Posts from Columbus Library

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.

Thanks to Lifetime Arts for securing funding and inviting our library system to participate, NYPL is once again able to offer free sustained art courses, taught by professional teaching artists, for adults age 55 and over. Seventeen branch libraries have received funding that enables them to host these classes, which will take place from February-November 2013, and which cover a wide variety of arts including: painting, sculpting, collage, memoir-writing/performance, drawing, and quilt-making.

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.

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.

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.

Now that the ING New York City Marathon has wrapped up, here are some titles to inspire you to take on next year’s marathon, or to participate vicariously through them. Some runners like to listen to long audiobooks to while away the hours spent training. Of course, you can always read them and just consider it sports nutrition for your mind.

Lately, I’ve noticed some interest in crossover titles for video game players who are looking for good fiction reads. I know I’m not the first person to think of this. Scott Pilgrim vs the World is a good, if somewhat obvious, example. Here’s a list of some other titles that may not immediately spring to mind.

Thanks for joining us for this month's edition of the Reader's Den! We have a special treat for followers of the Reader's Den... a live appearance by Michael Scott Moore, author of Sweetness and Blood, at Columbus Library! More details >>

Library patrons might be interested to know that Jack London, as well as Agatha Christie and her husband, frequented Waikiki Beach:

"The focal point of that surfline and the wave riding connected to it was the Outrigger Canoe Club. There, Agatha Christie and her husband extended their stay in Hawaii so he could surf longer, and Jack London and the Prince of Wales who abdicated his throne, and the King of Persia, as well as Rudolf Friml, Doris Duke, Otis Chandler and Jim Arness — all suited up in the locker rooms to 'go surfin' at Waikiki." (http://files.legendarysurfers.com/surf/legends/ls12.shtml)

Michael Scott Moore's debut novel, Too Much of Nothing, is very different from Sweetness and Blood, but it is similar in that they are both odes, at least in part, to his hometown of Redondo Beach, CA. Moore is a reporter and chief stage critic for SF Weekly in San Francisco. He has also written for salon.com, San Francisco magazine, Bostonia magazine, and the New York Times, and runs a website at radiofreemike.com. He lives in San Francisco. Too Much of Nothing is the story of a teenage love triangle. The protagonist dies at the hands of his friend and narrates the story as a nefesh, a 

Welcome to the September Reader’s Den! This month, we’ll be discussing Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, with Some Unexpected Results by Michael Scott Moore. This nonfiction book begins with the author’s apology that it is far from a complete history of surfing. Rather, it is a pop culture view of surfing’s global popularity from Californian influences.

With the English-language version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo film due to come out in December of this year, fans of Stieg Larsson who have already seen the Swedish films and read the trilogy may be searching for more. Here is a loosely inspired reading list. For a more comprehensive list of Swedish crime writers, see this blog post on Nordic Whodunits.

Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse has been a London stage play for four years running and has now come to Broadway. The Spielberg film version is slated to be released December 28, 2011.

The story takes place during World War I and describes the horrific conditions and loss of life, both human and animal, that took place.

Fans of the ABC Family television series Pretty Little Liars rejoice – new episodes began airing on January 3, 2011! The hit drama, based on Sara Shepard’s series of books by the same name, premiered this past summer to less than favorable critical reviews, but the fans ate it right up. The series won the 2010 Teen Choice Award for Choice Summer TV Show, with awards also going to Ian Harding (Ezra) and Lucy Hale (Aria) for Choice Summer TV Star: Male and Female, respectively.