Dreams of Hope

Today, Kansas Day, is the anniversary of the day Barack Obama visited us here in El Dorado, Kansas -- in fact, next door to my library. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius joined us that day as well to endorse him for the Democratic candidacy.

Thanks to Shelf Awareness for this bookstore news item: McNally Jackson Booksellers in New York City is focusing not on books written by or about Obama but mostly on the books the President read in his 20s, which the store has collected in a display titled "How History Was Made: Books that Inspired a President." "There is an incredible range of books and writers," said McNally Jackson's John McGregor, who came up with the idea for the display shortly after Obama won the election in November.

McGregor conducted extensive research to compile the list of more than 50 featured titles....
McNally Jackson's List of Titles Read by Obama

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
The Bible
The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow
Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
The Collected Writings of Thomas Jefferson
The Confessions of St. Augustine
The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich
Exodus by Leon Uris
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
Gandhi: An Autobiography
Gandhi's Truth by Erik H. Erikson
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
Gilead by by Marilynne Robinson
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr
King Lear by Shakespeare
Loon Lake by E.L. Doctorow
Mila 18 by Leon Uris
Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr
My Life as a Man by Philip Roth
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
The Outsider by Richard Wright
Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Working by Studs Terkel
World's Fair by E.L. Doctorow
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

It's been a month or more...

since I wrote about Rachel's new webcomic, Near and Far.

Ir's deligtful to have an author in the house who takes what happens in daily life and puts it in a form for the world to see. Oh, wait, that still happens when my husband preaches... Anyway, this is more about her and the online world that is out there for us all. Go take a look and raise her statistics. Comment. Subscribe. Encourage the artist and the writer both.

And thank you from the bottom of a mom's heart.

Lincoln's Birthday Celebration

Hello all....

Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday is coming and the U.S. has been
celebrating for months.

The Reference folks at the State Library of Kansas are offering up a
"birthday gift" of resources on our 16th president at:

http://ksdocs.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!

Bill Sowers, State Library of Kansas

The Graveyard Book

Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book just won the Newbery Award, the most prestigious award granted by librarians for children's literature each year. It so happens that I bought it recently, so you can check it out from this library as soon as we get the Newbery Medal sticker placed on its front cover. I have tried to get a complete collection of Newbery and Caldecott( children's book illustration) winners - one for reference, one for checkout - for our collection each year. This year I tuned in to the first ever live streaming broadcast of the events in Denver, at ALA's mid-winter conference. I have never before been reading the winner at home - I'm on page 79 - when the Newbery was announced! (So far there's been a triple murder, and a wandering baby, and a girl named Scarlett, and ghosts, and the Sleer...)

You can hear Gaiman himself reading the book, chapter by chapter, one per city on his recent book promotion tour. Check out his journal, revealing most of his reaction to the phone call announcing his win. Interestingly enough, the movie of his book Coraline is being released February 6th, next week as I write this.

The Newbery Award deliberations are this week...

Shannon Hale

...and thanks to my daughter Rachel, I saw this post from Shannon Hale, author of the Honor book - not the final winner, mind you - Princess Academy.

What did the Newbery ever do for me?

(The Goose Girl was pretty amazing, too, by the way. She's got quite a series of these books in the fantasy/fairy tale/myth genre that I enjoyed this past year. And yes, we have her newest, the graphic novel Rapunzel's Revenge, available for checkout at the L.W. Nixon Library.)

--Micaela

Have a good holiday

....and catch up on your rest this weekend, like Eowyn here. The semester starts for real next Tuesday!

Libraries busy during down times, part 2

From an article in the Wall Street Journal:

"This isn't the first time library attendance has spiked in a downturn. The 1987 and 2001 recessions saw similar jumps, librarians say. But few people thought that libraries would again be in such favor after so much information flooded the Web.

One big draw: Most libraries have put in free computer and Wi-Fi service. And they've begun stocking DVDs and videogames. With the recession weighing on them, "people recognize what a great value the public library is," says Jim Rettig, president of the American Library Association in Chicago."

^

Meanwhile, we're preparing for budget reductions for FY2010 of 5% and I consider that fair, even as I know the need for resources will go up, compared with what some libraries in some states face.