Blog Post
Meet “It’s All Write!” 2016 Judge #5: Kevin Emerson!
by BugsAndSlugs
Kevin Emerson is the author of twelve novels, including the Exile series books: Exile, Encore to an Empty Room and the series conclusion, coming in August 2016, Finding Abby Road.
School Library Journal declared that Emerson's Atlanteans series, "...reads like a combination of Star Trek, Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games... The plot twists around like a vine, blending mythology, technology, pandemics, violence, and excitement."
Kevin Emerson is a singer, drummer, and guitarist and has played in bands since high school. He has toured across the country and in Europe and the UK and now lives in Seattle, one of the best music cities in the world. Learn more about Kevin on his blog and stay tuned for more information about the 2016 “It’s All Write!” Teen Short Story Contest Judges!
Blog Post
Matisse’s Garden
by manz
This gorgeous picture book features reproductions of artworks by French artist Henri Matisse. Matisse’s Garden tells how he began cutting paper shapes and how his process evolved into large scale works of art that are so recognizable today. It beautifully captures the essence of the color, pattern, and shapes in his work. It’s a beautiful book for art admirers of all ages. I also recommend Henri’s Scissors, and if you want more perhaps you’ll enjoy these other books on Matisse.
Blog Post
New Adult Fiction: The Ramblers
by eapearce
There are times in our lives to travel a straight line. And then there are times to ramble, to explore what might be as we accept what is.
The Ramblers, the brand new novel by Aidan Rowley, is being hailed as “exquisite.” Taking place over one fateful week during Thanksgiving, the book follows three friends whose lives change profoundly in this short period. Clio Marsh had a difficult childhood, and uses her hobby of quiet birdwatching in Central Park to escape. After years of avoiding her memories, she is only now beginning to take the first tentative steps out of her shell. Smith Anderson, the privileged daughter of a wealthy New York family, makes her living organizing the lives of others, despite the fact that her life is in shambles after a broken engagement and the anxiety caused by her sister’s society wedding. Tate Pennington has returned to New York City after working in the West Coast tech world, licking his wounds after an imploded marriage and determined to pursue his artistic dreams.
As the trio’s lives intersect and they sort through their daily trials and tribulations, they learn the valuable lesson of letting go of the past to make room for the future. Reads the book jacket: “Part love letter to New York City, part tour through the wilderness of the human heart and mind, [The Ramblers] asks, ‘Maybe that is the point after all? To be lost?’”
Blog Post
Poetry on the Bus!
by muskrat
To celebrate National Poetry Month, AADL has joined with the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority for poetry on the bus!
In the spirit of the 2006 Poetry Bus and following in the footsteps of Vancouver's Poetry Moves and the Poetry Society of America's Poetry in Motion campaigns, AADL and AAATA have introduced two placards in each AATA bus with excerpts from great poems by John Keats, Li Po, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Claude McKay and others.
See if you can read them all! There are 8 placards and they will be up all month
Then head over to the library to check out more poetry!
Blog Post
Beep! Beep! Go to Sleep!
by manz
It’s FestiFools weekend in Ann Arbor and today is the BIG robot costume making workshop for tomorrow’s spectacle on Main St.! So of course some of us have robots on the mind around here. You may have heard some wonderful robot stories told at storytimes the past few weeks. Here is a darling new bedtime book that’s a new favorite robot picture book.
In Beep! Beep! Go to Sleep a little boy is trying to get his robots to go to sleep, but they come up with every excuse as to why they can’t. (Sounds a bit like putting kids to bed!) “Three little robots, time for bed, Time to dim your infrared.” The rhyming text, adorable pictures, and ROBOTS will have kids wanting to read this over and over at bedtime. If you're still feelin' the bots the next morning, here is a handy list of even more robot books.
Blog Post
For Gillian Flynn fans: Just Fall
by eapearce
A brand new psychological thriller has hit the shelves here at AADL: Just Fall, by Nina Sadowsky. Perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn and Patricia Highsmith, Just Fall explores the question: when you find out that the love of your life is a killer, can you continue to love them anyway?
Ellie and Rob are a golden couple: they both have fantastic jobs, live in a gorgeous apartment, and are madly in love. As their wedding approaches, Ellie is sure that it will be the happiest day of her life. And why shouldn’t it be? But just moments after saying “I do,” Ellie learns that Rob has as terrible secret and has been hiding a dark past. The more Ellie finds out, the deeper she is swept into a vortex of betrayal and danger.
On their honeymoon, Ellie isn’t basking in the Caribbean sunlight, as she’s become the only thing standing in between Rob and his potentially lethal destiny. How far is she willing to go to save the man she loves? As the book jacket puts it, “This sexy, seductive debut novel—balanced on the razor’s edge of moral ambiguity—breathlessly confronts the devastating consequences unleashed when love and murder collide, and devotion lies down with darkness.”
Blog Post
Meet “It’s All Write!” 2016 Judge #4: Todd Strasser!
by BugsAndSlugs
Todd Strasser is the author of more than 140 books for teens and middle graders including the best-selling Help! I’m Trapped In series, and numerous award-winning YA novels including The Wave, Give A Boy A Gun, Wish You Were Dead, Blood on my Hands, Kill You Last, No Place, , Boot Camp, If I Grow Up and Fallout .
Several of Todd's books have been adapted for television, and his novels The Wave and How I Created My Perfect Prom Date became feature films. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and he has also written for television, newspapers such as The New York Times, and magazines such as The New Yorker and Esquire .
Learn more about Todd Strasser by reading his blog and don't forget to stay tuned for more information about the 2016 “It’s All Write!” Teen Short Story Contest Judges!
Blog Post
Sharpie Art Workshop
by manz
Who doesn’t love a good Sharpie? Yeah, we’re talking about the markers. Perhaps you favor the Sharpie ultra-fine point, or perhaps the Sharpie brush or the Sharpie twin tip. Regardless, Sharpie Art Workshop:Techniques and Ideas for Transforming Your World is the book for you. The Sharpie was invented in 1964 and is the number-one selling permanent marker in the world. This pretty little book asks the big question: Why sharpies? It then explores the history and facts, materials, tools and techniques, and creative exercises all involving the beloved Sharpie.
Note: This blog post was not written with a Sharpie. Or was it?
Blog Post
Hot Fiction: Gold Fame Citrus
by eapearce
The dystopian novel Gold Fame Citrus has gotten a lot of buzz in recent months. Named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2015 and reviewed favorably in the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review, The Lost Angeles Times and The Washington Post, the book shines as brightly as the white dune sea of the near-future southwestern United States that it describes. Author Claire Vaye Watkins is a writing professor here in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, and Gold Fame Citrus is a hit of a debut novel.
The apocalyptic world that Watkins paints so vividly is that of fiction… for now. Drought has struck the southwestern United States. High winds and broiling temperatures have created a rolling “dune sea”, devoid of almost all life, and moving across the country at breakneck speed. A few survivors hold out, among them former model Luz Dunn and her partner, Ray. The two live in an abandoned Hollywood mansion, surviving on rationed cola and whatever else they can find. When they discover a child one day, however, their world—unexpectedly stable despite the destruction around them—turns upside down. What follows is a fascinating look at how humans react in the face of fear and the unknown, when survival is constantly on the line. Deciding to leave California, Ray, Luz, and the baby attempt to cross the dune sea to make it to the eastern United States—overcrowded but still livable.
The setting of Gold Fame Citrus is fascinating in and of itself, but Watkins creates such a brilliant storyline and uses such descriptive language that readers may feel as though they are trekking across the dusty landscape next to Ray and Luz, with the sun beating down upon them, tasting salt and grit on their tongue. “Gold Fame Citrus is a dreamy story with a mystical streak and a core of juvenile irresponsibility that does not go unpunished,” writes Jason Sheehan in his review of the book for NPR. “She's [Watkins got a knife eye for details, a vicious talent for cutting to the throbbing vein of animal strangeness that scratches inside all of us.” The characters are as intense as the landscape. Despite being in a place that is entirely unfamiliar to us today, the characters and their reactions make sense to readers, if not always in a positive way. “A great pleasure of the book is Watkins’s fearlessness, particularly in giving her characters free rein to be themselves. People who were shiftless and irresponsible before the disaster are shiftless and irresponsible afterward. This particular apocalypse is not an opportunity for redemption, and no one is ennobled by it,” reads the New York Times review of Gold Fame Citrus. “We were dishonest with ourselves and others before the apocalypse, Watkins suggests, and the same will hold true afterward. The world might be irrevocably altered, but we’re still us.”
Watkins is also the author of the short story collection Battleborn.
Crafts
Happy Birthday, Roald Dahl
Saturday September 17, 2016: 1:00pm to
2:00pm
Downtown Library: Secret Lab
Preschool - Grade 5