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Coretta Scott King Awards 2009
Caroline Parr, Children's Book Columns, Reading Room Blog, Book Buzz Blog
03/30/2009 - 5:19pm

The Newbery and Caldecott Medals may be better known, but the Coretta Scott King Awards, now in their fortieth year, have become a highlight of the American Library Association's awards ceremony.  Given to African American authors and illustrators for outstanding inspirational and educational contributions, these books are among the most distinguished of the year.

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The Stories of the Shanachies
Caroline Parr, Children's Book Columns, Reading Room Blog, Book Buzz Blog
03/30/2009 - 6:04pm

 

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Here’s to shamrocks, shillelaghs, and most of all to shanachies!

For a thousand years in Ireland, storytellers known as shanachies were ranked second only to kings. Even into the twentieth century, they could be found telling stories in villages, where they kept alive the myths, history, folk and fairy tales of the Irish people. The shanachies may be gone, but their stories live on in the bounty of picture books and story collections for children.

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If you like books by Donna Leon...
Book Match, Michele Brown, Reading Room Blog
03/24/2009 - 11:36am
The Terra-Cotta Dog

When I think of Donna Leon, I immediately flash to a series by Andrea Camilleri featuring Sicilian detective Inspector Montalbano.

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If you like fantasy books with interesting characters...
Book Match, Mary Buck, Reading Room Blog
03/24/2009 - 11:39am
Princess bride

Hello!  These fantasy titles have interesting characters and keep you guessing as to what will happen next:

The Princess Bride
by William Goldman
The classic story of true love, sword-fights, revenge, death and miracles.

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American Life in Poetry: Column 209
American Life in Poetry, Reading Room Blog, Poetry
03/23/2009 - 1:10pm

by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006

I've gotten to the age at which I am starting to strain to hear things, but I am glad to have gotten to that age, all the same. Here's a fine poem by Miller Williams of Arkansas that gets inside a person who is losing her hearing.

Going Deaf

No matter how she tilts her head to hear
she sees the irritation in their eyes.
She knows how they can read a small rejection,
a little judgment, in every What did you say?

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American Life in Poetry: Column 208
American Life in Poetry, Reading Room Blog, Poetry
03/23/2009 - 1:06pm

by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006
To have a helpful companion as you travel through life is a marvelous gift. This poem by Gerald Fleming, a long-time teacher in the San Francisco public schools, celebrates just such a relationship.

Long Marriage

You're worried, so you wake her
& you talk into the dark:
Do you think I have cancer, you
say, or Were there worms
in that meat, or Do you think
our son is OK, and it's
wonderful, really—almost

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If you like "Tweak" by Nic Sheff...
Book Match, Drugs, Meg Raymond, Reading Room Blog
03/20/2009 - 11:20am
Tweak

Thanks for contacting the Central Rappahannock Regional Library for a Book Match.  We LOVE to connect readers to the right books!

You wanted something similar to "Tweak" by Nic Sheff.  One book list you might like is called "Only When I Laugh", which has non-fiction titles about people facing life's greatest hurts - catastrophe, calamity, illness, reversal of fortune and death - with clarity, wit, and above all, humor.

 

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“Rich, and famous, and happy before I die”: Louisa May Alcott.
Author profile, LibraryPoint Blog, Scott Phillips, Reading Room Blog, unRequired Reading Blog, Literary/Classics
03/19/2009 - 9:37am

Louisa May Alcott did not write because she had the need to get the stories out. Louisa May wrote for one reason: she wanted her family to be rich.

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American Life in Poetry: Column 207
American Life in Poetry, Reading Room Blog, Poetry
03/10/2009 - 9:14am

by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006

People singing, not professionally but just singing for joy, it's a wonderful celebration of life. In this poem by Sebastian Matthews of North Carolina, a father and son happen upon a handful of men singing in a cafe, and are swept up into their pleasure and community.

Barbershop Quartet,
East Village Grille

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If you like Are You There Vodka by Chelsea Handler
Book Match, Kara Rockwell, Reading Room Blog
05/31/2011 - 3:28pm
Are you there vodka?

Thanks for requesting a book match!  If you like Are You There Vodka...by Chelsea Handler, you might also like these titles and authors:

I Love Everybody, and Other Atrocious Lies: True Tales of a Loudmouth Girl by Laurie Notaro.

In side-splitting essays, Notaro describes such things as the horror of entering the corporate work force, the total gross-out of high-protein diets, and the total exhilaration--and self-consciousness--brought on by publishing her first book.  (Catalog description)

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