The 2011 New Mexico Book Awards!

The 2011 New Mexico Book Award winners have been announced!

The full list of winners can be found on the New Mexico Book Co-op website Congratulations to all the winners!






This year's list of award winners is long, so here's a sample:



Young Readers
Grandpa's magic tortilla
by Demetria Martínez and Rosalee Montoya-Read ; illustrations by Lisa May Casaus ; Spanish translation by Rosalee Montoya-Read.

Juvenile
Tortilla sun
by Jennifer Cervantes.

Young Adult
Split
by Swati Avasthi.

Anthology
Rio Arriba : a New Mexico county
compiled and edited by Robert J. Tórrez & Robert Trapp.

Biography
Open range : the life of Agnes Morley Cleaveland
by Darlis A. Miller.

Biography
Kit Carson : the life of an American border man
by David Remley.

Gardening
Gardens of Santa Fe
by Anne Hillerman ; photographs by Don Strel.

Multi-cultural Subject
Chief Loco : Apache peacemaker
by Bud Shapard.

Nature/Environment
The return of the river : writers, scholars, and citizens speak on behalf of the Santa Fe River
edited by A. Kyce Bello.

Nature/Environment
Raptors of New Mexico
edited by Jean-Luc E. Cartron.

LibraryThing Redux!

Many of you may already use LibraryThing to organize your own home or business libraries. We've now added some of LibraryThing's features to our catalog to help enhance your browsing and searching experience.

The features we have are:

• Shelf Browse: you can see book covers arranged by call number
  
• Tags: see and click on different labels for each item
  
• Similar Items: see recommendations for both fiction and non-fiction
  
• Series & Awards: see if this title has won awards, or if it’s part of a series
  
• Lexile Reading Level: For select Children's and Teen titles

Tags and Book Recommendations for The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

The best thing about LibraryThing is that all of the information is right in front of you. You won't need to search a separate database or check out different websites to get reading recommendations or series information. Just click on the book covers or links and get all the info you need!

As always, come visit us at any library branch, call our reference desks, or email library@santafenm.gov if you have questions about this or any other resource.

Southside Half-Price Sale

Everything in the Store is Half-Price


Southside Library
6599 Jaguar Dr.

One Day Only
Saturday, October 29

Open to public: 10 am - 4 pm

Hardcover books - $1 each
Paperback books - 50 cents each or 3 for $1
Children's books - 25 cents each
Videos & DVDs - $1 each
Cassettes - 25 cents each

Cash / checks only. No plastic.
Scanners now allowed but please be courteous and no hoarding.
Sponsored by the Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library.
All proceeds from the sale of these donated books are used to purchase new books for the Library.

True Brit Book Signing

Artemesia Publishing is proud to announce the release of its tenth book in print and Rosemary Zibart's first installment of the Far and Away series, True Brit: Beatrice, 1940, about young people displaced and relocated during World War II.

What would it be like for an English girl to come from rainy, war-torn England in 1940 and arrive in sunny bohemian Santa Fe? In True Brit: Beatrice, 1940, a spoiled English girl, Beatrice Sims, comes to Santa Fe to live with a practical, hard-working nurse, Clementine Pope. At first, the twelve-year-old hates the dusty little town, and is accused of being “faceta” – stuck up. But soon Beatrice makes friends with goofy Arabella, develops a crush on handsome Esteban, aids Ana, a shy Indian girl, and learns that she has more courage and ability than she ever imagined.

Join Artemesia Publishing and Ms. Zibart for a book signing and special presentation of book excerpts on Sunday, October 30 from 2-4 pm as part of the Dia de los Cuentos (Day of Stories) at the Santa Fe Children's Museum on 1050 Old Pecos Trail. Admission is free with museum entry.

For more information, call 505-603-2656.

Swimming in Stars

You may have noticed a small change in our catalog recently. If you've read something or watched something that you feel strongly about, you can rate them on a Five Star scale. Just login to your account, find the title of the book or movie, and click the stars that are a couple of lines beneath the title.

For example, I just read The Hunger Games, and every few pages I was either laughing out loud or choking back tears. So that gets 4 Stars from me. Why not 5? Well, it's difficult to read a book at lunchtime with mascara running down your face. Ahem.



But if I ever change my mind and want to give it 5 Stars, or 1 Star, or just remove my rating altogether, I can click on the "My Ratings" button in my account, see what I've already rated, and delete all or some of my ratings. My Ratings are completely anonymous, so if a friend recommends something that I didn't enjoy much, I can give it 2 Stars with impunity.

So if you check out something that you feel strongly about, let the rest of us know!

Gimme Envy

Sometimes, another library comes up with something so cool that:

a) We're in awe
b) We're jealous
c) We're champing at the bit to become petty thieves
d) All of the above

The most recent resource to inspire this collegial envy is Gimme! from the Scottsdale Public Library. Gimme! is a simple book recommendation tool that's open to everyone. Just choose what you're looking for from the easy drop-down menu, and Voila! Author, title, book description, and brief review! For example, I asked Gimme! to "gimme a laser gun", and was told to read Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce. When I commanded, "Gimme something old school," it replied with Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, one of my all-time favorites.

While we're just not as cool as Scottsdale, we do have something in our catalog that can help you get book recommendations. If you're in the catalog and looking at a title you like, say, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, you can find a button that says "More Like This" on the top row. When you click on it, it gives you a list of similar titles based on subject headings. In this example, I have 1,967 suggestions, but I can modify the keywords searched, or further limit and modify the search to a reasonable length of suggestions.

If you'd still like more book recommendations, check out the page, About Books and Literature, linked on our homepage. The Book clubs, lists, genres section in particular has a great collection of "If you like" lists, which should start you on your way to piles and piles of great books to read. But either way, if you decide to use Scottsdale's Gimme! to get suggestions, we won't cry or pout. We promise!

Connect in Nature

A Book Talk and Presentation
By Susan Guyette and Earl D. James

Thursday, September 22
6:00 - 7:30 pm
Main Library Community Room
145 Washington Ave.

Authors Susan Guyette, Zen Birding: Connect in Nature, and Earl D. James, Bella Coola: The Rainforest Brought Them Home, will hold a book talk and discussion on the coming cultural shift needed for planetary action, Eastern and Native American spirituality, birdwatching, and the importance of habitat conservation.

Ms. Guyette's Zen Birding portrays birdwatching as one path to connect with Mother Earth, as well as to recognize the balance of her ecosystems. Mr. James' eco-novel, Bella Coola, probes the spiritual fault lines of our civilization in crisis.

This program is free and open to the public.

A Requiem for Borders

The liquidation announcement that signaled the death knell for Borders, the national bookstore chain, was greeted by many with dismay, but not necessarily surprise. For folks who regularly included a sojourn to their local store on Sunday mornings or Friday evenings, the removal of Planet Borders from their orbit is akin to a black hole in their lives. In the widely-circulated Associated Press article about the liquidation, a 42-year-old woman laments, "So where are we going to buy books from? I just got into reading books the last two or three years, and they just keep closing all these bookstores..."

Whether you shopped at Borders or not, whether you liked Borders or not, the closing of the chain will have an impact on our community. Santa Fe is a small city, so chances are you know an alumnus of the Borders sales floor or a recently laid-off employee. Visitors and residents respond with shock when they're told they can't while away a hot summer afternoon in the Sanbusco Borders café anymore. And for such a huge book behemoth to fall, many people are chattering that it's the canary in the coalmine about the fate of the book itself!

But Santa Fe is luckier than many communities. For one, we have a plethora of independent new and used bookstores all over town, pushing us up in the "bookstores per capita" category. While Borders may have been a big name, they weren't the only literary game in town. Let's see, there's Collected Works, Garcia Street, Nicholas Potter, The Ark, Big Star, Book Mountain, True Believers, and about half-a-dozen more. We also have an impressive number of libraries. There's us, the three-branch Santa Fe Public Library, with shelves and shelves of books, CDs, and DVDs; programs for children, teens, and adults; and dozens of free online resources that you can access from home. There are other college, government, and museum libraries in town that can fulfill pretty much every information need you have. And if you want a destination for those Friday nights or Sundays, all of the museums run by the Museum of New Mexico have free admission to New Mexico residents on Sundays, and many museums and galleries have Free Fridays.

I'm not a prophet, so I can't say if the demise of Borders heralds the demise of all print information and entertainment. I can say that the written word has seen upheavals before, and while Borders may have gotten steamrolled by the latest one, libraries have a good track record of adapting and and thriving. To the 42-year-old who mourns the demise of Borders, I encourage her to browse in her local library and seek out other bookstores, and to see what's been there all along.

Image by George England via Wikimedia Commons.

Books vs. Movies for Teens

This summer, the Southside Library will be taking a break from their regular teen meet-ups to offer Books vs. Movies! Teens ages 13-18 will be able to watch a movie one week, and to compare the flick to the book the next week.

All programs start at 3:30 pm on Thursday afternoons. The movie viewings will last 2 hours, and the book discussions will be 1 hour.

Since June has 5 Thursdays, the last one will be a Teen Party! Just show up and have some fun.

Call 955-2828 for movie & book titles and for more information.

June 2: Movie
June 9: Book

June 16: Movie
June 23: Book

June 30: Teen Party!

July 7: Movie
July 14: Book

July 21: Movie
July 28: Book

The Southside Library is located at 6599 Jaguar Dr. off of Country Club Rd.
These programs are free and registration is not required.

The Teen Programs are sponsored by the Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library.

A Science Fiction "Secret"

My sleeves are rolled up and my clothes are getting dusty as I go through our Science Fiction section. I'm looking at all the books that haven't been checked out in ages, and also seeing which SF gems the collection may be lacking. While librarians have very specific criteria about which books to keep or add, sometimes a book or author may try to break the rules and make me check it out so that it appears to have more fans than it does.

One such author is Theodore Sturgeon. His works are strange and weird, even for a genre that thrives on strange and weird. I first came across his work in a collection of short stories, The World Treasury of Science Fiction, which has his brilliant short piece, "The Man Who Lost the Sea". My appreciation for him grew slowly, however. I would occasionally acquire one of his battered paperbacks in a used bookstore, but they would collect dust on my own shelves as I devoured new acquisitions by writers such as Philip K. Dick or Ursula Le Guin.

And then, the "secret" was revealed to me. I was talking about Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. with a friend some years ago. If you've read just a few of Vonnegut's novels, then you're probably well-acquainted with one of his recurring characters, Kilgore Trout. Trout is a beleaguered science fiction writer who lives in abject poverty and can only manage publication in some rather questionable fora. However, in several of Vonnegut's novels, Trout's ideas are either the cause for the end of the world, the salvation of humanity, or both. My friend revealed the open secret that Kilgore Trout was based on Theodore Sturgeon. Trout...Sturgeon, funny that I hadn't connected the two before!

Curiosity compelled me to crack open the dusty paperbacks on my bookshelves, starting with More than Human. Now when I hit a used bookstore I head to the Sturgeons before the PKDs or Le Guins. He is not for every taste, and I can't promise that his books will save humanity. I can promise that if you want to read something unlike anything you've read, Theodore Sturgeon is worth the dust.

Hidden Treasure

Like many librarians, I got my start as a library shelver. Often part-time and minimum wage, shelvers are the most entry-level staff in the whole place, but without them each and every library would fall apart. The best part about being a shelver is getting hands-on knowledge of the variety of books, newspapers, magazines, and other resources in the library.

Besides becoming well-acquainted with the enormous breadth and depth of the library's information and the thrilling methods of organization, there was another interesting perk about working in a place where I handled so many objects that had passed through many other hands. I've never had a term for the various bits of other people's lives that I encountered: bookmarks, photographs, notecards, letters, newspaper clippings, shopping receipts. I collected these artifacts for years and used them in art projects or as inspiration for writing exercises.

It's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who enjoys this small degree of voyeurism. Fans of Found Magazine share these sentiments. In the strictly found-in-a-book category, Forbes has an excellent literary blog called Booked: Reading Unbound, and a regular feature is Forgotten Bookmarks. Whether it's a recipe for brownies left in Motherless Brooklyn, or a land deed from 1917, the assortment of hidden treasures unearthed is fascinating. The primary blogger is a used and rare book dealer, so his finds are more, shall we say, genteel than some library objects or Found's fare. That is to say, I don't think he's posted about finding a bacon bookmark in a rare edition.

While I love what I do, I sometimes miss the serendipity of the shelver's life. In addition to the right book falling into my hands at the right time, there's always the possibility that Mamie Eisenhower's Million Dollar Fudge recipe would also fall into my hands. Fortunately I can still partake of Forgotten Bookmarks, and puzzle over the pieces of strangers’ lives.

Portrait of Mamie Eisenhower courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Free eBooks!

We’re getting our feet wet with free eBooks. These are full-text books that can be read online or downloaded to eReaders such as the Kindle and Nook. We offer over 400 titles through our catalog, courtesy of the non-profit Project Gutenberg. We have a Featured List of the titles, and you can also find them by doing a Call Number search for eBook.

EBooks can be identified by the following icon:






Project Gutenberg has over 30,000 titles, and they are all works that are in the public domain in the United States. You'll find classics such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as well as more esoteric titles such as Hand Shadows to Be Thrown upon the Wall (1859). There are also titles of Chinese fiction, in Chinese, from the Ming Dynasty! We hope to add more to our catalog as they become available.

These items do not need to be checked out or returned, and there is no limit to how many books you can download. However, since this is a free product from a non-profit organization, technical assistance from the library and from Project Gutenberg is limited. However, you can find information on the How-To Wiki.

Give them a try, and let us know what you think!

Full Circle:

A Pioneer Family Story in New Mexico and the West

Thursday, March 24,
7:00 p.m.
Main Library Community Room

Full Circle continues the story of Thomas Chown’s first novel, Wolves at the Door, a story based on his ancestor’s pioneering across Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado from 1864 to 1944. The story reflects the fictional Devon family's experiences from the Battle of Westport, Missouri, to their Ft. Scott, Kansas, homestead and the founding of Kiowa, Kansas. Their move west continues to the coal mines of Madrid, New Mexico, and to Walsenburg, Colorado. Their story offers a particular historical perspective of early Santa Fe, Madrid, and Las Vegas, New Mexico, all carefully researched by the author.

For reviews of Mr. Chown’s books, check out his website.

This event is free and open to the public.

eBooks Await

Are you curious about eBooks? We are too! We've been getting tons of requests for downloadable texts for your eReaders. Just to assure you, we're looking into options from various vendors for eBook subscriptions.

In the meantime, there are some stop-gap measures you can take. If you have an MP3 player or iPod, visit our One-Click Downloadable Audiobooks page and listen to some interesting titles. For free eBook options, we have listings on our About Books and Literature page. And while we're weighing our options, let us know what you're looking for in an eBook provider. Selection? Ease of download and transfer? New bestsellers or old classics? You can provide feedback in the comments section here, or email us at library@santafenm.gov.

Thanks for your patience, and we're looking forward to hearing from you!

He's a character, alright!

Several years ago, a co-worker suggested that I blog about Charles Lummis around his birthday, March 1. I knew a couple of catchphrases about him: writer, librarian, editor, Indian Rights activist. March can be a busy month in Libraryland, so the poor guy has been languishing in my to-do file since then.

After reading a few brief histories of this extraordinary man and his work, I'm glad to finally catch up with him. Born in 1859, in Lynn, Massachusetts, Lummis' life stands out from many of the stories about Yankees who made their way West at that time. For one thing, he walked out here. Yes, when given a job as a reporter for the nascent Los Angeles Times, he decided to take a stroll from Cincinnati and write about his travels along the way. It was on this tramp that he fell in love with New Mexico, despite almost freezing to death in a snowstorm.

The rest of his life was spent divided among Los Angeles, travel, and San Mateo and Isleta Pueblo, New Mexico. As a Yankee who also migrated out West—with the help of modern transportation— I can't help but be entertained by this character. I don't want to give anything else away about this extraordinary man, so I'll just point you to some sources if you're intruigued:

• New Mexico Office of the State Historian: Charles F. Lummis
• Charles Fletcher Lummis, 'Apostle of the Southwest,' 1859-1928
• Library Books about Charles Fletcher Lummis
• Library Books written by Charles Fletcher Lummis

eAudiobooks for the Under-18 Set

Our One-Click Downloadable Audiobooks have been so popular that we're now subscribing to books for children and teens. As of this writing, we have 31 titles in Children's Classics, 355 in Children's Fiction, and 18 for Children's Nonfiction. For teens, there are 9 titles in Young Adult Classics, 239 in Young Adult Fiction, and 10 in Young Adult Nonfiction. Just like our Adult eAudiobooks, we'll be adding to these collections every month.

You can find all these listings on our catalog, or you can Browse by Subject on the One-Click Audio site. For step-by-step instructions, be sure to visit our One-Click Audio page.

Sum Yourself Up in Six Words

Not Quite What I Was Planning. This is my new favorite book. It’s all about six word memoirs. This is trickier than you think. Oh, anyone can write a sentence. But summing up an entire life? Unless you are four, that’s rough! Just give it a try yourself. You’ll see exactly what I mean. What’s the important thing to stress? Is your career the focal point? Or is it your family relationships? Or maybe just love of tennis. You could spend hours doing this. Go ahead, give it a try!


By AA @Main

Celebrating the State

In honor of New Mexico's Centennial, several organizations have gotten your input about which books and authors best represent our state. The New Mexico Book Co-op, the group behind the annual New Mexico Book Awards, has compiled a list of the 100 Best New Mexico Books. The New Mexico State Library and NM Department of Cultural Affairs have selected and honored the official New Mexico Centennial Poet, Author, Children’s Author and Storyteller, in addition to a special Distinguished Writer.

If you're a native New Mexican, a proud transplant, or curious visitor, be sure to check out these books and authors to indulge in our rich and varied literary heritage.

The Centennial Authors are:

• Poet: Levi Romero
• Author: Don Bullis
• Children’s Author: Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
• Storyteller: Joe Hayes
• Distinguished Writer: N. Scott Momaday

The Top Ten Best New Mexico Books are:

Bless Me, Ultima — Rudolfo Anaya
A Thief of Time — Tony Hillerman
Ben Hur — Lew Wallace
Death Comes for the Archbishop — Willa Cather
First Blood — David Morrell
House Made of Dawn — N. Scott Momaday
Lamy of Santa Fe — Paul Horgan
Milagro Beanfield War — John Nichols
Red Sky at Morning — Richard Bradford
The Rounders — Max Evans

How many of the Top Ten have you read? How many of the Top 100?

Children and Teen Book Awards

This past weekend, many of our library colleagues converged on sunny San Diego for the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting. A highlight of this annual event is the announcement of award winners in Children's and Young Adult books, including the renowned Newbery and Caldecott medals.

Here is a list of some of the award recipients:

Newbery Medal: Moon over Manifest, by Clare Vanderpool.

Caldecott Medal: A Sick Day for Amos McGee, by Erin E. Stead.

Printz Award: Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Coretta Scott King Author Award: One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams-Garcia.

Pura Belpré Author Award: The Dreamer, by Pam Muñoz Ryan.

Morris Award: The Freak Observer, by Blythe Woolston.

Stonewall Award: Almost Perfect, by Brian Katcher.

YALSA Award for Excellence: Janis Joplin : rise up singing, by Ann Angel.

Laura Ingalls Wilder Award: Tomie dePaola.

Margaret A. Edwards Award: Sir Terry Pratchett

For information about Honor Books (runners-up) and winners for additional medals and awards, check the official press release. For information about the awards themselves, the ALA has these links.