10/24: New at the library this week

Movies:

Babylon A.D.

(all movies are on dvd unless otherwise noted)

Books:

The lost symbol / Dan Brown
As the story opens, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned unexpectedly to deliver an evening lecture in the U.S. Capitol Building. Within minutes of his arrival, however, the night takes a bizarre turn. A disturbing object — artfully encoded with five symbols — is discovered in the Capitol Building. Langdon recognizes the object as an ancient invitation… one meant to usher its recipient into a long-lost world of esoteric wisdom.

When Langdon’s beloved mentor, Peter Solomon — a prominent Mason and philanthropist — is brutally kidnapped, Langdon realizes his only hope of saving Peter is to accept this mystical invitation and follow wherever it leads him. Langdon is instantly plunged into a clandestine world of Masonic secrets, hidden history, and never-before-seen locations — all of which seem to be dragging him toward a single, inconceivable truth. (read an exerpt)

8/12: New at the library this week

Games

The orange box (XBox360)
Halo 3 (XBox360)
Guitar Hero III (XBox360)
Def Jam Fight for NY (XBox)
Fable: The lost chapters (XBox)
Matrix: Path of Neo (XBox)

Movies:

Billy’s bootcamp : Basic training
Billy’s bootcamp : Ultimate bootcamp
Billy’s bootcamp : AB bootcamp
Billy Blanks’ tae bo : Capture the power
Rachel getting married
TrueBlood : Strange Love
Revolutionary road

(all movies are on dvd unless otherwise noted)

Books:

Spirit basket : Over 200 years of adventures in Alaska / Marie Osborn Reid
This novel portrays historical events experienced by an Alaska Native family over more than two centuries. Generations of teenagers adjust from subsistence living to invasion by Russian fur traders, the purchase by America, gold fever, WWII detention, huge earthquake, disastrous oil spill, and much more. Each chapter is a new adventure of a new generation.

Ch.1 Harvest of the Fur Seals, Attu Island in 1745
Ch. 2 Escape, Aleutian Islands in 1770
Ch. 3 The Governor’s Daughter, Kodiak in 1794
Ch. 4 The Priest, New Archangel, Russian America in 1834
Ch. 5 Coming of America, Sitka in 1867
Ch. 6 Gold Nuggets, from Sitka to Nome in 1900
Ch. 7 Return, from Fairbanks to Seward in 1925
Ch. 8 Evacuation, from St. Paul Island to a Southeast camp in 1942
Ch. 9 Earthquake, in Anchorage in 1964
Ch. 10 The Spill, in Valdez in 1989
Ch. 11 Olympic Games, in Fairbanks in 2010
(read exerpts)

A plague of secrets / John T. Lescroart
The first victim is Dylan Vogler, a charming ex-convict who manages the Bay Beans West coffee shop in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. When his body is found, inspectors discover that his knapsack is filled with high-grade marijuana. It soon becomes clear that San Francisco’s A-list flocked to Bay Beans West not only for their caffeine fix.

But how much did Maya Townshend—the beautiful socialite niece of the city’s mayor, and the absentee owner of the shop—know about what was going on inside her business? And how intimate had she really been with Dylan, her old college friend?

As another of Maya’s acquaintances falls victim to murder, and as the names of the dead men’s celebrity, political, and even law- enforcement customers come to light, tabloid-fueled controversy takes the investigation into the realms of conspiracy and cover-up. Prosecutors close in on Maya, who has a deep secret of her own—a secret she needs to protect at all costs during her very public trial, where not only her future but the entire political landscape of San Francisco hangs in the balance, hostage to an explosive secret that Dismas Hardy is privilege-bound to protect.

4/15: New at the library this week

Movies:

Stop bullying now! : Video toolkit
The Spiderwick chronicles
In Bruges
Slumdog millionaire
(all movies are on dvd unless otherwise noted)

Books:

Welcome to the departure lounge : adventures in mothering mother / Meg Federico
The adventure begins when Meg’s mother, Addie, vacationing in Florida, takes a spill. At the hospital, Addie bolts upright on her gurney and yells “I demand an autopsy!” before passing out cold.

“One minute, she is unconscious, the next, she’s nuts,” observes Meg Federico in this hilarious and poignant memoir of taking care of eighty-year-old Addie and her relatively new (and equally old) husband, Walter, in their not-so-golden years.

Addie’s accident is a portent of things to come over the next two years as Meg oversees her mother’s home care in the Departure Lounge, the nickname Meg gives Addie and Walter’s house in suburban New Jersey. It is a place of odd behaviors and clashing caregivers, where chaos and confusion reign supreme.

Meg had expected that Addie and Walter would settle into a Rockwellian dotage of docile dependency. Instead the pair regress into terrible teens. Meg watches from the sidelines in disbelief as her mother and stepfather, forbidden by doctors to drink, conspire to order cases of scotch by phone; as Addie’s attendant accuses the evening staff of midnight voodoo; as the increasingly demented Walter’s sex drive becomes unbridled and mail-order sex aids are delivered to the front door. Meg jumps in to cope with the pandemonium–even as she struggles to manage her own family back in Nova Scotia. (read an exerpt)

8/30: New at the library this week

Movies:

The kite runner
Scientology : An overview
The son

Books:

Mother tongue / Demetria Martínez Mary is nineteen and living alone in Albuquerque. Adrift in the wake of her mother’s death, she longs for something meaningful to take her over. Vulnerable to love and game for anything, Mary knows she has found the other part of herself when Jose Luis enters her life.
A refugee from El Salvador and its vicious and bloody civil war, José Luis has been smuggled to the United States as part of the sanctuary movement that is attempting to expose the plight of thousands of citizens being harassed, tortured, and disappeared by a United States-supported military government.
Mary cannot help but fall in love with the movement and the man who represents it for her—his strength, his sadness, and the life he has left behind. And little by little, she begins to reveal to José Luis the hope that always lives in love. Though violent times conspire against Mary’s dreams, she is about to lay claim to a part of herself she has never known.

Confessions of a Berlitz-tape Chicana / Demetria Martínez
Demetria Martínez wields her trademark blend of humor and irony in this series of revealing essays. She breaks down the barriers between prayer and action, between the border denizen and the citizen of the world, and between patriarchal religion and the Divine Mother.
Martínez also explores her identity as a woman who has within her the “Blood of the conquered and the conqueror,” and who must daily contend with yet a third world-white America.

4/5: New at the library this week

Audiobooks:

The final warning / James Patterson (CD)
This time, the US government wants to keep the Flock under observation, offering a safe haven and schooling in return. But after their incredible adventures in books 1-3, Max and Flock have grown to love freedom- -after all, haven’t grown-ups always found a way to ruin their lives? After escaping the control of the feds, they are surprised to find themselves allied with a group of environmental scientists who just might be trustworthy. Besides, what enemy could find them in one of the remotest locations on earth–Antarctica–on an expedition studying the effects of global warming up close?
(Age Range: Young Adult; Maximum Ride Series, #4)

A cat named Brat / Lydia Adamson (cassette)
New York actress and cat-sitting sleuth Alice Nestleton sets out to solve the murder of a nightlife journalist.
(Alice Nestleton Series, #20)

11/15: new at the library this week

Audiobooks:

• Blow fly / Patricia Daniels Cornwell — Dr. Kay Scarpetta is visiting Florida, hoping to get away from the pressures of her job. No such luck: down in the Sunshine State, she becomes involved in a terrifying international intrigue with ramifications that reach deep into Kay’s own life. (Kay Scarpetta Series, #12; cassette; read an exerpt)
• Bleachers / John Grisham — High school all-American Neely Crenshaw was probably the best quarterback ever to play for the legendary Messina Spartans. Fifteen years have gone by since those glory days, and Neely has come home to Messina to bury Coach Eddie Rake, the man who molded the Spartans into an unbeatable football dynasty. (cassette; read a sample chapter)
• Trace / Patricia Daniels Cornwell — Now freelancing from south Florida, Dr. Kay Scarpetta returns to Richmond, Virginia, the city that turned its back on her five years ago. Investigating the death of a young girl, she must follow the twisting leads and track the strange details in order to make the dead speak-and to reveal the sad truth that may be more than even she can bear. (Kay Scarpetta Series, #13; CD; read an exerpt)
• Post-mortem / Patricia Daniels Cornwell — Four women with nothing in common, united only in death. Four brutalized victims of a brilliant monster – a “Mr. Nobody”, moving undetected through a paralyzed city, leaving behind a gruesome trail of carnage . . . but few clues. With skilled hands, an unerring eye, and the latest advances in forensic research, an unrelenting female medical examiner – Kay Scarpetta – is determined to unmask a maniac. But someone is trying to sabotage Kay’s investigation from the inside. And worse yet, someone wants her dead . . . (Kay Scarpetta Series, #1; cassette; read an exerpt)
• The time traveler’s wife / Audrey Niffenegger — This is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare’s passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap (cassette; read a sample chapter)