David W.

  • Thrilling Tales: A Storytime for Adults

    I can remember attending story hour at the Magnolia branch library when I was a kid, just as thousands of children still do each year at libraries all over the city. I’ve never stopped loving stories, but as I grew older they stopped having a storytime for me. So I started one myself, and every other week for the past… Continue reading

  • Banned Book-of-the-Month Club presents: Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

    Each September, libraries observe Banned Books Week, celebrating the freedom to read. How about the rest of the year? Welcome to Shelf Talk’s Banned Book-of-the-Month Club! Our inaugural selection is a novel about banning books: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Why read banned or challenged books? Yes, to affirm your right to read and think as you please,… Continue reading

  • Lost and Found II

    Following up on a recent post on found objects, here are some other cool lost things found at the library. Ian Phillips’s Lost: Lost and Found Pet Posters is loaded with notices of missing dogs, cats, bunnies, birds (including several identically-described cockatoos), and ferrets in photographs or drawings, dashed off in desperation or lovingly detailed by a child’s hand, together with… Continue reading

  • Lost and Found

    One of the most attention-getting displays we have ever done at the Central library was an exhibit of things we’ve found in library books. You’d see even the most harried or preoccupied patrons stop to peer into the Plexiglas case with its odd assortment of scribbled notes, old Polaroids, postcards, ticket stubs and bookmarks ornate… Continue reading

  • Horror Stories

    This is a great time of year to sit around and share ghost stories, as featured in this post from last week, but some readers prefer something a little stronger to properly curdle their blood. The distinction between ghost stories and other horror is nicely drawn in the Modern Library anthology Great Tales of Terror and… Continue reading

  • Ghost Stories

    October is prime time for sharing scary stories, and people who might never think of checking out a horror novel stop by the library to find something to send a chill down their spine. I love chilling and thrilling tales, and read a lot of them as I select stories for the Thrilling Tales Adult Storytime,… Continue reading

  • Is Political Satire Redundant?

    You know how when something’s on your mind, you start seeing it everywhere? I find this to be especially the case in the libary, where lately the red, white and blue covers of political fiction have been jumping off the shelves at me. Did you know that Senator Barbara Boxer wrote a novel – a… Continue reading

  • Tales of Wall Street

    The news from Wall Street has been a little too thrilling of late, but the high stakes world of high finance has provided a natural backdrop for some great fiction over the years. How do I balance my own need for a little respite from the increasingly bleak economic outlook with my creeping concern that… Continue reading

  • Celebrating the freedom to read for over two millennia

    This month and next all over Seattle (and all over the country), libraries will be putting up displays and posters and hosting events in honor of Banned Books Week (Sept 27 – Oct 4). The annual event, started in 1982 by the American Library Association, is a celebration of your freedom to read, and an important reminder that… Continue reading

  • Da Vinci’s Inquest: The Best Hour on TV?

    So, I love Vancouver. I love escaping up there for the weekend in the Summer or going to penguin shuffle the half-marathon each Spring, and lately I’ve been telling everyone who will listen that I just love the Vancouver-based cop show, Da Vinci’s Inquest. After watching I don’t know how many thousand hours of the ubiquitous yet duly… Continue reading

  • Fantastic librarians, or librarian fantasies?

    In a recent post, I enthused about a few of my favorite fictional librarians, and invited others to share their favorites. The suggestions that followed were many and varied, ranging from Public Librarian Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, to Henry DeTamble from Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, to Garth Nix’s Lirael, who is given a job… Continue reading

  • There’s a Lobster Loose!

    Lately, walking around the library, I’ve become aware of lots of beady little eyes peering at me from the shelves, and snapping claws reaching out. For some reason the past year or so has seen a strange red tide of books with lobsters on their covers. Not cookbooks, but novels – oddball comic novels in particular.… Continue reading

  • Shakespeare Lives!

    It is easy to take Will Shakespeare for granted.  So established is he in the cultural and academic pantheons that even the frequent attempts to update or “jazz up” the plays feel time-honored and traditional.  Two recent movies provide a nice antidote to the standard bardolatry, reminding us just why he is truly immortal. Hank Rogerson’s Shakespeare Behind Bars observes a troupe of… Continue reading

  • Parlez-vous French Fiction?

    I’m not sure why – I’ve never been much of a Francophile – but I’ve been reading a lot of French authors lately. In English, of course – my high school French is pretty rusty. Fortunately, all the titles below are in translation, so you can enjoy them even if you don’t speak a word of French. Though I bet… Continue reading

  • Eeeee eee eeee by Tao Lin: A “book review”

    Tao Lin was in Seattle a little while back and had some very interesting things to say about our fair city. I think that Tao Lin is the first writer I’ve read who was born the year I graduated from high school. He is the sort of writer who cries out for expressions such as “deadpan” and “tongue-in-cheek” and “ennui”… Continue reading

  • The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

    This haunting novella – sort of an ethereal counterpart to Wells’ Island of Doctor Moreau, inspired in part by the author’s fascination with Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel is the curious fable of a man lost on an island where he falls in love with the beautiful Faustine, who seems not to know he exists. It is small… Continue reading

  • Shelf Talk(s) with Cory Doctorow, pt. 2

    Librarians like Cory Doctorow a lot, not least of all because we both tend to think that information wants to be free, and we both get a kick out of giving books away. However, if you want his actual analog pen-and-ink signature on his latest book – Little Brother – Cory will be appearing at the library’s… Continue reading

  • Shelf Talk(s) with Cory Doctorow, pt. 1

    Cory Doctorow is coming to Seattle this weekend, on tour to promote his latest book – Little Brother – a smart dystopic thriller aimed at young adults, but with something to say to everyone. (Comparisons are odious, but if Gene Shalit were here he might say 1984 meets Catcher in the Rye. I’d add in Eric Frank Russell’s Wasp.) He’ll… Continue reading