What We’re Reading

If you are seeking reading recommendations, you may want to check out National Public Radio’s weekly What We're Reading blog. According to NPR, the weekly listing “brings you our book team's shortlist of new fiction and nonfiction releases, along with candid reactions from our reporters, critics and staff.” The Nov. 17-23 list includes Open by Andre Agassi, Under the Dome by Stephen King, Going Rogue by Sarah Palin, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures by Nicolas Wade and Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith.

Closer to home, you can find Check It Out, a monthly list of eight staff favorites at your local library branch or visit the Staff Favorites page on the library’s Web site for the online version.

Community Dialogues

For those of you who have not yet participated in the community dialogues for the FY2011 budget process, you have three more chances. Additional sessions have been added for Wednesday, Dec. 2. Residents who aren’t able to attend a session are encouraged to submit comments and suggestions through the budget hotline at 703-324-9400 or the online form. The new meetings will be held Wednesday, Dec. 2, 7 to 9 p.m. at Hayfield Secondary School (7633 Telegraph Rd., Alexandria), Herndon High School (700 Bennett St., Herndon) and Lake Braddock Secondary School (9200 Burke Lake Rd., Burke). Registration is required to attend and seating is limited to 70 participants. Register online.

Money Matters

As we all look more carefully at how we spend scarce dollars these days, the library offers books on all aspects money management. Some of our new 2009 titles include:

365 Ways to Live Cheap: Your Everyday Guide to Saving Money
by Trent Hamm

Safe Money in Tough Times: Everything You Need to Know to Survive the Financial Crisis by Jonathan D. Pond

Miserly Moms: Living Well on Less in a Tough Economy by Jonni McCoy

Recession Proof Your Financial Life by Nancy Dunnan

Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties
by Beth Kobliner

The AARP Retirement Survival Guide: How to Make Good Financial Decisions in Good Times and Bad by Julie Jason

If you are looking for a reliable online resource, check out mymoney.gov, a Web site sponsored by the U.S. Financial Literacy and Education Commission. It offers information and links for a variety of subjects such as budgeting and taxes, home ownership and planning for higher education, retirement and other life events.

Also, check out these upcoming library programs:

What's in Your Credit Report? Nov. 12, 11 a.m. Sherwood Regional Library
Review the information found in credit reports, how to use this report to guard against identity theft and how to dispute credit report errors. Presented by the Consumer Affairs Branch of the Fairfax County Department of Cable Communications and Consumer Protection. Adults.

Identity Theft. Nov. 16, 6:45 p.m. George Mason Regional Library Learn how to protect yourself from thieves who want to steal your information. Presented by Consumer Credit Counseling Services of Greater Washington/MMI. Refreshments. Adults.

Libraries Without Books?

Ever since the Web became an intimate part of the lives of many Americans, there has been debate over both the future of the book and the library as an institution that traditionally houses them. I was browsing the Web recently and came upon this article, ("The Future of Libraries: With or Without Books," CNN, Sept. 4, 2009).

“Books are being pushed aside for digital learning centers and gaming areas,” the article begins ‘Loud rooms’ that promote public discourse and group projects are taking over the bookish quiet. Hipster staffers who blog, chat on Twitter and care little about the Dewey Decimal System are edging out old-school librarians.”

The article goes on to offer a great summary of the exciting trends in library services across the globe and the challenges facing U.S. public libraries, which rely on scare taxpayer funds to exist. The U.S. institution may not be able to adapt as well to the technological advances that libraries in other countries are embracing.

Libraries, according to Jason M. Schultz, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley Law School, have always had two purposes as “places where people can get free information; and they're community centers for civic debate.”

As one can imagine, there is no agreement among library professionals as to whether trends that embrace the digital world actually help or hinder libraries. "It's a source of tension in the field because, for some people, trying to re-brand can be perceived as a rejection of the [library] tradition and the values," says Linda C. Smith, president of the Association for Library and Information Science Education. "But for other people it's a redefinition and an expansion."

Younger librarians do seem to understand that change is in the air. One graduate student in library science says “Sure I love to read. I read all the time. I read physical books. But I don't have the strange emotional attachment that some people possess."

My Horoscope Says …

On November 1 the horoscope in The Washington Post for Scorpios said “Watching TV is easier than reading a book, but it doesn’t stay with you as long. You are like a book: not so many flashy images, but the impression you leave people with lingers.”

I don’t mind not being flashy, but the writer was certainly being a bit vague with that last line. People can leave a negative “impression” that lingers. But I am in agreement that TV is easier then reading; it doesn’t require as much of the brain, and because it’s a visual medium, you don’t need your imagination as much as you do with a book. Also, I think books deserve more credit than merely “lingering” with readers; it sounds so temporary. Books teach and inspire and motivate; they can truly change people, help people. I suppose TV can do that too, especially if you are one of the contestants in a reality TV program: learn to dance, lose weight, find your soul mate or become the next American idol. Alas, we must leave the comfort of the couch to do any of those via TV.

War of the Worlds – October 20, 1938

To celebrate Halloween seventy-one years ago, the “Mercury Theater of the Air” broadcast a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, the tale of a Martian invasion of the nation. Orson Welles narrated and directed the drama. Because the show ran without commercial breaks and the first part of the broadcast consisted of realistic radio news bulletins, some in the audience believed the invasion was real. The town of Grover’s Park, N.J., where the Martians supposedly landed, even erected a monument in 1998 to celebrate the fictional event.

On air radio announcers, such as Jack Parr at Cleveland’s WGAR, had trouble calming panicked listeners. To this day there are some conspiracy theorists who believe the broadcast was a psychological warfare experiment or broadcast to cover up UFO activity. Welles, who was catapulted to fame because of the broadcast, debunked those ideas.

If you want to learn more about the famous broadcast, Orson Welles, or H.G. Wells, try these books:

The Complete War of the Worlds: Mars Invasion of Earth From H.G. Wells to Orson Welles by Brian Holmsten

This Is Orson Welles by Orson Welles

War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

H.G. : The History of Mr. Wells by Michael Foot

Lifespan

You may embrace your birthday each year with grand parties and paper hats or you may dread its approach because it’s a reminder that there’s a limit to the number we get in a lifetime. One thing we can all celebrate is our lifespans, for Americans the average is 77.7 years. It’s a long life compared to other mammals: mice live an average of 2 years; rabbits about five years; deer live 10; cats and dogs live about 12 ; black bears live 19; and elephants live 40. (These are average lifespans, not how long the animals could live.)

If you’d like to try to beat the average lifespan, the library has more than 66 books you can consult. Here’s a sampling of titles:

Superhealth: 6 Simple Steps, 6 Easy Weeks, 1 Longer, healthier Life by Steven Pratt.

The Blue Zone: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest by Dan Buettner

The Longevity Bible: 8 Essential Strategies for Keeping Your Mind Sharp and Your Body Young by Gary W. Small

Dr. Perricone’s 7 Secrets to Beauty, Health and Longevity: The Miracle of Cellular Rejuvenation by Nicholas Perricone

Healthy at 100: the Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World’s Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples by John Robbins

Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond
By Chris Crowley

Ageless: Take Control of Your Age and Stay Youthful for Life by Edward l. Schneider

The Future of the Magazine

When I heard last week that Condé Nast would no longer publish Gourmet, I began to think more seriously about the fate of print magazines in general. Nast also counts Vogue, Wired, The New Yorker, GQ and Vanity Fair among its 25-plus publications. While newsstands seem to be rich with print magazines, I wondered what the landscape would look like in a few years. Former magazine staffer Jeff Jarvis weighed in on his Buzz Machine blog. According to Jarvis:

Packaging used to be a key value of magazines: the great editor selecting the interesting topics and good writers and cooking a meal out of it. But in the era of media unbundling, the magazine becomes an instant anachronism. Reading the New Yorker or Economist or Vanity Fair becomes an act of living nostalgia, at least for those who can remember them. For the next generation reading magazines and newspapers and buying albums is – haven’t we learned this yet? – an alien experience, a media oddity.

A more conservative blog, Rod Dreher’s CrunchyCon, is less happy about the demise of Gourmet. He encourages readers to subscribe or re-subscribe to favorite magazines to help them survive in print format. He concludes in his Oct. 6 post: “I have reclined in bed at the end of the day, and read stories from my laptop, and I have reclined in bed at the end of the day and read stories in conventional magazines. There's no comparison. I'm so old-school it hurts.”

Digital Magazines at the Library
For those who don’t mind reading magazine articles online, our library offers millions of articles for free in our periodical databases. If you want access to the complete text of articles in your favorite magazines all you have to do is access our Web site.

If you click on Databases and then Magazines, you will see more than 20 electronic magazine resources listed and that is just the tip of the iceberg. For general interest magazines your best bet is EBSCOhost General Reference Center Gold and MasterFILE Premier. For example, you can find the complete text of articles in issues of Time and Rolling Stone from 1990 forward or Parenting from 1997. There’s lesser-known and more specialized journals and newspapers as well. Explore online or stop by your nearest branch for a quick intro to our electronic periodical resources. All you need is a library card!

Adopt-A-Shelf

There are many ways that library lovers can support the library, but one of the efforts that would go a long way to helping branches keep their shelves straightened is the Adopt-a-Shelf program. Businesses, organizations or individuals agree to come in to a branch on a regular basis and keep the shelved books in order. You can even select a certain shelf to “adopt” if you want to be well informed about the collection in a certain area such as biography, travel or finance. Here are the tasks involved with Adopt-A-Shelf:

read spine labels and reshelve books that are not in proper order;
shift books between shelves as necessary to assure easy access;
remove bookmarks, paper and litter from books and shelves;
identify books belonging to other branches, return them to the circulation desk for rerouting; and,
identify books requiring mending and places them in mending area with note attached.

Not all branches need adopt-a-shelf volunteers; to find out if your branch needs them, contact the volunteer coordinator at your branch.

Not for Kids Only

Today’s release of the intriguing film version of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak reminded me that some picture books are for all ages. Published in 1963, the book has only 10 sentences. It tells the story of a boy named Max, who is punished for “making mischief” and sent to his room without his supper. There, Max imagines a wild forest and sea and sails to the Land of the Wild Things. He conquers these fearsome monsters and becomes their king. However, he soon becomes homesick and returns home where his supper is waiting.

It is Sendak’s memorable illustrations that have made the book a classic. Apparently the wild things originally were going to be horses until Sendak’s editor suggested a switch when she realized he couldn’t draw them. Instead, he used caricatures of his aunts and uncles which he remembered from their visits to his childhood home in Brooklyn.

Why does the book also appeal to adults? One critic believes the book makes “an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger.” In the book, The Art of Maurice Sendak, the author says that Where the Wild Things Are, as well as his two other books, In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There form a trilogy on “how children master various feelings.”

Here’s a few more picture books that appeal to the kid in all of us:

The Stinky Cheese Man by Jon Scieszka

The Three Pigs by David Wiesner

Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg

Halloween Happenings at the Library

The library has plenty of Halloween activities for little ones, all ages and even one for dogs! For addresses or directions for the following programs visit the library’s Web site. Registration is required for most programs. Register online or call the host branch.

All ages
Dog Costume Parade, Oct. 31, 11 a.m. at Herndon Fortnightly. Trick or treat with your dog in a costume parade on the Town Green. Show off your dog in the silly tricks contest. Cosponsored by Bark ’N Bubbles and Council for the Arts of Herndon.

Pumpkin Friends, Oct. 21, 7 p.m. at Reston Regional Library. Celebrate Halloween with stories and activities. Costumes encouraged.

Age 12 and up
Midnight at Bunnyman Bridge, Oct. 13, 6:30 p.m. at Burke Centre Library. Storyteller Margaret Chatham will tell the chilling local legend of the Bunnyman murders and other creepy tales.

Age 8 and up
Seriously Scary Tales in the Night, Oct. 28, 7 p.m. at Reston Regional Library. Enjoy seriously scary stories. Costumes encouraged.

Age 6 to 12
Paint a Fun Halloween Figure, Oct. 17, 11 a.m. at Reston Regional Library. Presented by Clay Café Studios of Chantilly. Fired and glazed figurines will be returned to the library one week later. Cosponsored by the Friends of the Reston Regional Library.

Age 4 – 5 with adult
Halloween Happenings, Oct. 29 at 10:30 a.m. at Sherwood Regional Library. Stories and activities.

Age 3 – 6 with adult
Boo to You! Oct. 31, 10:30 a.m. at Pohick Regional Library. Halloween storytime and parade. Stories about Halloween followed by a parade through the library. Come dressed in your Halloween best.

Age 3 – 5 with adult
Slightly Scary Stories. Stories and activities, Oct. 22, 10:30 a.m. at City of Fairfax Regional Library.

Halloween Storytime, Oct. 28 at 10:30 a.m. at Kings Park Library. Come in your costume for Halloween stories and fun.

Scary – Not Very! Oct. 29, 11 a.m. at Oakton Library. Suspenseful stories and activities to celebrate the season. Come in costume if you’d like.

Age 2 – 5 with adult
Halloween on Parade, Oct. 19, 10:30 a.m. at Kingstowne Library. Wear your costume and come for Halloween stories and fun.

Monster Bash, Oct. 28, 10:30 a.m. at Dolley Madison Library. Come in costume for Halloween stories and activities.

Halloween Parade Oct. 29, 11 a.m. at Centreville Regional Library. Stories and activities. Children are encouraged to come in costume to parade around the library.

Birth to Five with Adult
Halloween Lunch Bunch, Oct. 30, noon at John Marshall Library. Bring your lunch and join us for Halloween stories. Costumes encouraged.

The Slow Movement

Arianna Huffington has chosen In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honoré as the first selection in the Huffington Post Book Club. The author published the book in 2004 after catching himself rushing through the fairy tales he read to his kids. “My version of Snow White had just three dwarves in it. ‘What happened to Grumpy?’ my four-year-old son would ask,” Honoré explained on Arianna’s blog. When he found himself eyeing a book of one-minute fairy tales in a book store, he decided it was time to slow down.

In the past five years since his book was published, Honoré has seen the Slow Movement grow. Of course there is Slow Food. But according to the author there are now 120 Slow Cities in the world and Slow Travel is taking off. There is even a Slow Books Movement.

If you are interested in other books on slow living, try these:

Slow is Beautiful: New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie de Vivre by Cecile Andrews

Don’t Hurry, Be Happy: 650 Ways to Slow Down and Enjoy Life
by Ernie Zelinski

The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential – in Business and in Life by Leo Babauto

Scot Turow Comes to Fairfax

Have you read A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines yet?

That’s The Big Read/All Fairfax Reads book selection for 2009. Whether or not you’ve read it yet, don’t miss Scott Turow this Friday, Oct. 9 in the Board Auditorium at the Fairfax County Government Center. He will present “Confessions of a Death Penalty Agnostic” as part of The Big Read/All Fairfax Reads. Turow, the best-selling author of many novels including Presumed Innocent and Ordinary Heroes, is also the author of Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty. There’s no registration required for this event and books will be available for sale and signing. For more information visit the Web site. The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and Arts Midwest.

“I always say that I don't criticize anybody's position on the death penalty because I've held all of them.” ~ Scott Turow

Tweeting at the Book Festival

There was a 10-day period last week when I was in seventh heaven. First there was Fall for the Book, a literary festival that the library cosponsors with George Mason University and many other organizations. Among the authors I got to see was one of my favorites E.L. Doctorow, best known for his novel Ragtime, which became a film and more recently a musical. The 78-year-old author was as playful with the audience as he is in his novels which always mix history and fiction in delightful ways. He read from his newest work, Homer and Langley, based in part on the legendary, reclusive Collyer brothers who as Doctorow explained “were aggregators like Google.” Today we would call them hoarders.

Then, last Saturday I took the Metro down to the Mall for Library of Congress' National Book Festival. Any bibliophile who has never visited the festival – in its ninth year and always on the last Saturday in September – is missing a real treat. Despite rain, the festival was packed. There was something for everyone from John Grisham and John Irving to Paula Deen, Judy Blume and Ken Burns.

Seeking shelter from the weather in the Library of Congress tent, I had an opportunity to experience the Festival’s Tweet-in, which reproduced a Tweet feed on a large monitor. There I learned that John Irving had just told the audience he never liked Hemingway and that Azar Nafisi was rousing those in her tent to fight the closing of book stores.

As I writer, I’ve always been skeptical that great things can be talked about in 140 characters, but the Tweet-In at the National Book Festival convinced me otherwise. Maybe there is room in the world for both old and new literary technologies!

Whatever you do, look out for Fall for the Book and the National Book Festival in the fall of 2010.

Treat Library Materials Gently

I was reading a borrowed book the other day when I encountered – make sure you’re sitting down for this, because book lovers will be outraged – dog-eared pages! A library customer had folded pages down to hold his or her place. Folding pages in a book is not good practice and deteriorates the book for the next user.

It struck me; however, that that was the first time in a long time that I had run across a dog-eared library book. It’s been a while since I’ve borrowed a book that someone had –egads! – written in. Most customers are very respectful of their library materials. So, thanks to all of you who treat your library materials so gently.

We do have volunteers by the way, who are able to help with some minor mending of books, but once a book becomes too worn, it needs to be removed from the collection and these days not every book can be replaced due to budget cuts.

Mary Mulrenan, Fairfax County Public Library

Edgar Allan Poe at 200

Yesterday, I had an opportunity to attend a panel discussion commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe as part of the Fall for the Book Festival. He was born in 1809, but you will be hard-pressed to find a consistent birth date, since as one of the panelists said “Poe was a piece of fiction himself.” He was well-known for embellishing and confusing his life story, telling friends and colleagues different versions.

Panelists included Louis Bayard, whose The Pale Blue Eye is a fictionalized account of Poe’s six-month stint at West Point and Daniel Stashower, whose The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Rogers and the Invention of Murder, explores the true crime that became the basis for one of Poe’s most famous stories. You can listen to interviews with both of them as part of the library’s BookCast series.

While one well-known contemporary writer has called Poe “the best of our bad writers,” Bayard and Stashower believe that whatever one thinks of his work, he is probably one of the most influential writers of the 19th century. He invented the detective story, contributed to the science fiction and horror genres and mastered the short story form.

Writers as varied as Stephen King, Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury and Jules Verne have all been influenced by Poe.

If you want to sample Poe again, try these short stories: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Black Cat,” “The Gold-Bug” and his detective tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

Should you wish to join in the bicentennial celebration, you can attend a reenactment of his funeral and other events the weekend 0f October 9-11 up in Baltimore.

Fall for the Book Events

If you’re a book lover, then you will enjoy the Fall for the Book Literary festival Sept. 21-26. To see the events sponsored by the library or being held at library branches visit library’s Web site. Here are some of the programs being offered this year:

Staged Reading of A Lesson Before Dying
September 25, 7:30 p.m., The Fairfax Theatre Project, 3955 Chain Bridge Road, Fairfax (near the Asian Bistro). This event is also part of the library’s The Big Read/All Fairfax Reads.

Open Mic Poetry Reading
September 25, 8:45 p.m.-11:30 p.m. at Brion's Grille in Fairfax.

Soul of a People: A Community Celebration of the WPA Federal Writers Project
September 26, starting at 12:30, City of Fairfax Regional Library

Memoirist Ralph Eubanks
September 22, 6:00 p.m. at City of Fairfax Regional Library

Mystery Novelist Emyl Jenkins at City of Fairfax Regional Library
September 23, 6:00 p.m.

Novelists Pam Jenoff and C.M. Mayo
September 26, 3:00 p.m. at Patrick Henry Library

The Fairfax Prize is sponsored by the Fairfax Library Foundation:
E.L. Doctorow
September 24, 7:30 p.m. at Mason Concert Hall

Since we’re talking about the exciting events being planned at the library for you this fall, mark Oct. 9 on your calendar for Scott Turow. Read more about that and other Big Read/All Fairfax Reads events here.

Mary Mulrenan, Fairfax County Public Library

Armchair Explorers

For those of you who enjoy true tales of adventure, I’ve got a great recommendation for you: The Lost City of Z: A Tale of a Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Gran. I checked it out over the Labor Day weekend and couldn’t put it down.

The book chronicles the expeditions of Percy Harrison Fawcett, an Amazon explorer who made seven expeditions to South America and the Amazon between 1906 and 1924. He was in search of evidence of an ancient civilization that he thought might rival Machu Picchu. His last expedition in 1925 ended with his disappearance. He, his son and a friend never returned and their remains were never found.

Fawcett was a bit of media star in the early 20th century and his disappearance sparked other expeditions to locate him – some of them ended in failure as well. He was a friend of Arthur Conan Doyle, who used Fawcett’s adventures and theory of a lost city as the basis for his novel, The Lost World.

Gran is a meticulous researcher and The Lost City of Z is much more than a biography of Fawcett. He tracks down 16th century accounts of the earliest visitors to the Amazon, Fawcett’s diaries and a great deal of fascinating information on Fawcett’s contemporaries, who were trekking into one of the last great unexplored areas of the world.

It is so great to find a rare gem like The Lost City of Z!

Pat, Fairfax County Public Library

What Not to Read

I wish deciding what to read was simpler. With 175,000 books being published each year and only a small number of them getting most of the publicity, I wonder what treasures are published and disappear that I should have read. I add a few books to my list of “books I want to read” every week and that list gets longer and longer.

I feel guilty however, if a book comes highly recommended and yet languishes on my list while I read others that manage to call to me more forcefully. For example I have yet to read Three Cups of Tea or The Kite Runner, though they sit as one and two on my “list.” What’s called to me recently are books about animals such as Old Dogs are the Best Dogs by Gene Weingarten and Merle’s Door by Ted Kerasote. (Great books if you’re an animal lover.)

Every time I read a really good book that moves me in some way, I feel grateful I found it. I just wish I knew what not to read to have time for the rest.

Mary Mulrenan, Fairfax County Public Library

Remembering

It has been eight years since the event that changed the lives of Americans forever. It seems appropriate that the day is known only as “9/11” because almost everyone alive will always remember where they were when terrorists hijacked four planes – flying two into the World Trade Center towers, one into the Pentagon and crashing the third in a Pennsylvania field.

A number of memorials have been designed or are being constructed to honor all who lost their lives in the attacks of September 11, 2009. In our area, the outdoor Pentagon Memorial opened a year ago in honor of the 184 killed in the building and on American Airlines Flight 77.

The memorial is built on 1.9 acres of land with a view of the crash site of Flight 77. It consists of 184 benches and each is inscribed with the name of one of the victims. A rectangular pool of light illuminates each bench from below. The benches face opposite directions, determined by whether the victim was in the Pentagon or on Flight 77.

The library owns almost 100 titles devoted to 9/11. One that might interest local readers is Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11 by Patrick Creed and Rick Newman. You can hear the authors discuss the book on the library’s BookCast series: www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library/BookCast.

“Memory is the diary that we all carry with us.” -- Oscar Wilde

Pat, Fairfax County Public Library

(Image courtesy of the Department of Defense)