http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ Notes from staff and users of the Takoma Park Maryland Library. en-us 2008-05-09T17:58:55-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/001216.html Have books you want to donate? Please give us your good books, ones people will want to buy, before the book sale. Bring them in boxes if possible. Sale date: Saturday May 17th 2008 starting at 10 AM. 1216@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2008-05-09T17:58:55-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/001187.html 1187@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2008-04-24T17:34:44-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/001135.html 1135@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2008-03-04T10:30:35-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/001123.html We have the following novels by William F. Buckley: Elvis in the morning 2001 Mongoose, R.I.P. : a Blackford Oakes novel 1987 Nuremberg : the reckoning 2002 This novel on tape: A AC1438 The Redhunter a novel based on the life of Senator Joe McCarthy 1999 An adventurous non-fiction account of life aboard the Sealestial: 910.4 BUCKLEY Racing through paradise : a Pacific passage 1987 And of course the magazine he founded: NATL.REV. National review. 1955 (In the case of a magazine, the date that appears in a catalog record is usually that date it was first published.) We keep five years of print copies. Did you know he played the harpsichord? 1123@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2008-02-27T13:42:32-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/001088.html 1088@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2008-01-30T15:34:26-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/001064.html Friends of the Library Book Group January 15th, 2008 7:30 PM in the Community Center Everyone is invited to discuss Doris Lessing's The Diaries of Jane Somers. This book pairs two stories originally published separately, The Diary of A Good Neighbour and its sequel, If the Old Could. Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2007, giving a touching acceptance speech about the dangers to literature in a blog-besotted world. Please read the speech. Esme Vos disagrees with Lessing, and argues that the Internet and blogs have been a boon to serious readers. But perhaps for more casual readers the effects have not been so salutary. Just a month before Lessing's December speech, the National Endowment for the Arts documented a decline of pleasure reading in the United States: To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence. (PDF, sorry) And check Rosemary Mirsky's essay on how public libraries struggle with these issues. Some quotes from Lessing's speech:We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education it was, reading, because the young ones know so much less. And if children cannot read, it is because they have not read.In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the Tradition.The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative. 1064@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2008-01-11T09:57:13-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/001041.html 1041@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2007-12-01T11:49:13-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/001024.html We have a new book in the Maryland Reference collection. New to us, it was actually published in 2001. MD-R 598.29752 BIRDER A birder's guide to Montgomery County, Maryland published by the Montgomery County Chapter of the Maryland Ornithological Society. Whether you set out to find birds, identify trees, exercise in lovely surroundings or just love chipmunks, this is a useful book. It is organized by location, specific places that are particularly good for looking and listening. One of these is the Sligo Creek Stream Valley Trail. But the particular area they describe is not the part that winds through Takoma Park, but the section north of University. Here you may find Baltimore Orioles in summer and all sorts of other treats - the habitant is a mix of ponds, old fields and woods. You can get to it by hiking up the trail of course, or drive up Sligo Creek Parkway, turn right on University, left at the next light onto Arcola, and again left at the next light into the Kemp Mill shopping area. Park somewhere at the back and look for a trail head. The 10.2-mile paved surface portion of the Sligo Creek Trail, was designated a National Recreation Trail in 2006. Another area described in the book A birder's guide to Montgomery County, Maryland, is the 650 acre Rachel Carson Conservation Park. Did you know she lived in Montgomery County and wrote Silent Spring here? Her land was near Sunrise, which is at the intersection of Georgia Avenue (Md 97) and New Hampshire. You can find directions in the book. Please note: conservation parks do not have bathrooms or drinking water. No playgrounds or trains either. This park contains part of the planned Rachel Carson Greenway Trail. Two other sections are currently open: The Underground Railroad Experience Trail in the Quaker area of Sandy Spring and the Northwest Branch Stream Valley Park Trail which actually comes within a couple of miles of Takoma Park ... It crosses Piney Branch Road just before the intersection with New Hampshire Avenue. This trail system goes north to Wheaton Regional Park, near the Brookside Nature Center, and south into the Prince George's County Anacostia Tributary Trail System. See: Trail maps for all the Montgomery County parks and descriptions. More natural history in our Maryland Reference section: MD-R 581 BOYD A flora of the Sligo Valley in Montgomery and Prince George [sic] counties, Maryland Md-R 581 SALISBU The plants of Sligo Creek Park 599 PARADIS Mammals of Maryland MD-R 574 SHOSTEC Rock Creek watershed habitat survey and inventory of fauna and flora Montgomery County, Maryland This one also has snippits of local history. 1024@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2007-11-16T13:25:06-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/000997.html 997@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2007-11-04T17:09:16-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/000975.html Visit the Caspian, the Río Paraguay, the forests of Shikoku and the Smokies. Recently added to our audio book collection, unabridged and on CD:Special Topics in Calamity Physics - New York Times list of the ten best best books of 2006.Absurdistan also on the New York Times list of the ten best best books of 2006.The News from Paraguay - Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 2004.Coming Soon - Kafka on the Shore one of the NYT 10 best books of 2005.And from the J CD book collection:Secrets of a Civil War Submarine Non-fiction account of the efforts to recover the H.L. Hunley; winner of the 2006 Robert F. Sibert MedalStormbreaker, the first book in the Alex Rider series; made into a movieA-Z Mysteries H-J includes The Haunted Hotel, The Invisible Island and The Jaguar's Jewel.The Aurora County All-Stars, author interview.New Moon A YA (jargon for young adult) book. Romance, vampires, suspense. 975@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2007-10-17T11:45:51-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/000972.html The National Book Awards nominees were announced today. Please see our earlier post on book awards. 972@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2007-10-10T13:10:14-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/000968.html Want to read a book on your little green computer? Indexes - to help you locate a specific book: The Online Books Page University of Pennsylvania, lists over 25 thousand free books Alex catalogs about 14,000 free online texts, most from Project Gutenberg (below). Easy to use. Many more. Individual Sources: Project Gutenberg, an enormous volunteer project, has over 20 thousand free books for you, many in a choice of file types, including fast-loading plain text. Most are in English, but an increasing number are available in other languages. Practice your Spanish (scroll down to the start of the text). Project Bartleby also has lots of free books including a number of reference titles and the entire Harvard Classics. Ever read Theodore Roosevelt's A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open ?? Classic Reader Mostly fiction including some classic children's books Example: The Wind in the Willows. International Children's Digital Library Visual images of books. Free Audio Books: LibriVox. Recorded by volunteers. Want a sample? Listen to Jane Austen's Persuasion And since this is the final day of banned books week, why not pick one from this list? 968@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2007-10-06T14:20:06-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/000932.html Reminder: Come talk about Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart Tuesday, September 25th, 7:30, Community Center Atrium Room Everyone is welcome. 932@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2007-09-18T16:49:00-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/000924.html Saffron Days in LA by Bhante Walpola Piyananda is a great read. It has a lot of buddhist insight and doctrine, and a lot of funny stories for the Bhante's experiences as a genuine Theravada monk from Sri Lanka walking around LA with a pure and open heart. I think the stories while funny capture as much wisdom as the explanations of the Buddha's teachings. He walks as he talks, and when he runs into the particular bit of our culture that LA embodies, he puts it all in a new light. It's well written and a fairly quick read. If you don't like little speeches about what the Buddha taught about subject X, then you may wish to skip that section in each capture. --Chris chris@austin-lane.net 924@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2007-09-11T18:13:06-05:00 http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/archives/000916.html 916@http://www.takomapark.info/library/books/ 2007-09-06T15:52:35-05:00