Book Discussion Resources

While I was fooling around looking for resources to help me lead the Cook evening book discussion, I came upon a couple of helpful websites. You may be aware of the Random House one (it offers lists of discussion questions and even a group of authors who would be willing to have a "phone chat" with your group! It also has a newsletter to subscribe to. When I looked at their newsletter, the Book Group Expo site was mentioned. This is a convention for book groups and just had their first annual meeting in California. That looked quite intriguing! Now you tell me, have I found anything new under the sun here, or is this all old news to you veterans.


http://www.bookgroupexpo.com/
and
http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/rc/library/author.pperl?author_last=A

Book Club Dilemma

A member of the Monday Night Book Club called to request that we change their book selection for September. Susie put the request through. Mary Ann had already ordered the books for that club and had received six of them already from other libraries. At Mary Ann's request, I called Michelle ? Shaeffer and told her that since their books had started coming in, we couldn't at this point make the change. She questioned me and I tried to explain that with almost 90 book clubs that we weren't able to accomodate late changes such as this one. She still pushed me as to why they couldn't change. I stuck to my guns (mostly because she was kind of nasty with me), but I'm not sure I gave her the right answer.

Any thoughts?

ej

Books into Movies

A couple of our popular books are about to be made into movies, so we can expect them to get even more HOT!!:

"Natalie Portman has been tapped to headline an adaptation of Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl. ...Billy Bob Thornton will star as a 1960's janitor who takes two of his children on the road to find his third--a son convicted for killing two intruders in their home--in an adaptation of Leif Enger's elegiac 2001 novel Peace Like a River." p. 13, Publisher's Weekly, 6/26/06

Very exciting! I'm especially thrilled that Peace Like a River will get a wider audience--it is one of my all-time faves! ej

Jane Trump is going to make a copy of "Books on the Air" which is updated every Friday and she'll give us a copy to keep at the fiction desk. Let's put it under the daily calendar.
Bookletters is now on the website. If you go into the toolkit where we can edit the newsletters you can see how many people have signed up for each newsletter. There are already 7 signups for the Da Vinci Code Readalikes. I'm excited about all the possibilities for readers advisory.

A Couple of Good Books

I read two good books this last month. Poison by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is a "psychological" study of a family that is dealing with the aftermath of the powerful patriarch's death--a world renowned author and womanizer whose first two wives committed suicide. His first wife'schildren, well-known in their own right; his sister who sacrificed a promising career and personal life to help her brother with his children after the first wife's death; the widow, his third wife are all locked in an emotional and financial battle, dealing with a fight over his will and their perceived places in his heart. Much of the narrative is almost stream of consciousness, with characters "thinking" in the middle of the action as well as an omniscient narrator driving the plot. The ending at first was dissatisfying to me--everything left up in the air. Later, I reflected that it really was in keeping with how the characters had been left by this basically self-oriented man, whom they all adored, and sometimes despised at the same time.

I liked the "tangled" narrative and development of the characters. The Snow Fox is another book by Schaeffer I may try as well.

Not being able to put a "NEW" book on the regular shelves without anyone having checked it out, I decided to read John Crow's Devil by Marlon James, a first novel. It is set in 1950's Jamaica, in the freed slaves village of Gibbeah. At first, I was a little put off because the beginning pages are a first person narrative in dialect--hard to read when I didn't know what the book was going to be about. However, the dialect speaking narrators were joined by one omniscient as well as standard English-speaking narrators. I was really glad I stuck with this book. It is the tale of Pastor Bligh, a drunken disgrace to his church, and Apostle York, who arrives like the four horseman of the Apocalypse to rid Gibbeah of Bligh and all other sin. It truly seems for most of the book to be a cosmic battle between good and evil--speaking in tongues, weird mutilations of animals, spontaneous fires, wild "Spirit" led worship services. The end is a little more earthly and decidedly not supernatural. I found it pretty clever considering the intense build up toward a God vs. Satan fight. I'm glad I stuck with the dialect and the story.

Book Share Book

Hello Cook Fiction!

I really enjoyed Carolyn Parkhurst's book Lost and Found. It has received strong reviews and I found it to be very interesting and well written. Lost and Found is about reality show contestants on a show of the same name. I thought it was going to be a fluffy tell all about Reality T.V. a la Devil Wears Prada and Nanny Diairies but it wasn't! It is really about the contestants and the events in their lives that a) brought them to the apply for the show and b) why they were chosen for the show. The narration bounces between the 6 main characters like Maeve Binchey's Evening Class where their stories are intertwined but independent at the same time.

Any way it was great book and I am actually reading her first book The Dogs of Babel because I like it so well!

Haley

bookletters

Hi fiction people,
I thought we had a good fiction meeting this morning and I'm excited to do some book sharing.
I really liked Triangle by Weber. It's about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that took place around 1910. It's a fascinating story told by one of the survivors whose memories have inconsistencies. Weber is a good writer. She wrote one of my favorite books The Music Lesson also.
Connie

How to Post on this Blog

OK gang. We've had this blog now for a while and it seems I'm the only one who is posting on it (and probably the only one reading it, I'm afraid.) Anyway, I thought that perhaps it might be because it's not clear How to Post. So here are the directions:

1. Click on the little B in the orange box in the upper left hand corner. That will take you to a page which says Cook Fiction in blue and if you click on the green plus sign under the heading New Post, you can create your own posting (as opposed to a comment about someone else's posting). When you're done writing, click on the orange button at the bottom that says Publish Post and you are done! Go back to the blog and REFRESH to see what you've added. I promise it will get easier with practice, practice, practice.

2. The first person to do this will win some delicious chocolate candy!!! There will also be a second place prize for the 2nd blogger who adds a post (not a comment--a posting).

On your mark, get set, BLOG!!

Chicago Area Writers Launch New Blog

A group of seven Chicago crime fiction writers calling itself the Outfit has created a blog that makes its debut this coming Monday, July 10. At theoutfitcollective.com, Sara Paretsky, Barbara D'Amato, Kevin Guilfoile, Libby Fischer Hellmann, Michael Allen Dymmoch, Sean Chercover and Marcus Sakey will discuss everything from writing to Chicago to crime.

ej

Haley Awarded Elite Scholarship

Congratulations to Haley for being selected to receive a scholarship by the State of Illinois for her work toward a Masters degree in Library Science. The link will take you to the requirements for this grant which is only given to 15 MLS students per year.

http://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/departments/library/what_we_do/scholarships.html

Way to go Haley!

Great Lakes Book Award Finalists

Books & Authors
Great Lakes Book Award Finalists
http://www.books-glba.org/glbookawards.php

The finalists for the 2006 Great Lakes Book Awards, sponsored by the Great Lakes Booksellers Association and honoring books with "a Great Lakes theme or setting," are:

Fiction
A Dark & Deadly Deception by Eleanor Taylor Bland (St. Martin's Minotaur)
Gatsby's Girl by Caroline Preston (Houghton Mifflin) (bold type by Ellen)
The Kindness of Strangers by Katrina Kittle (Morrow)
Ordinary Heroes by Scott Turow (FSG)
Taking Care of Cleo by Bill Broder (Handsel Books)
Torch by Cheryl Strayed (Houghton Mifflin) General
If I Am Found Dead edited by David Lee Poremba (Ann Arbor Media Group)
Islands by Gerry Volgenau (Ann Arbor Media Group)
Legends of Light by Ed Wargin (Ann Arbor Media Group)
Made in Detroit by Paul Clemens (Doubleday)
Mighty Fitz by Michael Schumacher (Bloomsbury)
A Private History of Awe by Scott Russell Sanders (North Point Press)

Children's Books

Best Foot Forward by Joan Bauer (Putnam)
Crooked River by Shelley Pearsall (Knopf)
The Game of Silence of Louis Erdrich (HarperCollins)
A Good Night Walk by Elisha Cooper (Orchard Books)
Kelly of Hazel Ridge by Robbyn Smith van Frankenhuyzen (Sleeping Bear Press)
The Legend of Michigan by Trinka Hakes Noble (Sleeping Bear Press)
Nailed by Patrick Jones (Walker)
The Warrior Heir by Cinda Williams Chima (Hyperion)
The Wright 3 by Blue Balliett (Scholastic Press)

Winners will be announced in late August, and the awards will be presented Friday, October 6, at a luncheon during the Great Lakes Booksellers Association Fall Trade Show in Dearborn, Mich.

Book Club Members Love Our Office

A member of the Kaleidescopes book club came in today to request a book. Her request was late and the title she'd wanted would have been tough to get in a short time, so I asked her if she'd seen our office collection of book club books. She was excited to see what we had on our shelves and mentioned that everyone else in her club had gotten to see it before and that she had been a little envious.

Mary Ann and I showed her several books and she selected Interpreter of Maladies since they could pick and choose just the stories they wanted to read in the short time they had to read them. (And Mary Ann pleased the patron's little daughter with a lei.)

This might be a good way to help our book clubs remember to think of our titles first!

ej

What's Next?

Since our version of What's Next is 2004, perhaps you have also found that the newer books in a series aren't in our blue copy of this book.

So, here is the link to the online (and up-to-date) version of this valuable resource. I use it all the time.

Using this source, will also allow us to print out lists from our printer, rather than making copies of pages on the copy machine. Now all I have to do is to remember to use the website!

Enjoy!

ej

http://www.kdl.org/libcat/whatsnext.asp

Free Money!!

As I was plowing through my Fiction_L email yesterday, I stumbled across this little site and it looks like a great new project for finding alternative funds (it's what public schools and libraries constantly hunt for to help pay for extras.) I suspect we'll have some stiff competition, but I also think with our F451 pictures, news articles, etc. we have a good chance at it!

Check out the site and let us know your thoughts!

http://www.pattersonpageturner.org/index.html#overview

ej

Cool Readers' Advisory Tool

When you have a slow moment sometime (it COULD happen), check out this creative way to help readers find read-alikes. Very good for visually oriented, left-brain types!


http://www.literature-map.com/

Found anything online worth sharing? Click on the little pencil at the bottom of the page and you can add your own note to OUR blog!

ej

Welcome to the Cook Fiction Blog!!

I have created this blog to facilitate communication between the members of the Fiction Department at Cook Library. We have so many book groups and sometimes mistakes have occurred because we don't have a way to communicate easily. Hopefully this will allow us to share information, news and other things of interest.

Read a good book? Let us know!

Added a new book for a book group? Let us know!

Time to pull some books? Do some weeding? Need to switch your schedule? Write about it.

Have a problem with something? Ask--maybe we can help.

This can be as helpful as we make it and I hope this will prevent things from slipping through the cracks.