Blog Category: Director's Notebook

Posted by KChin on Mon, Mar 30
Library Director’sNotebook April, 2015  Stoner by John Williams As all book lovers know, there is nothing nicer than “discovering” a book or an author you have never heard of before, opening the book, and finding yourself drawn swiftly and deeply into the story, the characters, the information, the world of the book.  This delightful experience happened to me a few weeks ago when I opened the book Stoner by John Williams.  Published in 1965, Stoner is now...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Feb 26
Library Director’s Notebook March, 2015 A character in Kate Atkinson’s book Life After Life asks “What if we had a chance to do it again and again until we finally did get it right? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Not necessarily, at least not if you are Ursula Todd, born, again and again, during a snowstorm in the Winter of 1910, sometimes dying at birth, sometimes surviving into early childhood, sometimes making it all the way to adulthood and the Blitz of London. How do you write a novel that...
Posted by KChin on Wed, Jan 28
Director’s Notebook  February, 2015   All of us at some time or another have had to ask teachers, colleagues, or bosses for letters of reference.  Usually we feel pretty confident that the person we ask will help us with a positive reference, but if we had first read Julie Schumacher’s new novel Dear Committee Members, we might not be so sanguine in our expectations.  Dear Committee Members is an epistolary novel, always an enjoyable format, since letters can reveal much more...
Posted by KChin on Tue, Jan 06
Library Director’s Notebook January, 2015 Stefan Zweig is one of the most famous people no one has ever heard of.  This certainly seems like a contradictory statement, but in our modern world where people are famous, if only briefly, for merely being famous, Stefan Zweig in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s of the last century was famous for much more concrete reasons: because he was a brilliant, highly sociable, gifted, prolific writer, a humanitarian and a pacifist...
Posted by KChin on Tue, Nov 25
Library Director’s Notebook December, 2014   The name Fannie Flagg is synonymous, as anyone who has enjoyed Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café,  with delight, good humor and optimism, with a dash of seriousness added for good measure. This winning formula succeeds again with Flagg’s latest novel The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion. Told through two major points of view, that of Sookie Poole of Point Clear, Alabama and Fritzi Jurdabralinski, of...
Posted by KChin on Wed, Sep 24
Library Director’s Notebook October, 2014 What do Henry James, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf have in common?  Probably many things, but one similarity between them that may not immediately come to mind is that they all wrote and really enjoyed ghost stories. The ghost stories they wrote were not horror stories as modern readers might think of them ; rather, the stories penned by these accomplished authors are short on gore and long on suspense, tension, and psychological...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Aug 21
Library Director’s Notebook September, 2014 Tracy Chevalier, best known for her international bestseller The Girl With the Pearl Earring, has also written another novel in which she uses her rich imagination to create a complex fictional story around an actual work of art.  In the case of her novel The Lady and the Unicorn, Chevalier’s story centers on  the creation of the famous tapestries known as The Seduction of the Unicorn which hang in a museum in Paris and are among the most highly-...
Posted by KChin on Tue, Jul 29
The Director’s Notebook August, 2014 The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt Ekphrastic poems are poems about a specific work of art.  In that case, what do you call a novel written about a specific painting?  Perhaps it hasn’t been done enough-writing a novel about a specific painting—to warrant a defining label. Yet,no matter what we label The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, it will fall into the enviable category of “books you cannot put down.” The Goldfinch is a real painting by a real...
Posted by KChin on Wed, Jul 02
The Director’s Notebook July, 2014 The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window and Disappeared , by Jonas Jonasson, is to my mind a perfect summer read.  It is silly, ingenious, engaging, and full of imaginative connections between an oddly-assorted group of oddly-endearing people. This novel falls into the category of picaresque, which is just a grand way of saying that the central...
Posted by KChin on Wed, May 28
The Director’s Notebook June, 2014 The Blind Contessa’s New Machine by Carey Wallace For those who will be travelling this summer  and who are looking for a small, portable, delightful book that won’t take up too much space in their luggage or carry-on bag,  I would recommend The Blind Contessa’s New Machine by Carey Wallace. Carolina Fantoni, the blind contessa, was not always blind.  As a young girl drawn to close observation and  appreciation of the natural world, Carolina used her...

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