All CRRL branches will be closed in observance of Labor Day on Sunday, September 5 and Monday, September 6, and for staff development on Friday, September 10, 2010. If you need to renew your materials at that time, click here.
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Local Authors
Books & Authors
Training on Demand
HeritageQuest

LibraryPoint Blog

Porter Book Sale through September 8
LibraryPoint Blog, Samantha Thomason, Books and Reading
09/03/2010 - 1:38pm

Stop by our lobby book sale today through Wednesday, September 8. (Remember, we're closed Sunday and Monday.)

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If You Like Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Book Match, LibraryPoint Blog, Michele Brown, Readalike Friday, Shelf Life Blog, Travel
09/03/2010 - 8:21am

This readalike is in response to a patron's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids. 

There have been some wonderful books with the theme of self-discovery through travel, as in Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Their journeys have been life changing for them and perhaps also for the reader.


Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez.
This classic won the 1986 National Book Award. This book is based on a number of extended trips the author made into the Arctic region. His descriptions of the flora and fauna not only evoke the northern landscape, but give a true sense of the Arctic's importance to the health of our planet. More than twenty years after its publication this book has an even more important message for us.
 

Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz
A wild and fun travel narrative focusing on Horwitz's adventures sailing on a recreation of Captain's Cook's ship. Like Eat, Pray, Love it is well written and a lot of fun to read.

 

 

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The Corpse Had a Familiar Face
20th century, LibraryPoint Blog, miami, newspaper reporters, serial killers, True Crime, Virginia Johnson, Shelf Life Blog, Nonfiction
09/02/2010 - 10:55am

“The crime that inevitably intrigues me most is murder. It’s so final.  At a fresh murder scene you can smell the blood and hear the screams; years later, they still echo in my mind. Unsolved murders are unfinished stories. The scenes of the crimes may change over the years; highways are built over them, buildings are torn down, houses are sold. I drive by and wonder if the new occupants, as they go about their daily lives, ever sense what happened there. Do they know, or am I the only one who still remembers?” – The Corpse Had a Familiar Face

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edna Buchanan spent years covering Miami, “America’s Hottest Beat,” for the Miami Herald.  Edna went from factory worker to crime reporter in a matter of just a few years with nary a college degree. Though at first appearances she was simply another beautiful blond in high heels and a mini-skirt, beneath her glamour lay the steel-trap mind of a reporter who always wants to know who, what, when, where, and why.
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Summer Book Matches for Kids
Caroline Parr, Children's Book Columns, LibraryPoint Blog
09/01/2010 - 5:27pm

      What have the thousands of kids in our summer reading club been reading all summer long? A quick look at our Book Match service, which connects readers with book recommendations via email, shows that series books continue to be popular.  (Find Book Match here.)

          Anna-Marie asked for more American Girl History Mysteries like “Ghost Light on Graveyard Shoal” by Elizabeth McDavid Jones because “I liked the pirates and the skull on the island. I liked trying to solve the mystery along with the characters.” We suggested another in the series, “The Smuggler’s Treasure” by Sarah Masters Buckey. Eleven-year-old Elisabet travels to New Orleans in 1812, determined to find a smuggler's treasure to ransom her father, imprisoned by the British.
 
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A Vision of Light by Judith Merkle Riley
14th century, Bubonic Plague, England, LibraryPoint Blog, Virginia Johnson, Wise women, Shelf Life Blog, Historical Fiction
09/01/2010 - 8:39am

In A Vision of Light, Margaret Kendall of Ashbury is a young and beautiful housewife living in 14th-century England. She is the mother of two healthy children, loved, and surrounded by many luxuries, but there is one thing more Margaret wishes, and her doting merchant husband is pleased to indulge her. Yet it is such a shocking thing that it is a harder wish to grant than a ring of rubies. Margaret wishes to write a book.

There are many difficulties. Of course, Margaret can not write--or read, for that matter—so she must find someone willing to take down her words. Three clerics refuse her, but they snigger as they point out their compatriot. Tattered, starving, and arrogant, Brother Gregory takes the job--which comes with frequent visits to Margaret’s well-stocked table. But he does so very grudgingly. What could such a feather-headed female have to say that is worth the expense of setting it down on vellum? A monk-in-training should be writing down great deeds and high-minded, philosophical points—not recipes and domestic notions.
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