If you like Dan Brown…

The movie “Angels and Demons,” based on Dan Brown’s bestselling book, hit theaters last weekend.  The movie’s release has increased demand for Brown’s novels.  If you are looking for something to read while you wait, or if you have read Brown’s books and are looking for something similar, try these books.

The Last Cato  Matilde Asensi

 The Templar Legacy  Steve Berry

 The Rule of Four  Ian Caldwell

 The Genesis Code  John Case

 A Finer End  Deborah Crombie

 Foucault’s Pendulum  Umberto Eco

 Codex  Lev Grossman

 The Historian  Elizabeth Kostova

 The Last Templar  Raymond Khoury

 Labyrinth  Kate Mosse

 The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud  Julia Navarro

 Daughter of God  Lewis Perdue

 Seven Deadly Wonders  Matthew Reilly

 Map of Bones  James Rollins

 The Secret Supper  Javier Sierra

 The Confessor  Daniel Silva

 

And don’t forget to watch for his new novel, The Lost Symbol, to be published on September 15, 2009!

Community Shred Day Results

In partnership with the City of Avon Lake, we had our second community shred day May 16.  Residents simply had to drive up next to the shred truck and the very helpful staff of Gateway Recycling was on hand to unload your bags and boxes of paper. 

Wow, did those bags and boxes of unwanted paper add up!  During this three hour shred, Gateway Recycling shredded approximately 3 TONS of paper, saving 49 trees –  20,300 gallons of water –  12, 180 kilowatt hours of energy and 1189 gallons of fuel!!

We look forward to continuing this service several times a year for the community.

Introducing Ready to read @ ALPL — The Children’s Department Blog!

Just in time for a super summer reading program and another round of storytimes, all starting in June, stay tuned to a new blog from our library family, Ready to read @ ALPL.

Useful and fun information for children and parents alike!

Visit the blog and see SuperLibrarian (pictured) battle the Riddler in the stacks!

Second Blogoversary Today

Friday, May 8th was our SECOND YEAR!

After two years of blogging here, our numbers stand at:

1. Number of page views:  20,394
2. Number of posts:  146
3. Number of comments:  83
4. Number of SPAM comments:  3,036

Top Five Search Terms:

• alligator 970
• elf 299
• banned 284
• zardoz 265
• banned books 212

I first blogged about a very odd movie that still attracts the curious.

I would like to welcome more and more ALPL staff as bloggers, joining Cindy and myself.  The more perspectives the better, everyone who works here has one (as do our patrons and commenters).

Don’t forget….

• You can follow our updates via RSS by clicking here when in your reader.
• You can find us on Facebook here.

Passport to Fishing

 

How many of us have fond childhood memories of a    relaxing, lazy summer afternoon fishing with a parent or grandparent?  The thrill of that first catch!  The Friends of Avon Lake Public Library and Lorain County Metro Parks are joining hands to bring a super exciting program, PASSPORT TO FISHING for children ages 7-15.  On Saturday, May 23 from 9:00 a.m. to noon, children (must be accompanied by an adult) will learn how to tie and bait their own hook and how to cast where the fish are biting!  For those kids who participate, there is a surprise at the end of the program!!  Registration required at the Circulation desk.  Space is limited, so sign up soon!

About that flu

Do you have questions about the H1N1 flu?  Here are some good sources of information:

• This New York Times article has an excellent discussion of just how scared or not we need to be about this virus.
• Another New York Times article tells us what scientists know about how this virus became what it is and how viruses jump species.  Generally interesting and also a good resource for a biology class or report.

Three websites give us continually updated public health information on the virus, complete with statistics on the number of cases and the spread of the disease:

• On the international level, the World Health Organization has a website dedicated to the outbreak with daily situation updates, maps, FAQs and guidance documents.
• The Centers for Disease Control has the national picture.
• The Ohio Department of Health gives a county-by-county breakdown of cases.

The Centers for Disease Control have a page with guidance for individuals at greater risk and their caregivers, schools and daycares, those in the travel industry, etc.

The president dedicated last Saturday’s weekly address to the flu outbreak, giving a clear description of the flu and steps being taken to address it.

The databases provided by the libraries in Ohio include the amazingly complete Consumer Health Complete. If you have a library card with any library in the state, you can use this database, and many others, at oplin.org/databases.  You will probably be prompted to enter the name of your library and your library card number before you actually make it into a database.  Just choose Consumer Health Complete and do a search for H1N1.  When you get your results, you may want to sort them by date so you’re looking at information about this outbreak.  The document Swine Flu: a Primer is a particularly clear and brief summary in a FAQ format.  It could be helpful in explaining the outbreak to middle-grade children.

While we don’t have any books on H1N1 (the publishing industry isn’t that fast, yet), we do have a number of excellent books on influenza, epidemics and viruses for both children and adults.

For children and young teens:

• Deadly Invaders: Virus Outbreaks Around the World, from Marburg Fever to Avian Flu by Denise Grady, a medical reporter with the New York Times, covers the emergence of new diseases caused by new and evolving viruses.  Grady explains how we in the U.S. are affected by health care realities in developing countries and how diseases travel internationally.  The book includes lots of sidebars explaining key scientific and social issues.
• Pandemics: Epidemics in a Shrinking World by Miriam Segall is a briefer, somewhat simpler, book covering much of the same material.
• The Flu by Gretchen Hoffman, Achoo: the Most Interesting Book You’ll Ever Read About Germs by Trudee Romanek, and Bill Nye the Science Guy’s Great Big Book of Tiny Germs all offer excellent introductions to the topics of germs, influenza and the immune system.  Romanek and Nye’s books both include neat experiments to increase understanding (no, not utilizing actual viruses!).

For adults:

• The Great Influenza: the Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry is part social history, part medical mystery, part biography of several gigantic figures of the early twentieth-century tackling the 1918 killer flu.  Barry’s a terrific writer, able to make complex science clear and compelling and history both terrifyingly and inspiringly relevant.  This one gets my personal recommendation as a great read.
• Gina Kolata’s Flu: the Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It tells the story of the nearly century-long search to isolate, study and understand the virus that caused the 1918 influenza.  Reviewers describe the book as thrilling and a “novel-like page turner.”

Two fictional accounts of the 1918 influenza deserve mention:

• We have multiple copies of Thomas Mullen’s Last Town on Earth, a novel about a small town in Washington state trying to quarantine itself against the flu with disasterous results.  This one is an excellent choice for a book discussion group with lots of material for debate, discussion and deep thought.
• Dreamers of the Day by local author Mary Doria Russell begins with a fictional account of the 1918 flu in Cleveland.  Russell always does a superb job of researching her novels and puts you right here ninety years ago.

As the H1N1 story unfolds, your library will keep collecting the most accurate information.  As you need to know more, check back!

Need ideas for your next read?

Summer will be here before you know it, so it is not too early to start thinking about what books you would like to read at the beach or in your garden.  We are compiling lists of books by author, genre, and themes on a regular basis.  We will feature each list at the Reference Desk.  Feel free to let us know what might interest you.  Here is one of our recent lists, perfect for a light-hearted summer read.

If you like light-hearted or humorous mysteries, try these authors…

Donna Andrews

 M.C. Beaton

 Dorothy Cannell

 Jill Churchill

 Susan Conant

 Mary Daheim

 Diane Mott Davidson

 Janet Evanovich

 Joanne Fluke

 Dorothy Gilman

 Charlaine Harris

 Carolyn Hart

 Alexander McCall Smith

 Tamar Myers

 Sarah Strohmeyer

 Donald Westlake

Reference Gem # 2

If you’ve ever read an old book that describes the price of something “back in the day” or someone’s wages in days gone by (or perhaps have heard an older family member tell a story about the price of something in their childhood) and you’ve wondered what that really meant, we’ve got the reference book for you.  Actually, two volumes: The Value of a Dollar 1600 – 1865 and The Value of a Dollar 1860 – 2004.  Both books contain a wealth of information on prices, wages, per capita spending and general economic conditions during different periods of American history (each half decade during the 20th century).  A couple nuggets:

* Football great Red Grange recalled in a 1974 interview that he had supplemented his salary as a football player in the mid-1920s by working summers on an ice truck, “I’d start at six in the morning, and many a day I’d work until seven or eight a night, six days a week.  We got five dollars a day until the union came in and upped our salary to $37.50 a week.”

* In 1901 the average salary for a public school teacher was $337.  That was the equivalent of only $6740 in 2000 dollars.   Imagine living on that!

These two volumes are beautifully printed and easy to read.  Each historical era is described with a background narrative;  a “historical snapshot” which may include old ads, quotes, excerpts of letters or magazine articles or interviews;  tables of selected incomes drawn from advertisements; investments; average wages for a range of jobs; and prices for a variety of foods and other common consumer goods.  The text is supplemented with old black and white photographs and line drawings.  Besides finding particular pieces of information such as the approximate original cost of an old item or for research in social or economic history, these books are simply fun to browse through.  You can find them in our Reference collection at R338.5 Value.

And here’s an online calculator to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to the Present.