ki by Chang Shou-lee (Chinese)                                                                                                   

Poe és kóvet”oi: rémiszt”o történetek, translated by Csaba Hunyadi (Hungarian)
Treize fantomes by George Langelaan (French)
Vlast’ karmy: roman by Theresa Weir (Russian)
Youisa ui haru by Yi Yu-jin (Korean)

DVDs

Darna zaroori hai (Hindi)
Fear  (Hindi)
Vellinakshathram (Malayam)
Viy (Russian)

Check the library catalog for these items and more.  Don’t be a zombie.  Get into the spirit and take possession of some of these great finds for Halloween.

World Book Day, designated by UNESCO as a “worldwide celebration of books and reading,” is celebrated in over 100 countries accross the globe. In the UK and Ireland this annual event has sparked the World Book Day team to come up with a list of books, both fiction and non-fiction, that not only entertain but also provide further food for thought and discussion. They asked publishers large and small to submit titles they felt worthy of being talked about and have whittled down a list of 50 from the thousands of suggestions they received. Now, I know this is yet another list of books, but what is really interesting about this one is that a lot of the books don’t even sound familiar to me. It’s a list of things we here on the other side of the pond might not have come up with ourselves and so provides the opportunity to discover both new titles and authors at the same time. Exciting, right?!

The full list, Spread the Word: Books to Talk About, will be voted on by the public and narrowed down to a shortlist of 10 titles, with a final winner announced on March 5, 2009. To see the list and get in on the voting visit the site here. Then check the AFPLS catalog to see which of these titles have been hiding in our very own stacks!

Thanks to About Contemporary Literature for the article and links.

For more information about World Book Day and its origins, visit this page from UNESCO, here.

The National Book Foundation annually celebrates the best of American Literature by offering the National Book Award in the areas of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry and Young People’s Literature. This year over 1200 book titles were submitted by publishers for consideration, but the finalists have been narrowed down to just 5 from each category. National Book Award Week will begin on November 17th, with winners announced on November 19th, so there is still time to read a few of the nominated titles and decide who you’d like to see walk away with the prize! To see the full list of nominees from this and previous years, click here. You can even download a PDF of all finalists and winners from 1950 to the present. Then check the library’s catalog here to see which titles are available in our system!

September 27-October 4 is Banned Books Week for 2008. I usually try to pick a book each year that has been banned and read it for myself during the week to see what all the fuss is about. So rebel and find yourself a banned book to read this week! Here are a few links to help you out:

*Top 10 Most Challenged Books of 2007
*Banned Books Week on Facebook and MySpace

You can check the AFPLS catalog here to see which banned books are available at your local branch.

Oprah has choosen her newest book club title and it’s David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Published this year, Edgar Sawtelle is the story of a mute boy living in Wisconsin who has created his own sign language and who has inherited his family’s skill with dogs. Edgar’s quiet life faces some new challenges the summer of his fourteenth year with the arrival of two strangers, one a rebellious stray dog and the other his equally rebellious uncle.

If you’d like to read a review of Wroblewski’s novel, you can find the New York Times review here. You can also check out the first chapter if you can’t wait to get started.

You can check the AFPLS catalog here to see if any copies are available or to put this book on hold. I can’t wait to read it myself!

The eighth annual National Book Festival will be taking place in Washington, D.C. this weekend, Saturday the 27th on the National Mall. The festival is hosted by First Lady Laura Bush and sponsored by the Library of Congress. This is a huge event for authors, publishers, libraries and readers everywhere, and always draws big names and big crowds. Authors from all genres and age groups will be represented and you can find the complete list here.

The festival homepage also has links to podcasts of interviews with some of the participating authors, including one with Grammy award-winning performer Dionne Warwick who has written a children’s book! So if you aren’t able to actually jet off to D.C. for the weekend, be sure and check back with the site for updates and added material as the festival gets underway.

You can also check out books by some of the authors that will be headed to the festival by checking the library’s catalog here. Here’s a few suggestions for children, teens and adults to get you started:

CHILDRENS

•  Gingerbread friends
      Brett, Jan
• No, David!
      Shannon, David

YOUNG ADULT

• Neverwhere
      Gaiman, Neil
• November blues
      Draper, Sharon M

ADULT FICTION

• People of the book : a novel
      Brooks, Geraldine
• Lush life
      Price, Richard

ADULT NON-FICTION

• Einstein : his life and universe
      Isaacson, Walter
• One minute to midnight : Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of nuclear war
      Dobbs, Michael

POETRY

• Old heart : poems
      Plumly, Stanley
• Flamingo watching : poems
      Ryan, Kay (Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2008-2009)

I know many of you have read Douglas Adams’s Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy-the constant battered state of paperback copies in the library is proof enough! It has just been announced that British author Eion Colfer will pen a new installment to be entitled And Another Thing… Eion Colfer is best known for his best-selling Artemis Fowl series. The book is due oct in October of 2009.

You have time to catch up on the series, which includes:

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, the Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks for the Fish
Young Zaphoid Plays It Safe
Mostly Harmless
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

You can check the afpls catalog here to see which titles are available at your local branch.

Thanks to PopCandy for the info!

If you have a multi-language household or want to refresh your high school language skills, it can difficult to find books in languages other then English. Luckily, AFPLS provides many foreign language books through our Global Access Department. Materials from this department can be placed on hold through the online catalog available at www.afpls.org. When using the catalog search, first click on power search then scroll down and click on the language you’d like to see materials in.

If you don’t feel like waiting the 3-5 days it takes for materials to transfer between branches, you can also read foreign language books online for free! Foreign language materials that are in the public domain, which means that they are no longer under copyright, can be found at Project Gutenberg’s Foreign Language Page. Books are available in over 50 languages, from Bulgarian to Welsh, with some languages, such as Spanish, French and Chinese having over 50 titles available. These titles can be downloaded and read online for free, along with thousands of English-language books. Check out Project Gutenberg and enjoy!

Prolific English mystery writer Dame Agatha Christie was born in September, 1890.  Her nearly 100 novels and plays have been translated into many languages.  The Global Access Department of the Central Library has translations of Christie’s books in German, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Vietnamese.

German
• Letztes weekend
• Das Schicksal in Person
• Der Todeswirbel

Polish
• Godzina zero
• Uspione morderstwo

Portuguese
• Os relógios : romance de Agatha Christie

Russian (Agatha Christie anthologies)
• Desiat negritiat ; Ubiistvo v Vostochnom ekspresse ; Smert na Nile
• Drama v trekh aktakh ; Piat porosiat ; Odnim paltsem ; Mesto naznacheniia neizvestno

Vietnamese
• Ðiêp vu thành Bát Ða : truyên trinh thám
• Oan khuât
• Tôi ác duoi ánh mat troi

Enjoy reading Christie again (or for the first time) during the month of September. Additional works by Christie in these languages and in English may be found through the library catalog.