eBranch Blog

August 30, 2005

Hurricane Information

Our sympathy goes out to those affected by the Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita disasters.

Evacuees can obtain a Harris County Public Library Visitor Card. This card is free and provides access to all library materials and computers. To get a visitor card, you will need to fill out a library card application and provide your regular mailing address or the local address at which you are staying.

All branches have free storytimes for children and many branches have programming for teens and adults. Please join us.

This information was originally developed for Hurricane Katrina. It will now include information concerning both hurricanes. We welcome any suggested links. Use the Ask a Librarian form to submit a suggestion.

Harris County Joint Information Center - Official county site with information for evacuees and volunteers.

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New Bestsellers 8/29/05

The following books are appearing on the best seller lists for the first time this week. For a complete listing see our collection of Best Seller Lists.

E = Essence Magazine
NYT = New York Times
PW = Publisher's Weekly
USA = USA Today
WSJ = Wall Street Journal

Fiction

Ted Bell. Pirate
In Ted Bell's scorching follow-up to his New York Times bestseller Assassin, intrepid intelligence operative Alex Hawke must thwart a secret, deadly alliance between China and France before they annihilate everything and everyone in their headlong rush toward world domination. (NYT #15, PW #15, WSJ #14)

Connie Briscoe. Can't Get Enough
Briscoe's much anticipated follow-up to P.G. County. As the characters slip in and out of their Pratesi sheets and stride into mayhem and misdeeds in their Jimmy Choo shoes, Can't Get Enough will hold readers spellbound. A delectable and scrumptious page-turner, it ushers in spring with the fabulous force of a Gucci-clad lion. (E #3)

Sandra Brown. Chill Factor
A successful magazine editor is trapped in her remote cabin with a man believed to be a serial killer. (NYT #1, PW #2, USA #7, WSJ #3)

Eric Jerome Dickey. Genevieve
Eric Jerome Dickey's boldly sensual new novel centers on what his fans love best - steamy romance and shocking betrayal. This is an edge-of-your-seat novel about a good man who loves his wife, Genevieve, but finds himself drawn against his best intentions into an affair - with his wife's sister. Both women have a mysterious and tragic past that raises the stakes in this fast-paced novel. (E #2)

Bret Easton Ellis. Lunar Park
Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing "resolution about love and loss, fathers and sons?in what is surely the most powerfully original and deeply moving novel of an extraordinary career. (NYT #13, PW #11, WSJ #13)

Carl Weber. The Preacher's Son
A revelatory chronicle of an esteemed church family that has a whole lot of repenting to do. (E #6)

Nonfiction

Michael Eric Dyson. Is Bill Cosby Right?
"In May 2004 Cosby delivered a speech at the NAACP Awards in which he said he blamed what he termed the "knuckleheads" of the African American community for poor parenting, poor academic performance, sexual promiscuity and criminal behavior. The audience laughed and applauded. Here, Dyson (humanities, U. of Pennsylvania) comments on both the speech and the reaction, finding a growing cultural divide between the "Afristocracy" (the African American elite and professional classes) and the "Ghettocracy" (the African American poor, working class and incarcerated). He finds evidence of abandonment of the aims of the civil rights movement among the elite, and a growing perception that the poor have no one to blame but themselves, despite obvious, ongoing and vicious racial discrimination in America." - Book News (E #1)

August 25, 2005

Beloit College Mind Set - Class of 2009

Each year, Beloit College publishes a Mind Set for their incoming class of freshmen. This year's class was, on average, born in 1987. While the whole list is interesting, one things stands out for libraries:

49. Libraries have always been the best centers for computer technology and access to good software.

Harris County Public Library strives to be a technology center for our customers:

- We have over 1,000 computers in 26 branches that offer access to the online catalog, theInternet, and the MS Office suite.

- All 26 of our branches have wireless Internet access to use with your laptop or one of ours.

- We have over 30 subscription databases, which offer access to thousands of articles from hundreds of publications.

- Our website has interactive features including book reviews and the storytime database.

- Our HCPL Toolbar means the library is a mouse click away from anywhere on the Internet.

Beloit College news via LIS News

August 24, 2005

HCPL Toolbar Updated

The HCPL Toolbar has been updated to work with the recent catalog upgrade. If you have the toolbar, you will need to download the updated version.

August 22, 2005

Staff Favorites

Did you know that we have a database of Staff Favorites? It's actually divided into three parts: adult, young adult, and children's. As of today, the database as a whole has 302 entries! You can also search the database by title of the book, author of the book, genre, and/or who submitted the favorite. The most recently submitted favorites in each category are:

Adult
Title: The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
Author: Thomas Friedman
Description: The timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists.
Genre: Non-Fiction
Submitted by: Alpana B. Sarangapani, Reference Librarian from Tomball

Young Adult
Title: Touching Spirit Bear
Author: Ben Mikaelsen
Description: After his anger erupts into violence, Cole, in order to avoid going to prison, agrees to participate in a sentencing alternative based on the native American Circle Justice, and he is sent to a remote Alaskan Island where an encounter with a huge Spirit Bear changes his life.
Genre: Fiction
Submitted by: Greg Burns, Branch Librarian from Evelyn Meador

Children's
Title: Coyote and the Laughing Butterflies
Author: Harriet Peck Taylor
Description: Coyote is tricked by some butterflies who laugh so hard about their joke that they cannot fly straight.
Genre: Picture Book
Submitted by: Christine Turner, Children's Assistant from Atascocita

Galveston Bound Book List

In these last days of summer, head off to Galveston through the books on the Galveston Bound book list. Visit with generations of families, solve a murder with Truman Smith, revisit the 1900 storm, or one of the other stories in these titles.

James Carlos Blake. Under the Skin: A Novel
Gambling, bootlegging, and other illicit pleasures made Galveston a hot town in the 1930s, and James Youngblood is in the thick of it, working as a ghost rider/enforcer for the island?s mob bosses.

New Bestsellers 8/22/05

The following books are appearing on the best seller lists for the first time this week. For a complete listing see our collection of Best Seller Lists.

The Library Journal Lists of Most Borrowed Books in Public Libraries for Fiction and Nonfiction were updated for August 15.

E = Essence Magazine
NYT = New York Times
PW = Publisher's Weekly
USA = USA Today
WSJ = Wall Street Journal

Fiction

Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Match Me If You Can
When Annabelle inherits her late grandmother's matchmaking business, she wants to make the best of it since she is the lone failure in a family of overachievers. To do so, she must land Heath Champion - the most sought after batchelor in the city. (PW #7, WSJ #5)

Anne Rivers Siddons. Sweetwater Creek
From bestselling author Anne Rivers Siddons comes a bittersweet and finely wrought story of friendship, family, and Charleston society. (PW #8, WSJ #9)

Harry Turtledove. Settling Accounts: Drive to the East
Harry Turtledove?the master of alternate history?has recast the tumultuous twentieth century and created an epic that is powerful, bold, and as convincing as it is provocative. In Drive to the East he continues his saga of warfare that has divided a nation and now threatens the entire world. (PW #14, WSJ #14)

August 17, 2005

Presidential Reading

President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush have each taken a selection of books to read on vacation in Crawford.

President Bush

John M. Barry. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
No disease the world has ever known even remotely resembles the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Presumed to have begun when sick farm animals infected soldiers in Kansas, spreading and mutating into a lethal strain as troops carried it to Europe, it exploded across the world with unequaled ferocity and speed. It killed more people in twenty weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty years; it killed more people in a year than the plagues of the Middle Ages killed in a century.
In his powerful new book, award-winning historian John M. Barry unfolds a tale that is magisterial in its breadth and in the depth of its research, and spellbinding as he weaves multiple narrative strands together. In this first great collision between science and epidemic disease, even as society approached collapse, a handful of heroic researchers stepped forward, risking their lives to confront this strange disease.

Mark Kurlansky. Salt: A World History
The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions. Populated by colorful characters and filled with an unending series of fascinating details, Kurlansky's kaleidoscopic history is a supremely entertaining, multi-layered masterpiece.

Edvard Radzinsky. Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar

Source: LA Times

First Lady Laura Bush

Jonathan Safran Foer. Everything is Illuminated
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

Sue Monk Kidd. The Mermaid Chair
Inside the abbey of a Benedictine monastery on tiny Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. Jessie Sullivan's conventional life has been "molded to the smallest space possible." So when she is called home to cope with her mother's startling and enigmatic act of violence, Jessie finds herself relieved to be apart from her husband, Hugh. Jessie loves Hugh, but on Egret Island-- amid the gorgeous marshlands and tidal creeks--she becomes drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk who is mere months from taking his final vows. What transpires will unlock the roots of her mother's tormented past, but most of all, as Jessie grapples with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, she will find a freedom that feels overwhelmingly right.

Patricia O'Toole. The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends

Alexander McCall Smith. The Sunday Philosophy Club
Amateur sleuth Isabel Dalhousie is a philosopher who also uses her training to solve unusual mysteries. Isabel is Editor of the "Review of Applied Ethics, which addresses such issues as "truth telling in sexual relationships," and she also hosts The Sunday Philosophy Club at her house in Edinburgh. In this first book in McCall Smith's new series Isbel investigates how a young man could have fallen to his death from the top balcony of the Usher Hall. She is aided by her beautiful niece Cat, Cat's ex boyfriend Hugo (whose own good looks Isabel is tantalised by), and her strict housekeeper Grace. Isabel is drawn into the heart of Edinburgh's well heeled, if somewhat shady, business community as she sets out to discover the truth.

Source: Newsweek

August 16, 2005

New Bestsellers 8/15/05

The following books are appearing on the best seller lists for the first time this week. New bestsellers for last week are also included. For a complete listing see our collection of Best Seller Lists.

E = Essence Magazine
NYT = New York Times
PW = Publisher's Weekly
USA = USA Today
WSJ = Wall Street Journal

Fiction

Kay Hooper. Chill of Fear
Hooper turns up the heat even as she chills readers to the bone with a new suspense novel that distills the essence of fear itself. In this relentless thriller, two psychics put more than their lives on the line to stop a killer darker and more evil than they could ever imagine... (NYT #13, PW #11, WSJ #11)

Lisa Jackson. Final Scream
The haunting story of an inferno that sears the night, snuffing out lives and dreams, and of a killer who goes unpunished.... (USA #6)

J.A. Jance. Long Time Gone
After more than twenty years of distinguished service with the Seattle Police Department, Jonas Piedmont Beaumont is now working for the Washington State Attorney's Special Homicide Investigation Team or, as it's more commonly called, the SHIT squad. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. (NYT #12, PW #12)

Steve Martini. Double Tap
Paul Madriani's defense of a soldier on trial for murder-and the explosive government secrets it could reveal-propel Steve Martini's latest thriller. (NYT #8, PW #9, WSJ #10)

Nonfiction

Bill Maher. New Rules
Bill Maher's popular new HBO television show, Real Time, has put Maher more front and center than ever before. Particularly one regular segment on the show, entitled "New Rules," has been a hit with his ever-growing legion of fans. It is the part of the show during which Maher takes serious aim, bringing all of his intelligence, incisiveness, wit, and his signature exasperation to bear on topics ranging from cell phones to fast food to the conservative agenda. (NYT #8, PW #12, WSJ #11)

Business

Ted C. Fishman. China Inc.
China today is visible everywhere -- in the news, in the economic pressures battering america, in the workplace, and in every trip to the store. provocative, timely, and essential, this dramatic account of china's growing dominance as an industrial super-power by journalist Ted C. Fishman explains how the profound shift in the global economic order has occurred -- and why it already affects us all. (NYT #15)

August 05, 2005

2005 Notable Children's Recordings Book List

Love to listen to audiobooks? If so, this book list of Notable Recordings, will help you and your child select the perfect book to listen to.

Sharon Creech. Heartbeat
Twelve-year-old Annie ponders the many rhythms of life the year that her mother becomes pregnant, her grandfather begins faltering, and her best friend (and running partner) becomes distant. Narrated by Mandy Siegfried.

Quill Awards Nominations Announced

Frist off, you may be wondering what the Quill Awards are; they are a new book award that "will pair a populist sensibility with Hollywood-style glitz and become the first literary prizes to reflect the tastes of the group that matters most in publishing-readers." The awards banquet will be held in October and will be shown on NBC.

There are nineteen categories - ranging from nonfiction to mystery to children's fiction to audiobooks. Each category has five nominations. The nominees were selected by a panel of librarians and booksellers based on starred reviews in Publisher's Weekly, besteller lists, Booksense Picks, Borders Original Voices, and Barnes & Nobel Discover Great New Writers Program.

To top it all off, YOU get to choose the winners. Voting begins on August 15 at Quillsvote.com.

August 03, 2005

New Books/Movies/Audio Lists Updated

The New Books, Audios, and Movies lists have been updated with titles cataloged in July 2005.

Alex Awards Book List

The best adult books for young adults are selected each year by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) The ten selected books receive the Alex Award.

Steve Almond. Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate
Underbelly of America After confessing to being a lifelong chocoholic, the author traces the history and bittersweet business practices of the companies producing those addictive candy bars. He includes relevant Web sites.

August 02, 2005

New Bestsellers 8/1/05

The following books are appearing on the best seller lists for the first time this week. For a complete listing see our collection of Best Seller Lists.

The Publisher's Weekly Audio Fiction and Nonfiction lists were updated for August 2005.

E = Essence Magazine
NYT = New York Times
PW = Publisher's Weekly
USA = USA Today
WSJ = Wall Street Journal

Fiction

Sophie Kinsella. The Undomestic Goddess
Workaholic attorney Samantha Sweeting has just done the unthinkable. She's made a mistake so huge, it'll wreck any chance of a partnership. Going into utter meltdown, she walks out of her London office, gets on a train, and ends up in the middle of nowhere. Asking for directions at a big, beautiful house, she's mistaken for an interviewee and finds herself being offered a job as housekeeper. Her employers have no idea they've hired a lawyer--and Samantha has no idea how to work the oven. She can't sew on a button, bake a potato, or get the ironing board to open. How she takes a deep breath and begins to cope--and finds love--is a story as delicious as the bread she learns to bake. (NYT #7, PW #5, WSJ #6)

Cormac McCarthy. No Country for Old Men
Set in our own time along the bloody frontier between Texas and Mexico, No Country for Old Men is a harrowing story of a war that society is waging on itself, and an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies. (NYT #8, PW #9, WSJ #8)

Terry McMillan. The Interruption of Everything
An African-American woman in her forties discovers that the unplanned life may be the best. (NYT #2, PW #3, USA #12, WSJ #3)

Nonfiction

Jill Scott. The Moments, the Minutes, the Hours
Writing Poems and Keeping journals since 1991, Jill Scott now shares her personal poetry collection in The Moments, the Minutes, the Hours. Praised for her earthy, honestly erotic, soulful, and very real lyrics, Jill Scott explores all the flavors of life, love, and self.Of her music, Jill offers: "It's music. It's experiences. It's vulnerability. It's honesty. It's being a woman-an African-American woman. Being a daughter, a sister, a grandchild, and a godmother. It's life. It's deeper than what I know. It's bigger than what I can see. I guess it's a dive into the human spirit." And the same will come forth in this never-before-seen collection of her poetry. (E #2)