Posts from Mid-Manhattan Library

I just quit smoking for the fifth time. For me, it's all or nothing. I could never be one of those people — dilettantes! — who are able to smoke socially and then go for indefinite periods of time without a cigarette. I suppose this has to do with physiology, personality, and the times in which I grew up.

The Mid-Manhattan Library recently hosted an excellent, entertaining program given by author A.J. Jacobs based on his recently published book Drop Dead Healthy. The program was about the year Jacobs spent consulting numerous health experts and attempting to incorporate all their recommendations into his everyday life.

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." 

As we come to the close of another year, I always look forward to the "best of" lists and discovering interesting games I may have missed. Over the next several weeks, NYPLarcade will be showcasing six video game titles from 2012, which were not covered in our other game series this year: Jenova Chen, Horror Games, and International Games Day (Music Games).

Musical recipes... a soul food journey... a history of peanut butter... food bloggers... urban farmers and foragers...Dirt Candy... Julia Child... America's banana king... the hidden financial and political aspects of food... the astrological signs of the delicatessen... foodways of the African diaspora... cooking on TV. The Lunch Hour NYC exhibition currently at the Schwarzman Building has inspired us to offer some truly varied food related programs at the Mid-Manhattan Library. If you haven't seen this fascinating exhibit, which looks back at a century of New York lunches, why not combine a visit with one of our upcoming programs?

Washington Square Park, Manhattan, iPad drawing ©2012 Fotis Flevotomos on Vimeo.

On October 25, 2012, we posted "Drawing on the iPad," a brief introduction to digital drawing for people with or without vision loss. The present video is an example of the playback feature of the Brushes app.

Question: What phenomenon occured in 1949, exploded in 1959, and more or less faded in the late '60s? Answer: The TV western.

In his very first email to me, Michael Marmor, professor and past chair of ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, wrote:
Your point that your view is original and valid on its own is important. I try to teach students that low vision or color “blindness” are not necessarily faulty vision... they are “different” vision. And may in some ways be better, or at least just as valid, depending on what you are trying to do. You have more of an “impressionist” view of a distant landscape than others with perfect vision — it's not better or worse, but alternative.

Visit NYPL's BiblioCommons for these lists and many more. See below for some interesting staff picks from the past couple months, on topics both timely and timeless:

I've always been curious about Neil Peart. You could say he's the George Harrison of the band Rush. He's the quiet one, but he is anything but silent. In addition to the complex time keeping duties the drummer extraordinaire is also the band's lyricist. With the song's varied themes ranging from philosophy to fantasy you have to assume he is well read.

As a visiting artist at the NYPL, I felt the need from the very beginning of my stay in New York City to explore the library visually by making drawings of it on my iPad. The library’s landmark building at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street caught my attention immediately. In the room of the Art and Architecture Collection, the reddish light coming from the reflections of the floor, the wood and the books was one of my first visual discoveries. I loved the quietness of the room, the stillness of everything in there, and, of course, the big table lamps that look like elegant immovable figures among the human figures. All these elements kept me drawing for hours without a break — five 

Of all the books in last year's Children's Books: 100 Titles for Reading & Sharing, my favorite title turned out to be Anne Ursu's Breadcrumbs. Anne was nice enough to answer a few questions about the book and provide valuable insight on one of the most imaginative literary works published last year.

On Saturday, November 3, libraries all over the world will celebrate International Games Day by playing games. This year, at Mid-Manhattan Library, we'll have a variety of board games as well as a special line up of music video games from 2012 in Room 101 from 1-5 p.m.

This week, I'll be delving into FTL: Faster Than Light, which was recently released for the Mac. If you haven't played it, the concept is a roguelike set in space, or "Firefly by way of Spelunky." Each time you play, you can expect permadeath, dangers lurking around every corner, and a new randomized world. So far, it's been a lot of fun successfully fending off space pirates and navigating asteroid fields, only to accidentally sacrifice my last crew member by leaving the airlock open too long. (In my defense, I was trying to get rid of hostiles who had boarded the ship.)

The U.S. economy and the upcoming presidential election are on my mind as well as on the minds of many Americans.

I'm not an economist, a political science major or an historian.

I'm a librarian at the Mid-Manhattan Library who specializes in health and medicine — but, I am interested in understanding what has happened to our country over the past ten years.

(with apologies, in advance, to the amazing Chris Raschka.)

"Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one." —Neil Gaiman

In September 2015 the Picture Collection, which is located on the third floor of the Mid-Manhattan Branch of The New York Public Library, will celebrate its centennial.

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.

I'm currently working my way through Borderlands 2 as an assassin who almost exclusively uses Maliwan weapons. It's a lot of fun and (as most reviews have indicated) a nice improvement on the first game. The wacky humor, mindblowing variety of guns, and drop-in, drop-out cooperative play are all back again, but with a tighter story and pacing.

Welcome back to the Reader's Den for the final post in our discussion of The Eyre Affair by Japer Fforde. Did you enjoy this literary silliness? As mentioned in the earlier posts, this is the first novel in the Thursday Next series.