Posts by Lois Moore

Is NYPL obsessed with food? Maybe, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The popular Lunch Hour NYC exhibition at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building opened June 2012 and runs through February 17. It celebrates over a century of New York lunches. Don't miss the online exhibit and the menu collection. In conjunction with the exhibit, NYPL has hosted multiple programs, events, and blogs about food, including book talks by cookbook authors on everything from pizza to the history of salad, cooking demos, and food-related lectures ranging from Civil War rations to Jewish delis in America.

This is the last week of our book discussion of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. In my first post, I mentioned that it is a post-9/11 novel, published in 2005, but during the past month of discussion, I haven't focused on that aspect of the work. The book talks about Oskar's reaction to the 9/11 tragedy and his father's death at the World Trade Center as well as the reactions of his mother, the people Oskar interviews while trying to find the lock for his key, and various other characters. Foer's intent is to describe the aftermath of 9/11, rather than the event itself, although he uses some details of the event in his story.

Now that you have read more of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (if not all of it), you may have noticed some of its quirky phrases (such as “heavy boots” and “feeling like a hundred dollars”). Part of my interest in reading new (for me) authors is noticing how they use language: what kind of sentence structure — long or short, simple or complex; what kind of words — familiar or out of the ordinary or a combination; lots of descriptive language or spare simplicity; how the individual characters express themselves and what that reveals about them; lots of dialogue between characters or lots of interior monologues.

Now that you have had a chance to meet Oskar, what do you think of him? Many readers have compared him to Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Others think he’s far too precocious for a nine-year-old and have suggested the author used his own inner child as the narrator.

Mixed Bag: Story Time for Grown-Ups is a short story read-aloud program that meets every two weeks on Wednesday at lunch time (1:00 p.m). Mixed Bag PM meets at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday every two weeks. In December we are reading Holiday Classics, including an excerpt from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and "The Night Before Christmas" by Clement Clarke Moore.

Oskar Schell, a precocious nine-year-old who lives in New York City, is the protagonist In Jonathan Safran Foer’s popular post-9/11 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oskar's active mind keeps endlessly creating new inventions, most of them somehow related to saving lives and making connections with other people. In other words, he's trying to find a way to prevent “the worst day” from ever happening and thus regain the human connection he lost when his father was killed in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001. As Oskar says, he is "wearing heavy boots." 

Mixed Bag: Story Time for Grown-Ups is a short story read-aloud program that meets every two weeks at lunch time (1:00 p.m). Mixed Bag PM meets at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesdays every two weeks. During the month of October in honor of Halloween, the focus is on Roald Dahl, with four short stories and an excerpt from The Witches.  

Mixed Bag: Story Time for Grown-Ups is a short story read-aloud program that meets every two weeks at lunch time (1:00 p.m.) Mixed Bag PM meets at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesdays every two weeks. This story is a Mixed Bag reading for September and October.

March Story Time for Grown-Ups featured stories by Dorothy Parker to celebrate Women's History Month, as discussed in my previous blog post. During March, a lot of women's history-related lists were posted on the web: 10 powerful female fictional heroines, 10 most powerful women in history, 10 most powerful women in the world today, and top 10 hottest historical women (yes, Cleopatra made the list).

In honor of Women's History Month, the theme for the March schedule of Mixed Bag: Story Time for Grown-Ups is "Dorothy Parker: New York Writer, New York Woman." Dorothy Parker, nee Rothschild, (1893-1967) was an American poet, short story writer, critic, and a native New Yorker. She is best remembered for her sarcastic wit as a member of the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s. Although her marriage in 1917 to stockbroker Edwin Parker ended in divorce in 1928, she continued to be known as Mrs. Parker.

Dog stories was the January theme for Mixed Bag: Story Time for Grown-Ups, the read-aloud program I do on Wednesdays at lunch-time every other week. (I promised to read cat stories later this year in rebuttal.) Most of the stories I chose to read in January were selected from the book The Best Dog Stories. Since I included a list of 25 favorite films about dogs in my last blog post, this post features a list of favorite books about dogs.

Dog stories is the January theme for Mixed Bag: Story Time for Grown-Ups, the read aloud program I do on Wednesdays at lunch-time every other week. (I promise to read cat stories later this year in rebuttal.) As I researched the stories I wanted to read, two things became clear: there are a lot of heart-warming stories about dogs, and many of those stories have been made into films. Most of the stories I chose to read were selected from the book The Best Dog Stories.

This week at Mixed Bag: Story Time for Grown-Ups I read aloud two holiday classics, The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore and the first part of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, which is enitled Marley's Ghost. While researching the background for these two readings, I discovered some interesting details.

Thank you for joining us this month in the Reader’s Den. I hope you enjoyed the first book in the Maisie Dobbs series. Birds of a Feather and Pardonable Lies are the next two books in the series. 

Here are a few suggestions if you want to read other novels set in World War I or the post-war period, or if you want to find more information about World War I and some of the issues addressed in Maisie Dobbs:

Welcome to week three of the book discussion of Maisie Dobbs. I hope you are enjoying getting to know Maisie and her family, friends and colleagues. Perhaps you are nearly finished reading the novel. I promise not to spoil the ending. 

Welcome to week two of the Maisie Dobbs book discussion. Have you introduced yourself to Maisie yet? She is a singular character — somewhat aloof — but I think that is because she is shy. The process of moving from in-between maid to Cambridge student meant she was constantly going between two worlds without fitting into either one. Gender and class issues were involved. A woman aspiring to a university education was still unusual at that time.

Welcome to the August edition of the Reader's Den. The month of August fairly screams "beach read!" There's nothing like a good mystery to banish the workday world from your vacationing brain while you are relaxing on the beach.