November 2012

If the National Book Awards are meant to be evolving into something like Britain’s much more popular and influential Booker Prize, then this year’s awards, and last night’s ceremony, are steps in the right direction. Here’s a list of the winners:

Nonfiction: “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” by Katherine Boo
Fiction: “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich
Young People’s Literature: “Goblin Secrets” by William Alexander
Poetry: “Bewilderment” by David Ferry

A hard-hit area of Queens is getting a temporary library — set on blocks in the sand.

The permanent Queens Library at Arverne was badly damaged by superstorm Sandy.

On Friday, a double-wide trailer is being set up next to the library.

It’s expected to open to the public by Monday.

Is the brick-and-mortar bookstore dying out? Not in these pages. In ‘My Bookstore,’ dozens of authors celebrate their favorite brick-and-mortar booksellers, located all across America. From California to Florida, here are 10 of their picks.

Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, a novel about a woman who is raped and left traumatized on an Indian reservation in North Dakota, won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday.

Erdrich, who gave part of her acceptance speech in Ojibwe, said the award “recognized the grace and endurance of native women.” USA TODAY’s four-star review called it “deeply moving” and “impossible to forget.”

From a crime committed against a native American woman to a scheme to sell software to the king of Saudi Arabia, Amazon’s list of the 10 best books of 2012 is a diverse collection. Here are the 10 titles.

Google engineer builds $1,500 page-turning scanner out of sheet metal and a vacuum
For the past eight years, Google has been working on digitizing the world’s 130 million or so unique books. While the pace of new additions to the Google Books initiative has been slowing down, members of the team have come up with a new automated scanner design that could both make the project much more cost efficient and give everyone with $1,500 and a little know-how access to a page-turning scanner of their very own. In the video below, Google Books engineer Dany Qumsiyeh presents the prototype design that he and other teammates created during the “20 percent time” that Google (and now Apple, among others) allocates for personal projects, showing the design challenges he overcame along the way.

[Thanks Sassy Ass Sarah G.]

Neighborhoods with high poverty rates have lower test scores. Education is affected by lack of access to resources. Libraries and their staff (both in schools and out of schools) are part of those resources that can help bridge the achievement gap between rich and poor students. Working-class children hear 10 million words before they enter kindergarten compared to the 30 million that kids with professional parents hear. That initial vocabulary gap is predictive of reading comprehension in high school (Beth Fertig “Why Can’t U Teach Me 2 Read?”). The gap is developed in part by lack of access to literary materials, which libraries provide free of charge, and probably continues because of the perpetual inaccessibility of libraries to the inner-city. I’m sure Schaumburg has great test scores that are in part due to its great main library and school libraries. Let’s make it a city goal to have good libraries, and our students (and their test scores) will benefit from the plentiful access to educational resources.

Letters to a Young Librarian
” I could talk about other times I pissed off parents with my collection development policy or about the time I told the area homeschool groups about our library’s teen programs (which included a paranormal program that contradicted one group’s very conservative beliefs) or about the time I quit a library job without a backup plan because the environment was not conducive to making me my best, personally or professionally. The thing is, no matter what role you’re in and no matter how much or how little experience you have in the field, your beliefs and values are going to piss someone off somewhere.
To be as good as you want to be and to further your goals in providing the best service and experience as a librarian, you have to suck it up and stick to your beliefs.

Gigaom mapped Google’s transparency data to see which countries want online content removed and why. It turns out that censorship is in the eye of the beholder.

Why Twilight Sucks:
1) It’s incredibly sexist … toward men
2) Edward is a creepy stalker
3) Bella is the worst kind of “Mary Sue”
4) It led to 50 Shades of Grey
5) People have been tricked into thinking it’s good writing