Blog Category: Director's Notebook
Posted by KChin on Fri, Jan 30
Library Director’s Notebook
February, 2009
When does a book of fiction earn the exalted title “literary fiction”? Well, that’s a tough one. I was joking with a friend the other day about this and I quipped, “you know a book can count as literary fiction if it ends sad, and there’s very little kissing in it!”
What I meant was that literary fiction doesn’t follow easy formulas. Where many writers of popular fiction ensure strong sales by having the good guys come out on top and...
Posted by KChin on Mon, Dec 29
Director’s notebook
January, 2009
Hear the name Sherlock Holmes, and you think “world’s greatest detective”, right? Hear the name Vidocq and you think… well, I don’t know what you think, but I didn’t have any immediate associations with the name. Perhaps if I’d been French I might have, for it appears that Vidocq is France’s answer to Sherlock Holmes, except that...
Posted by KChin on Tue, Dec 23
Everybody has their favorite holiday film; the one they must see before the old year ends and the new year begins. For me that favorite is The Apartment, starring a very young and bewildered Jack Lemmon and a very young and lovely Shirley MacLaine. True, this is not your usual holiday fare, full of happy families and wrapped presents under the tree, but there is a feeling of love and redemption about it that happily triumphs, despite the machinations of the evil boss Fred MacMurry,...
Posted by KChin on Wed, Dec 10
‘Tis the season… for buying books as presents. At least, that’s what I do each year. And the book I’m buying multiple copies of this year is A Guide to the Birds of East Africa. Contrary to the title, this is not a birding guide, although birds feature prominently in the story and bird lovers will enjoy the birding competition that takes place in this story. This is instead a very lovely, sweet natured novel with a nice dose of romance and an unlikely hero you can really root for...
Posted by KChin on Tue, Dec 02
Is there a future for traditional printed books? Read this article for an interesting opinion… .
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/opinion/30gleick.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&em
Posted by KChin on Mon, Dec 01
Director’s Notebook December, 2008
There’s a quirky 1950’s movie starring William Holden and Gloria Swanson that I’ve always been drawn to called Sunset Boulevard. What always fascinated me, other than Swanson’s gloriously over-the-top performance, were the glimpses of the early days of movies and the larger than life escapades of the silent picture stars. That’s probably one of the reasons that I first decided to read The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr, since it is a novel...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Oct 23
Library Director’s Notebook
October, 2008
When I was much younger, say in college or even in high school, I really loved the stories of W. Somerset Maugham. There was something about the exotic locations, the history, and the sense of the sun never setting on the British Empire that appealed to my budding anglophile heart. Years later, and with more understanding of the many negative aspects of the...
Posted by KChin on Wed, Sep 24
September 2008
If you’re liike me, you have been disappointed more times than you can count with film adaptations of your favorite novels. All too often the transition from story to cinema is a bumpy ride at best, or a soul-starved rip-off at worst. Whether driven by economic, political, or catering to the-lowest-common-denominator forces, as far as audience intelligence goes, directors and producers too often succeed in bleeding the life out of stories, making the word “adaptation”...
Posted by KChin on Thu, Aug 14
Director’s notebook August 2008
One of my favorite types of novels is the kind that tells a story from multiple viewpoints. This might be through letters, diaries, or narratives from different characters. The Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins was especially adept at this type of novel: his novels The Woman In White and The Moonstone are classics of the multiple viewpoint novel.
Recently I read another novel that makes wonderful use of multiple viewpoint: The Secret...
Posted by KChin on Tue, Jul 08
Director’s Notebook
July, 2008
There are nine of them now; these wonderful stories in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series written by Alexander McCall Smith. The series began some years ago with the first novel entitled The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, featuring Precious Ramotswe. Set in Botswana, the stories are not your traditional mystery novels, in that they are short on mystery but long on...
