My favorite holiday!

It's that time of year again! Where we assert our right to choose for ourselves what we want to read! Yup, Banned Books Week is September 27 through October 4. Terry and I just put a great display together:





There is a list of banned books from 2000-2007 at ALA. Read one of these banned books and assert your fREADom!

Lucy and Anne

I love the Anne books by Lucy Maud Montgomery. For my 7th birthday my Aunt Barbara gave the full set and the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (which I will gush about at a later date). I read Anne's story numerous times in my single and double digit years. I love them so much that, when I graduated from college, my mother and I took a road trip to Prince Edward Island to see where Lucy was born, where she lived, the inspiration for the forest and fields in the books, and her grave. I love them so much that my all-time favorite movie scene is from You've Got Mail: a customer tells Meg Ryan (owner of a children's book store) that when she bought Anne of Green Gables she was advised to read it with a box of tissues. I cry and laugh every time!

Well, 2008 is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables. There is a new book out on Lucy, called Looking for Anne of Green Gables: the Story of L.M. Montgomery and her Literary Classic as well as reprints of the books themselves. And in the September 19, 2008 Globe and Mail Lucy's granddaughter speaks out about the crippling depression Lucy suffered with her entire life. In fact, she reveals that Lucy actually died from an intentional drug overdose - suicide. It's a heartbreaking article and I think the revelations will force us to read Anne with new eyes.

I say Peeps, you say Peppys

I woke up last night around 1:30 a.m. and picked up Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin and finished the last 3 chapters. It is a long journey, but a wonderfully done book.

There is some nonfiction out there that reads like fiction, but this book is straight up nonfiction. Tomalin doesn't hold back the dates, political details, meandering family trees or detailed medical and relationship dirt. But this is exactly what I love about her biographies. I read Jane Austen: A Life and when I finished it I had learned not only about Jane Austen's life, but also about her time. While reading about Pepys, I admit, I had to look up some events in other books. Perhaps because I bought my copy in England there were less explanations of political details that, as an American, I didn't understand (our library copy has a different - uglier - cover...perhaps there are additional footnotes or an Americanized version). Regardless, I feel that I know Pepys (incidentally, I understand the pronunciation is "peeps") and I have a much better understanding of London during the 1660s-1670s. He lived through so many major events - the plague, the great fire of 1666 that destroyed all of medieval London, the killing of Charles I and the creation of a commonwealth in London, the introduction of tea in London, and so on - his daily musings are well written and cover dramatic events.

As I was coming to the end of Samuel Pepys, I (of course) was already planning my next book. I had purchased so many anglobooks (my new word) while on vacation but I had just devoted so much time on Pepys, I felt it was time for something different. Ah-ha! I thought! The Red Leather Diary was in my "read soon!" pile in my library. This was the exact opposite of Pepys! He was 1660's London, this was 1930s New York! As I got into the book, however, I found that I managed to find a book that was a biography of a person based on their found diary. As opposite as the locations and times are the books are actually strangely similar.

Finally, as I go through my Pepys withdrawal (I feel like we are friends now) I have come across a really fabulous website. Each day it posts Pepy's diary entry for that day (revolving through, year by year). Today, September 18, for example, has Pepys' entry for September 18, 1665. You can also search the diary for terms or specific dates. How amazing! I can get my daily dose of Pepys and read his diary in "real time" ... day by day!

Sony Readers Just Don't Fill a Bookcase

"Books, as any visitor to a civilised house knows, do furnish a room. Books never look untidy, even when piled in tumbling stacks ... There is something sensuous, possibly even erotic, about the book. It appeals to both the senses and the intellect as well as to your hidden interior designer. And what curious pleasures are to be found in antiquarian bookshops - the market for used Sony Readers will perhaps never be quite so attractive."

There are those who love to predict the end of books and there are those who say, "You're crazy!" Peter Crawshaw says "You're crazy" in the BBC News Magazine. He's got lots of great reasons why books will always be here ... including the decorative reason above. And for those of you who don't want to READ about why we need books, there is a nifty 3 minute video.

While he argues that books are here to stay, my New York Magazine arrived Monday with an article predicting the end of the book publishing industry ... as we know it. You can read about that here.

Pages turning like autumn leaves.

Bring on the fall!

I love pumpkin carving and cooler weather and sleeping with the windows opened and passing out Halloween candy and putting on homemade sweaters. And I especially love all the books that are being published this fall.

Bring on the sequels!
Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked (basis of the Broadway play) and the sequel Son of a Witch has written a third installment, A Lion Among Men.



John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick was published in 1984 but the sequel, The Widows of Eastwick, is being published in 2008.



Nelson DeMille is a very popular author on Long Island. The Gold Coast, published over ten years ago, is finally getting a sequel. The Gate House will be published in October.



Bring on the new books for long winter nights!
Some of my favorite authors are going to keep me busy until spring.

Julia Glass' new book, I See You Everywhere, "Follows the intertwined lives of two sisters--Louisa Jardine, the conscientious older sister who yearns for a good marriage, an artistic career, and a family, and her younger sister Clem, an iconoclastic, daring rebel--over the course of twenty-five years."



Neil Gaiman returns to YA with Graveyard Book. "Raised since he was a baby by ghosts, werewolves, and other residents of the cemetery in which he has always resided, Bod wonders how he will manage to survive amongst the living with only the lessons he has learned from the dead." Like Coraline, this will be a read-aloud Halloween book.



Another Halloween pick is Just After Sunset, a new collection of short stories by the Maine master of the macabre, Stephen King. Until its release date, check out the animated graphic novel version of one of the short stories here.



So pour a cup of apple cider and open a book. If you see the leaves piling up on my front lawn it's because I'm too busy to rake!

13 to 6

The longlist has become the shortlist.
The 2008 Man Booker Prize shortlist is as follows:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

They cut Child 44 and A Case of Exploding Mangoes, among others. Any opinions on the above 6? I'm ashamed to say I have not read ANY of them!!

Year of Reading

One evening in London, after walking all day until my feet ached, I was lying in bed and flipping through the television channels. I came across a commercial that made me stand up (aching feet and all) and cheer. 2008 is a National Year of Reading in the UK and THIS is the fabulous ad they are running on t.v.

I know my library is beautiful...

but apparently NBC agrees.

It's my first day back at work and all day a group of people have been stamping across our lawn, looking up at our building, making strange hand gestures and running down the middle of the street with cameras. Yes, our building is being filmed as part of a pilot for a new NBC sitcom called Royal Pains. It is about a NYC doctor who somehow comes to work at a fictional Hamptons hotel (our library, with a big "West Wind Hotel" sign stuck on the front). So watch out for it, and when you see the shot of the "Hotel", look for me in the window.

The London Book Tour '08

I'm back! I had an amazing two weeks in London. I bought a pair of shoes, went to museums, took a bus to Kent but mostly I tracked down bookshops, libraries and other literary places.
We stayed right down the road from Charing Cross Road, the place where the bookstore from 84 Charing Cross Road was and still the home of many, many bookstores (both independent and not - lots of used, rare and specialized but also the home of Borders).


Needless to say, I bought a few books.


I visited the British Library,

a library in Leeds castle (Kent)

and the Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

At the Tower of London I saw words carved into stone hundreds of years ago

and at Shakespeare's Globe I saw some of his works, hundreds of years old.

In Leister Square I came across a beautiful statue

and somewhere in London I bumped into Oscar Wilde! ... well, a statue of him.

I'll have more London stories later!