And today, dear patrons, we come to you with some good news to start your weekend off right! Our Assistant Director, Gerri Guyote, is one of the recipients of the 2016 Mass Literacy Champions Award! We are as pleased as punch that Gerri is getting recognized for all her hard work, infinite patience, and dedication to literacy programs, and are so thrillled to congratulate her on this significant achievment! Here is the official photo taken of all the winners:
As described on their own blog, “The Mass Literacy Champions Awards Program enables literacy providers in Massachusetts to share their most promising practices with their peers and serve as ambassadors for Mass Literacy. The program was created in 2002 by Mass Literacy to identify, publicly recognize and reward Massachusetts educators who have shown exceptional commitment and results through their work in literacy education. 76 Mass Literacy Champions have been recognized since 2003, and together they represent the diverse literacy community that makes Massachusetts a national leader in education.”
Each Mass Literacy Champion will receive a $1000 grant for program development, a professionally produced video to promote the work of their organization valued at $1000, and they will serve as a Mass Literacy Adviser. They will each complete an innovative literacy project that will be shared with the statewide literacy community. YAY!!
And speaking of books, and reading, and long weekends (not that we were, but we certainly are now), let take a look at some of the new books that have climbed up onto our shlves this week, that can’t wait to meet you:
Grunt: Mary Roach has made a career out of telling us all about things we never knew we never knew about human bodies, from our own alimentary canals and digestion processes to the secrets of human cadavers, to how the human body can survive in outer space. This latest book tackles the science of warfare, and how soldiers are kept fed, awake, sane, and cool in some of the most difficult of conditions. In so doing, she brings to light just how extensive the military complex is–involving fashion designers and movie studios in addition to army bases and foreign clinics. The result is a book that is illuminating on many levels, surprisingly funny, and genuinely engrossing, that had Booklist referring to Roach as, “A rare literary bird, a best selling science writer…Roach avidly and impishly infiltrates the world of military science….Roach is exuberantly and imaginatively informative and irreverently funny, but she is also in awe of the accomplished and committed military people she meets.”
Hard Light: Remember how we were talking about noir fiction, and how there were so few women who were portrayed as actual human beings in their stories? Well, ask, and ye shall receive…In this third novel featuring the foul-mouthed, hard-living, occasionally criminal, punk photographer, and utterly wonderful noir antiheroine Cass Neary, who is on the run from cult murderers in Iceland, and has arrived in London to find her long-estranged lover, Quinn. But Quinn is gone, and before long, Cass finds herseld caught up in the world of eccentric gansters and drug-smugglers that takes her to the wilds of Land’s End, were a fascinating archeological discovery could change the course of human history…if Cass can survive long enough to expose it. Cara Hoffman provided a sensational blurb for this book, describing Elizabeth Hand’s work as “Brutal, elegant, rich and strange, Hard Light is noir at it’s very best. This fast paced marvel of a book beats with the exultant energy of Punk rock and hums with the mysterious beauty of a Delphic hymn. Elizabeth Hand is not only one of the great American novelists, her influence on a generation has changed the face of Literature. This novel will haunt your dreams.”
The Doll Master and Other Tales of Horror: It’s summer time, and that means that I am on the hunt for books that will keep me up late at night…and this book looks like the perfect place to start. Joyce Carol Oates is a marvel at creating stories that are as real and as recognizable as our own lives–and them subtley twisting just one or two threads of that story in order to make it something horrifying. These stories range in setting from the house down the road to the Galapagos Islands, dealing with intruders and secret collections, and are sure to give you goosebumps, even as the temperature outside rises. Publisher’s Weekly found it downright chilling, remarking that “Oates convincingly demonstrates her mastery of the macabre with this superlative story collection . . . This devil’s half-dozen of dread and suspense is a must read.”
Barren Cove: Ariel S. Winter’s newest novel is about humanity and love and loss, and all those wonderfully human emotions, as seen through the eyes of an antiquated and lonely android named Sapien. Hoping to find a little comfort for himself, Sapien goes to live in a Victorian manor at Barren Cove–but instead finds himself increasingly fascinated by the family who is also living there, including Beechstone, an enigmatic man who may just have the answers that Sapien has sought for so long. But there is danger on Barren Cove, as well, and as Sapien beings a quest for understanding, he will also come face to face with the darkness inside his new companions, and in himself, as well. Fans of Emily Bronte, as well as science fiction fans are going to find a lot to like in this story that, according to Kirkus Reviews “Weaves a uniquely dreamy spell, and a lingering one. Lyrical, unexpected, and curiously affecting…a story that lodges uneasily in the heart and mind.”
The Dragon Behind the Glass: The Asian arowana or “dragon fish”, a holdover from the prehistoric age, and a symbol of good fortune and prsperity, is the world’s most expensive aquarium fish. Though they are bred in secure farms in Southeast Asia, they have also been declared an endangered species in the United States, creating an even higher demand for this bizarre commodity, and establishing a thriving black market that Emily Voigt penetrates in her engrossing new book. Her journey takes her from some of the last uncharted wildernesses on this planet to the South Bronx, where arowana fish are sold for astromonical prices, even as scientists declare that fresh water fish are some of the most rapidly declining species around. This is a story about environmentalism, greed, and about fish, that Publisher’s Weekly devoured, calling it an “engaging tale of obsession and perserverance, jouranlist Voigt chronicles her effort to study and understand its appeal. . . . Voigt’s passion in pursuing her subject is infectious, as is the self-deprecating humor she injects into her enthralling look at the intersection of science, commercialism, and conservationism.”
So, until next week, beloved patrons, happy reading!