10 Books We’re Looking Forward to in July

July 15, 2015July 6, 2015 / cheshirelib / Leave a comment

Beat the heat! Find yourself some air conditioning (or a spot at the beach) and settle in with one of the new books hitting our shelves in July. Romance, thrills, good eats – the perfect summertime reading!

Every month, librarians from around the country pick the top ten new books they’d most like to share with readers. The results are published on LibraryReads.org. One of the goals of LibraryReads is to highlight the important role public libraries play in building buzz for new books and new authors. Click through to read more about what new and upcoming books librarians consider buzzworthy this month. The top ten titles for July are:

Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal
Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
Kiss Me by Susan Mallery
Second Chance Summer by Jill Shalvis
Speaking in Bones by Kathy Reichs
Those Girls by Chevy Stevens
Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans
Love Lies Beneath by Ellen Hopkins
Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/day by Leanne Brown

My Angry Birds Obsession

June 24, 2015June 4, 2015 / Mary / Leave a comment

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m addicted to Angry Birds.

It started innocently enough. When I got my new iPhone, my daughter said the game was fun and urged me to download the app. Why not, I thought. Everyone else was doing it.

At first, it seemed harmless. Cute little angry birds smashing fat, smug-looking pigs into oblivion. I quickly became adept.

And then new birds were introduced. They did cool things like explode and split into three separate birds. I learned which were good against glass and which against the wood structures those grinning little pigs erected. The exploding bird was great for stone. I got an unholy satisfaction from blowing pigs up.

I even found a great book, Learn to Draw Angry Birds. Now I could doodle Angry Birds in the moments when I couldn’t play the game.

Soon, it was no longer enough to just win a level with one star. I had to get three stars. ON EVERY GAME. I would try for hours to get that lone two-star game up to three stars. One-star wins began to feel like losses.

That should have been a warning sign, but I was too far gone. I conquered all the levels in the original Angry Birds game. I needed more. On to Angry Birds Rio. I ran my phone down playing Angry Birds.

My daughter must have seen my plight, for she intervened. She introduced me to Trivia Crack.

Gee, I thought. Everyone else is doing it. It seems harmless…

If you can’t get enough of Angry Birds, here are some more titles to feed your addiction… Um, I mean, give you more information.

Getting Past Captain Underpants

June 22, 2015June 1, 2015 / Sharon Tyler / Leave a comment

My son was not as instantly attracted to books and reading as myself or his little sister. While he loved picking out books and being read to, once it came time to read on his own he was easily discouraged. He had the skills to read, but had trouble sitting still or focusing on decoding the more challenging words. I offered him every style of easy reader and early chapter book imaginable. Thankfully, as a librarian with many friends that happen to teach, I had plenty of resources. The book that finally caught his attention is one that many try to steer clear of because of its silly and sometimes disgusting humor. However, if he was going to read, and do so happily, I was going to encourage it regardless of the book in question.

As you might have guessed, that book was Captain Underpants. He has now read the boxed set of the series through more than a few times, and expanded to other books, all of which I like much better. Now he still loves that silly humor, but he also loves jokes and anything vaguely monster, hero, or adventure. So, for fellow parents that fear the draw of the Captain, there are some great follow up books that a fan might easily and happily transition to. The number of easier chapter books and graphic novels that will appeal to the fans of Captain Underpants is growing, with volume and quality. If you are trying to ease your young reader away from the underwear clad superhero, here are some great options to keep them reading. If the book belongs to a series, which most of them do, I have listed the first book in that series. And on a side note, do not be afraid to introduce harder books via audiobooks! I hooked both my kids on the Magic Tree House series by listening to the audio book collection in the car.

Squish 1: Super Amoeba by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm
Introducing SQUISH—a new graphic novel series about a comic book-loving, twinkie-eating grade school AMOEBA trying to find his place in the world (or at least trying to make it through a school day).

Sardine in Outer Space by Emmanuel Guibert
Sardine and her uncle, Captain Yellow Shoulder, sail their ship, The Huckleberry, across the universe meeting up with monsters and aliens in order to confront Supermuscleman, who is trying to take over the galaxy.

George Brown, Class Clown: Super Burp by Nancy E. Krulik
When fourth-grader George starts at a new school, he vows to become a model student instead of the class clown he has always been, but just as his plan is going really well, he is overtaken by a magic burp that turns him back into a mischief-maker.

The Fake Cape Caper by Greg Trine

Melvin Beederman, superhero in charge of Los Angeles, attends the Superhero’s Convention in Las V egas, leaving his young sidekick to keep Los Angeles safe from evil bad guys and bullies.

Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom by Eric Wight
Fourth-grader Frankie Piccolini has a vivid imagination when it comes to cleaning his disastrously messy room, but eventually even he decides that it is just too dirty.

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There is an increasing number of wonderful books for this reading level and age group as of late. If you have already read all of these and are still looking for me you might also want to try: Dinosaurs Before Dark by Mary Pope Osborne, The High and the Flighty by Catherine Hapka and Lisa Rao, Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy: The Hero Revealed by William Boniface, Notebook of Doom: Rise of the Balloon Goons by Troy Cummings, Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute by Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Wiley & Grampa’s Creature Features by Kirk Scroggs,Dragonbreath by Ursula Vernon, Looinverse: Stranger Things by David Lubar, My Big Fat Zombie Goldfish by Mo O’Hara, Galaxy Zack: Hello Nebulon by Ray O’Ryan, and Attack of the Giant Hamster by Paul Harrison.

How to Have Fun at Work

June 17, 2015June 22, 2015 / Mary / Leave a comment

We seem to have a lot of fun at our library.

For instance, we have a regular staff storytime. Louise, our Social Media Coordinator, chooses picture books and reads aloud to us. During our last session she read Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beatty and Kid Sheriff and the Terrible Toads by Bob Shea (complete with western accent!). We sat on the floor as she read the stories and showed us the pictures. We applauded. Then we all helped each other stand back up.

Want to have fun at work? Try some of our methods:

Dress up Elvis as Darth Vader.

Create a Truffula Tree.

(If you don’t know what a Truffula tree is, read The Lorax by Dr. Suess.)

Keep dolls nearby.

And cats and frogs. And iguanas. (At least, we think it’s an iguana.)

Keep an M&M dispenser on your desk.

Include a scoop for those who need extra sustenance.

Make a money tree.

When people ask you for money, point to it.

Hang out with celebrities.

Pose for a group photo. (Dogs optional.)

Or a Book Face.

If you’d like some other ideas about having fun at work, try these titles.

Traveling Through Time with Jeeves and Wooster

June 12, 2015June 4, 2015 / Mary / Leave a comment

Wandering through the fiction stacks looking for a good book, a title caught my eye: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells.

Boy, is that in the wrong place, I thought, knowing that the author of the Jeeves and Wooster series was the late, great P.G. Wodehouse. What was it doing on the shelves near Faulkner? I pulled it off and received a surprise. Sebastian Faulks was listed as the author and the full title was Jeeves and the Wedding Bells: an homage to P.G. Wodehouse.

I flipped open the cover and read the blurb on the inside: P.G. Wodehouse documented the lives of the inimitable Jeeves and Wooster for nearly sixty years, from their first appearance in 1915 (“Extricating Young Gussie”) to the his final completed novel (Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen) in 1974. These two were the finest creations of a novelist widely proclaimed to be the finest comic English writer by critics and fans alike. With the approval of the Wodehouse estate, acclaimed novelist Sebastian Faulks brings Bertie and Jeeves back to life in a hilarious affair of mix-ups and mishaps.

How had I missed this? I clutched my new-found treasure and remembered…

I was fifteen years old and a new Wodehouse fan, having discovered his books via my job as a library page. I was an avid reader and hungrily devouring all the new series that came my way. Granted, Wodehouse was not a new author even back then, but he was new to me and from my first story, Jeeves and the Tie that Binds, I was smitten. Wit, pacing, irony, farce, and Englishmen; I couldn’t read them fast enough.

I recalled my delight at spotting a Wodehouse title that I had never read before and how I would carefully stow it away on my book truck so that I could check it out at the end of my shift. That same joy was surging through me now. A new Jeeves and Wooster tale! For a brief moment, I was fifteen again.

If you have never experienced the joys of a P.G. Wodehouse tale, I highly encourage you to dig in. You can also watch the excellent Jeeves and Wooster T.V. series starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.