LISTS

  • Seattle Picks: Set in Seattle

    Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie Someone is murdering white men in Seattle, scalping them and leaving owl feathers behind. As racial tensions rise to fever pitch, suspicion falls on John Smith, an Indian raised by white parents. Leaving Yesler by Peter Bacho Choices are few for a mixed-race working class kid from the projects, but… Continue reading

  • Desert Island Books

    There seem to be a lot of lists of Desert Island books out there, such as this one here on Nancy Pearl’s Booklust site, or this person’s Flickr album, or this cute cartoon thingy. What bugs me is that no matter how many interesting or worthwhile titles one finds on these lists, almost none of… Continue reading

  • Celebrate Black History Month Through Children’s Literature

    Black History Month invites us to explore African American culture and history with children. Consider making a date with your favorite children to attend one of the many literature-based events in the Seattle area, connecting history and the African American experience with children’s literature. Here are a few suggestions: Central Library will host the play… Continue reading

  • Further down The Road: Dystopian Fiction

    If Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road – or the movie adaptation hitting theaters October 16 – piques your interest in fictional visions of a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world, here are some other books to check out. There’s been a massive flood and only one family, on an ark, has been saved.  Sound familiar?  The Island at the… Continue reading

  • Walkabout

    Taking a walk is such a mundane activity, but there is still something mysterious and wonderful about it, even if it only takes us around the neighborhood. One notices a relaxation of pace and shortening of perspective, perhaps — objects often seem farther away in a car or the bus, bracketed, as it were, by… Continue reading

  • Watching the Watchmen: The Superhuman Factor.

    Finally: This week is the loooong awaited premiere of the Watchmen movie based on the renowned genre-bending graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The original, together with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (partial inspiration for the recent hit films), helped usher in a new “dark age” in superhero comics, one that is bleaker,… Continue reading

  • Magnolia’s Favorite Audiobooks

    “If I don’t like the [narrator’s] voice, I can’t listen. If I like the voice, I can listen to almost anything!”  — Magnolia Library Patron While there’s nothing like sitting down with a good book and thumbing through the pages, sometimes listening to a book read by a really talented narrator can be an even… Continue reading

  • Tiny people, big adventures

    Sometimes, especially at night when the world is dark and quiet, I hear strange noises in my house. Rhythmic little taps that fade to nothing. The squeak of a cupboard opening in an empty room. A faint sound like distant voices coming from up near the eaves, where no human ought to be. My first… Continue reading

  • 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

  • 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

  • Before Autumn Leaves

    Before autumn leaves, settle down into a bounty of words, sights and sounds that crackle with the color and energy of the season.  Then, take a few moments to take in an eclectic array of books and CDs that’ll bring an extra spark to warm the chill heading up that frosty hill. Let’s start with some… 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

  • Scaring me in 2008

    This year proves fertile ground for new kinds of horror — scary books that go beyond the splash-gore of Clive Barker or the pokey-fanged love of Tanya Huff and L.A. Banks. Even Stephen King is up to something new. Frankly, simply by his status as one of the most prolific horror writer in America, I… 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

  • In space, no one can hear you read…

    So, there you are bobbing along weightlessly — another dull evening orbiting Earth. How do you pass the time? Well, if you’re on the International Space Station, you do have some entertainment options! Thanks to a Freedom of Information request, NASA recently released a list of all the books, movies, and music currently on the… Continue reading

  • The Vampire List, Part 3: From traditional to modern

    When people hear the words “vampire story” two authors come to mind — Bram Stoker and Anne Rice. These writers pioneered the world of vampire fiction, with Bram Stoker basically creating it and Anne Rice redefining it into what most readers know today. But as we’ve proven in previous lists, Stoker and Rice are not… Continue reading