August 26, 2006

Book Lists

For the past few years people have been working on the concept of master databases of titles and authors, something like the IMDB for movies, with the collaborative twist of Wikipedia. A community created master booklist.

The Internet Book List database is now very large with over 45,000 book entries and over 10,000 members. Many of the entries are small with minimal information, but the genre tags can lead to interesting places e.g. "Science Gone Wrong"

See also:
Internet Book Database of Fiction which is a part of IBList.
Internet Speculative Fiction Database, a wiki hosted by the Cushing Library at Texas A&M. Any member can edit.

Want to collaboratively catalog books? Try Library Thing. As soon as it gets cold and rainy, sit down with your own books and start cataloging. For a given book you will find both a page of bibliographic information and one of social information. The later contains tags, ratings and reviews. If you see something you don't have but want to read, please check our catalog.

Want to share books and trace their peregrinations? Join Bookcrossing. Over 3 million books have been registered.

Posted by library at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2006

Pi

The next Friends of the Library Reading Group selection will be Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The group will meet on Wednesday October 4th in the atrium room of the Community Center at 7:30 PM. Copies are available in the library.

The atrium room is on the top floor. Take the elevator from the Grant Avenue entrance area or climb the stairs near the Maple Avenue walkway. Handicapped parking is available just outside the Grant Avenue door, right across from the side entrance to Piney Branch school.

A note about this book - a number of our readers have said "Don't give up before you've passed the 75 page mark."

Life of Pi
Setting: the Indian Ocean
links:
A short essay by the author.
Martel's comments on winning the 2002 Booker Prize for Fiction
Pop Matters review
Read an excerpt (chapter 37)

The August book was The Kite Runner
Setting: Afghanistan
Links:
Author's website
San Francisco Chronicle review
The Guardian review

Posted by library at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2006

Dog Days

The dies caniculares, the sultry days lasting until mid-August, or early September - it differs a bit from tradition to tradition, depends on latitude, etc., were named for the rising of the dog star, Sirius in the constellation Canis Major, at sunrise. This is no longer true because of precession, but we call them the dog days and colloquially the term now just means the hottest days of summer.

About two weeks ago a library visitor asked for "dog books." It turned out that she meant true stories about particular dogs, rather than something from the "How to train your Rottweiler to do calculus" genre. (Though that could be useful.) We sent her home with a couple of staff favorites, Farley Mowat's The dog who wouldn't be and Jon Katz' A dog year : twelve months, four dogs, and me

As we had assembled a bit of a book list in the process of helping her, we decided to post it on a wiki so as to make it collaborative. You can add your own favorites to the list if you wish. You don't need to sign up or log in - just edit as anonymous. Most of the books we listed are available here in the library.

See also:
online - Excellent Roman calendar
in the library -

  • R 394.26 CHASES Chase's calendar of events and many other 394 (calendar) books in the reference, children's and adult collections
  • Go to 636.7 in all 3 collections for the dog books

Posted by library at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)
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