Women Writers & Publishers Weekly

A good deal of heat has been generated among book aficianados by the Publisher’s Weekly Best Books of 2009 list.   This list is the editors’ choice of the major publishing trade magazine which has significant influence over what books get stocked in book stores, reviewed,  purchased and read.  Not one of the top 10 books in their list was written by a woman, not this year’s contributions by such literary luminaries as A.S. Byatt, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro or Rita Dove.  None of those from popular writers Diana Gabaldon, Barbara Kingsolver,  Sara Paretsky or Kathyrn Stockett.  None of the important nonfiction of Gail Collins,  Sheryl WuDunn, Rebecca Solnit or Sara Maitland.

The 2009 Man Booker International Prize, the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction all went to women writers (Munro, Hilary Mantel and Elizabeth Strout), so it’s not like women aren’t writing great books.

Publisher’s Weekly acknowledged that their (subjective) choices didn’t produce “the most politically correct” list (Huffington Post, 10.29.09).   Does politically incorrect mean male bias?

Fortunately, Women in Literature and Literary Arts (WILLA) is taking up the gauntlet.  They’ve created The WILLA List Wiki (sort of like a small version of Wikipedia, the public can contribute directly to it) to list books written by women authors in 2009.  There are some great books listed though the list is quite long, and I certainly don’t recognize all of the authors or titles.  I have found a good source of reading ideas for 2010.

What are your favorite authors, female or male, of 2009?  Leave a comment and let us know.

New Anisfield-Wolf Award Winner: Louise Erdrich

Congratulations to one of my favorite writers, Louise Erdrich, who won the Anisfield-Wolf Award this evening at the Cleveland Play House.  This award recognizes excellence in writing that contribute to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of cultural diversity.  Erdrich won this award in recognition of her outstanding novel, The Plague of Doves, along with Nam Le for his collection of short stories, The Boat, Annette Gordon-Reed for The Hemingses of Monticello and Paule Marshall for Outstanding Life Time Achievement.

Henry Louis Gates, one of the judges for the award, describes these works as “collectively they share an unyielding faith in the essential humanity of their subjects”.  This is very much what I appreciate about all of Erdrich’s many novels and other books, along with her humor, her complex and nuanced characters and her wild story lines.

I invite you to check out and enjoy The Plague of Doves and the rest of Erdrich’s many rich novels (may I particularly recommend The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse?).

2008/05 Harper 0060515120 Check Our Catalog

The Plague of Doves By Erdrich, Louise BookPage Notable Title In this multi generational tour-de-force of sin, redemption, murder, and vengeance (Publishers Weekly), a senseless and horrific crime in 1911 forever changes the lives of several families living in and around Pluto, North Dakota, a white town on the far western edge of an Ojibwe reservation. Louise Erdrich’s mesmerizing new novel, her first in almost three years, centers on a compelling mystery. The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. The descendants of Ojibwe and white intermarry, their lives intertwine; only the youngest generation, of mixed blood, remains unaware of the role the past continues to play in their lives. Evelina Harp is a witty, ambitious young girl, part Ojibwe, part white, who is prone to falling hopelessly in love. Mooshum, Evelina’s grandfather, is a seductive storyteller, a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. Nobody understands the weight of historical injustice better than Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, a thoughtful mixed blood who witnesses the lives of those who appear before him, and whose own love life reflects the entire history of the territory. In distinct and winning voices, Erdrich’s narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in this corner of North Dakota. Bound by love, torn by history, the two communities’ collective stories finally come together in a wrenching truth revealed in the novel’s final pages. “The Plague of Doves” is one of the major achievements of Louise Erdrich’s considerable oeuvre, a quintessentially American story and the most complex and original of her books.

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Another Book I Read

Everything Matters!
by: Currie, Ron, Jr.
2009/07 ISBN:0670020923  /  9780670020928
In infancy, Junior Thibodeaux is encoded with a prophesy: a comet will obliterate life on Earth in 36 years. Alone in this knowledge, he comes of age in rural Maine grappling with the question: Does anything I do matter?

–

It does, but not in ways he imagines.  Written from the perspective of Jr.’s loved ones and from the omniscient 2nd person point of view of a voice in his head (that tells him things he cannot possibly know), this is a lot of questions added in.  Is the world worth saving?  Is anyone worth saving, especially yourself?  Does the end matter as much as getting there?  Certain to start many conversations about family, growing up, free will and the many worlds interpretation of our universe.

Happy “Canadian” Day, eh?

In honor of Canada Day, here are some recent and interesting (popular, even?) titles from Canadian authors!

2009/04 Ace Books 0441016790 Check Our Catalog

WWW: Wake By Sawyer, Robert J. Although Caitlin Decter is blind, she can effortlessly surf the Internet by following its complex paths clearly in her mind. When she receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing reality, the landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her consciousness.

2008/10 House of Anansi Press 0887848001 Check Our Catalog

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth By Atwood, Margaret Collected here, the Massey Lectures from legendary novelist Margaret Atwood investigate the highly topical subject of debt. She doesn’t talk about high finance or managing money; instead, she goes far deeper to explore debt as an ancient and central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies. By looking at how debt has informed our thinking from preliterate times to the present day, from the stories we tell of revenge and sin to the way we order social relationships, Atwood argues that the idea of what we owe may well be built into the human imagination as one of its most dynamic metaphors. Her final lecture addresses the notion of a debt to nature and the need to find new ways of interacting with the natural world before it is too late.

2009-04 Hyperion Books 9781401303389 Check Our Catalog

Always Looking Up By Fox, Michael J. The beloved actor–and #1 bestselling author–writes about the personal philosophy that has carried him through his darkest hours, and speaks with others who have emerged from difficult periods with optimism to spare.

Reference Gem #3

Today’s amazing Reference find is The Encyclopedia of Earth: a Complete Visual Guide published by University of California Press in 2008.

This one-volume encyclopedia is gorgeous! There are stunning photographs and illustrations throughout the book.   Topics, developed by international experts, include Birth (the history of the planet), Fire (the interior of this ball of rock), Land, Air, Water and Humans.  Throughout you’ll find charts, diagrams and cut-aways that make challenging concepts clear.  The text is in small chunks of fascinating tidbits of information.

This new item in our Reference collection will be useful for school projects or anyone looking for a brief, clear explanation of a basic concept related to geology, weather, astronomy, oceanography, the environment, human ecology and anything else related to earth science or natural history.  But most of all, this is a beautiful book to browse through on a hot or rainy afternoon.  Come by the Reference desk; we’ll pull it for you and you can find a comfy chair to spend the afternoon!

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.

Reference Gems # 1

This is the first in an occasional series on Reference Gems.  We have all these marvelous books in our Reference collection that don’t get much use, probably because our patrons don’t notice them over in Reference (and sometimes, truth to tell,  we staff forget to use them).  So I’m going to pull some of them out, shine them up a bit and show them off.

Today’s Gem is the Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2009.  This is the go-to-reference, complements of the U.S. Census Bureau, for all kinds of data regarding the U.S., it’s people, cities, towns, government bodies, economy and on and on.  If you’re writing a school paper,  a business plan, a letter to the editor, doing strategic planning for an organization, or just curious, this is the book you want to curl up with.  You’ll find out everything you want to know about U.S. population (age, sex, race, states, metropolitan areas, cities, mobility, immigration, ancestry, language, marital status, religion),  births, deaths, marriages and divorces, health, employment,  educational attainment, crime rates, government finances, national security, the labor force, income, poverty, wealth, prices, business, agriculture, utilities, transportation, etc., etc., etc., etc.  Lots and lots of stats that together form a remarkably useful portrait of our country and the factual basis you need for the argument you’re making.

We also have a copy of State and Metropolitan Area Data Book: 2006, the latest issue available.  This brings some of the data down to Ohio and the Cleveland-Metropolitan-Akron statistical area (and others around the country).  For both books, the data is drawn from a wide variety of public and private sources and some data is more recent than other data.  All of it is the most recent as of publication.

A limited set  of this data at the American Factfinder website.  The Avon Lake page is here.  Unfortunately, the information at this level is from 2000.

The Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2009 and the State and Metropolitan Area Data Book are found in our Reference collection at R317.3.   You’re welcome to look through the collection yourself, or ask any librarian at the Reference desk for assistance.  We’re here to help you find the information you need!

Where Did My Favorite Magazine Go ??????

Each year, after careful assessment of circulation and within budget constraints, we order approximately 230 titles for Avon Lake Public Library’s magazine collection. This includes magazines of interest to children, young adults, and our adult readers. Multiple subscriptions are ordered of very popular titles such as PEOPLE and CLEVELAND MAGAZINE, so that our patrons can access the most recent issue on a timely basis. The average circulation for magazines in any given month of the year is 1,500 issues!

If you have noticed that one of your favorite magazines has been missing from our shelves, it might be because it is no longer being published. Since the beginning of 2009 this tough economic environment has also taken its toll on the magazine publishing business, and 14 of our 2009 subscriptions have ceased publication. These notices continue to arrive at the library regularly.

According to a recent article in The New York Times, declining advertising revenue is one of the reasons. Publishers had been able to keep subscription prices low and even lost money doing so, assuming that the real money came from ads. Subscription revenue was gravy! Publishing prices have risen as ink, paper and shipping costs continue to escalate.

Publishers are now realizing that they must raise subscription prices if they want to continue a quality product. The cover price of PEOPLE has risen 21% in the past four years. VANITY FAIR raised its cover price from $4.50 to $4.95 with the April issue. REAL SIMPLE has raised subscription prices 17% in the last four years. How price-sensitive are the readers going to be before they quit purchasing a particular magazine and it ceases publication?

ENJOY YOUR FAVORITE MAGAZINES WITH NO

OUT-OF-POCKET COST TO YOU!

CHECK OUT AN ISSUE THE NEXT TIME YOU ARE IN THE LIBRARY!

Judy Blume for Banned Books Week

Chicago TV did an excellent interview with author Judy Blume on Banned Books Week.  Blume’s book Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret was one of my very favorite books back in sixth grade.  It was a revelation at age eleven that a book could truly speak to my experience.

Unfortunately, organized censorship groups have targeted this lovely coming-of-age novel, sometimes successfully getting it removed from libraries or placed behind a desk where young girls who could really treasure and benefit from this realistic novel won’t find it.  But Blume, among other courageous writers and librarians, are fighting back, demanding the freedom to write and read what we please!

The video of Blume’s interview is not embeddable, but you will find it here.  And it’s well worth the click.