Posts by Jenny Baum

The newest film version of The Great Gatsby is opening in theaters on May 10th. This is the fifth time this story has been filmed, I believe. This version boasts a modern soundtrack and promises to deliver on the fashion and visual excesses of the "Jazz Age," if director Baz Luhrmann's signature style is to be expected. Here are some titles that give a more substantial background to the time period in which "Gatsby" is set and to biographical details of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's lives. Also, I've included some links that hint at the hype and flash that the film promises to bring.

The Gilded Stage: A Social History of the Opera by Daniel Snowman promises to do what few nonfiction books about opera have done thus far: describe the evolution of opera from everyman's entertainment to one, believed by many, to be reserved for those of a select social sphere.

Many have heard about slow food, but fewer still about slow looking. This Wall Street Journal article from 2011 coined the term, referring to LSU's Hill Memorial Library and the way in which they presented their collection of John James Audubon's four-volume Birds of America (1827-38): slowing turning the pages for a rapt audience.

This is a view of Broadway, in Oakland, California from NYPL's Digital Gallery. Although it's not Telegraph Avenue where Oakland and Berkeley intersect, I think it still contributes to envisioning the setting of the novel. How do you envision the area where Telegraph Avenue takes place? Do you think that this picture fits with that idea? That time frame?

If you're enjoying Telegraph Avenue, here are some suggestions on what to check out next:

If you'd like to know all about Michael Chabon's prolific publishing history, Contemporary Authors Online has an exhaustive biography of him in our online databases. As I already noted, comics have been a big influence on his work and I surprized to learn that he worked on the screenplay of Edgar Rice Burrough's A Princess of Mars (novelized by Stuart Moore as John Carter: The Movie Novelization).

Welcome back to the Reader's Den! Today we take a slight detour from our focus on New York City to the sunny climes of Northern California. Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue is a fictional place that the NYT book review calls, "a homage to an actual place: the boulevard in Northern California where Oakland — historically an African-American city — aligns with Berkeley, whose bourgeois white inhabitants are, as one character puts it, 'liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken.' (page 287)" Unlike The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which takes place in a New York that 

Carliss Pond, author of Taste of Broadway and Sizzle in Hell's Kitchen spoke at the Columbus Library last year. It was great to have an author speak about the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, which has come to be known as Clinton in recent years. Sizzle in Hell's Kitchen chronicles the diverse restaurants available on Ninth Avenue, including 38 different restaurants representing 27 different cuisines.

Last year around this time, author Michael Scott Moore read from his book Sweetness and Blood at the Columbus branch. I wanted to share it with everyone who couldn't attend. Sweetness and Blood focuses on the history of surfing and was also an NYPL Reader's Den pick. I was reminded of it when recent weather advisories discouraged (rightfully so) surfers from taking advantage of favorable storm wave conditions. 

Previous Sweetness and Blood Reader's Den posts: Week 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

This is the third edition of Halloween reads, a sequel to Halloween Reads and Halloween Reads II: The Re-Ordering. I tried to have a theme to my previous posts and the theme of these can best be described mind candy: relaxing treats that you can read to keep you in the Halloween spirit since the holiday falls in the middle of week this year.

For new and existing fans of Stephen King, here are some things to check out next:

Every once in a while, science fiction really resonates with the human experience. One of these moments for me, was in the TV series The 4400 when a woman walks into a polluted river and uses her powers to make it crystal clear and clean. Time travel fiction does this well, and 11/22/63 was full of these moments for me. Jake has several of these moments every time he goes through the Rabbit Hole, and this blogger summed many of them up quite well (spoiler alert). King uses phrases like "the heart wants what the heart wants" and "the past harmonizes with itself" partly to move the time travel plot along, but also, I believe, to illustrate the 

The month of May brought with it the end of the TV series House, M.D. as well as the publication of the book Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow. In the series send-off, the producers highlighted the similarities between the show's characters, House and Wilson, and the fictional characters of Holmes and Watson.

The '60s have been a wellspring of creative inspiration lately, from Mad Men to X-Men: First Class to Motown-inspired singing sensations such as Adele, Duffy and Amy Winehouse. In the article "1962" in Intelligent Life from the magazine the Economist, author Matthew Engel discusses other recent works of fiction that are firmly grounded in the '60s, including The Help and On Chesil Beach.

Welcome to the June 2012 edition of the Reader's Den! The title for this month is Stephen King's 11/22/63, part of Mystery Summer. If you were expecting The Sixes by Kate White, please see my earlier post and check out her new book So Pretty It Hurts.

Anyone who has seen the Seinfeld finale, whether they loved it or hated it, remembers that it was about the characters getting their just desserts for being such terrible people. By extension, New Yorkers sometimes have a reputation of being rude. I don’t think this is true, and I’ve seen New Yorkers be incredibly polite, but I do think that in a city full of people with such varying backgrounds in such close proximity, there are bound to be misunderstandings. I once saw a pedestrian hold up four or five cars while he gave directions to one lost driver. When they honked their horns he shouted waitaminit! This, to me, is a type of New York etiquette, not 

The steampunk genre has been around for some time now, and while some may disagree, I most strongly associate it with The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a graphic novel, by Alan Moore.

I've been thinking about this post ever since Lady Gaga and Mayor Bloomberg hosted the New Year's ball drop, which made me think of her Monster's Ball tour, and of monsters, in general. Unfortunately, I have been a wee bit tardy in posting it, so some of these books are not exactly hot off the presses, but I think they are all great horror and science-fiction reads for 2012. As a bonus, some are available as e-book titles. Readers, engage!

The Bailey Weggins mystery series by author Kate White is a cross between Nancy Drew, Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City, and occasionally, the cutthroat office politics from Lauren Weisburger’s The Devil Wears Prada. Like NBC’s Castle and the aforementioned Bradshaw character, Bailey is a writer for a fashion magazine called Gloss.