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August 2011
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The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries. [Descartes] Photo of Library Exterior

New Fiction

  • The Bear in a Muddy Tutu - Cole Alpaugh
  • Inzanesville - Jo Ann Beard
  • The Edge of Eden - Helen Benedict
  • A Death in Summer - Benjamin Black
  • Long Gone - Alafair Burke
  • Escape - Barbara Delinsky
  • The Silent Girl - Tess Gerritsen
  • Quinn - Iris Johansen
  • Blind Fury - Lynda La Plant
  • In the Garden of Beasts - Erik Larson
  • It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories - James Lasdun
  • Sister - Rosamund Lupton
  • To Be Sung Underwater - Tom McNeal
  • A Dance with Dragons - George R. R. Martin
  • The Confessions of Edward Day - Valerie Martin
  • The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason
  • Emily, Alone - Stewart O'Nan
  • The Storyteller of Marrakech - Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
  • The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein
  • Forever - Maggie Stiefvater
  • Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan
  • Monument to Murder - Margaret Truman
  • Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner

New Non-Fiction

  • 60 Quick Knits: 20 Hats, 20 Scarves, 20 Mittens in Cascade 220
  • Rimbaud Illuminations - translated by John Ashbery
  • Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L'Oreal, and the Blemished History of Looking Good - Ruth Brandon
  • Patience: Taking Time in an Age of Acceleration - Akiko Busch
  • Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the last Days of the Working Class - Jefferson Cowie
  • The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution - Keith Devlin
  • Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew - Sherrie Eldridge
  • Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London's Ottolenghi - Yotam Ottolenghi
  • Swimming in the Steno Pool: a Retro Guide to Making It in the Office - Lynn Peril
  • Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming Our Families-and America - Adam Pertman
  • The Psychopath Test: a Journey through the Madness Industry - Jon Ronson
  • Thinking About Memoir - Abigail Thomas

New Audio Books

  • Millennium People - JG Ballard
  • Separate Beds - Elizabeth Buchan
  • Dead of Alive - Tom Clancy
  • Silent Mercy - Linda Fairstein
  • Fall of Giants - Ken Follett
  • A Father's Love - David Goldman
  • Fadeaway Girl - Martha Grimes
  • King Solomon's Mines - H. Rider Haggard
  • A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Hawkins
  • King's Cross - Timothy Keller
  • The Prisoner of Zenda - Anthony Hope
  • I Beat the Odds - Michael Oher
  • Known and Unknown - donald Rumsfeld
  • Prince of Fire - Daniel Silva
  • In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck
  • Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
  • Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck
  • Bel-Air Dead - Stuart Woods
  • Strategic Moves - Stuart Woods

New DVD's

  • The Adjustment Bureau - Matt Damon, Emily Blunt
  • Mao's Last Dancer - Kyle MacLauchlan
  • My Dog Tulip - voices: Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave, Isabella Rossellini
  • Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune
  • Source Code - Jake Gyllenhaal

Some Recently Donated DVDs

  • All Creatures Great & Small, series 1-4
  • Being Julia - Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons
  • Beverly Sills: Made in America
  • Campion, series 1-2 - Peter Davidson
  • La Cage Aux Folles
  • The Last Detective, series 1-4 - Peter Davison, Sean Hughes
  • Edith Piaf: a Passionate Life
  • The Maigret Collection - Michael Gambon
  • Marilyn Horne in concert
  • Micawber - David Jason
  • The Mikado - Opera Australia
  • The Shield, season 4
  • Tortilla Soup - Hector Elizondo
  • A Touch of Frost, seasons 1-13 - David Jason
  • The Women - Meg Ryan, Annette Bening

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BOOKLISTS

Every month in this spot we feature reading suggestions. These include historic fiction, science fiction, mysteries, and more. Many of these titles can be found in the Mid Hudson Library System.

Visit the Library to pick up a copy of the booklist-of-the-month brochure and check out a book from our current display.

100 Best English Language Novels - Time Magazine

TIME critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-Language novels from 1923 to the present. more

  • The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow
  • All the King's Men (1946), by Robert Penn Warren
  • American Pastoral (1997), by Philip Roth
  • An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser
  • Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
  • Appointment in Samarra (1934), by John O'Hara
  • Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (1970), by Judy Blume
  • The Assistant (1957), by Bernard Malamud
  • At Swim-Two-Birds (1938), by Flann O'Brien
  • Atonement (2002), by Ian McEwan
  • Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison
  • The Berlin Stories (1946), by Christopher Isherwood
  • The Big Sleep (1939), by Raymond Chandler
  • The Blind Assassin (2000), by Margaret Atwood
  • Blood Meridian (1986), by Cormac McCarthy
  • Brideshead Revisited (1946), by Evelyn Waugh
  • The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder
  • Call It Sleep (1935), by Henry Roth
  • Catch-22 (1961), by Joseph Heller
  • The Catcher in the Rye (1951), by J.D. Salinger
  • A Clockwork Orange (1963), by Anthony Burgess
  • The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by William Styron
  • The Corrections (2001), by Jonathan Franzen
  • The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon
  • A Dance to the Music of Time (1951), by Anthony Powell
  • The Day of the Locust (1939), by Nathanael West
  • Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather
  • A Death in the Family (1958), by James Agee
  • The Death of the Heart (1958), by Elizabeth Bowen
  • Deliverance (1970), by James Dickey
  • Dog Soldiers (1974), by Robert Stone
  • Falconer (1977), by John Cheever
  • The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), by John Fowles
  • The Golden Notebook (1962), by Doris Lessing
  • Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), by James Baldwin
  • Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell
  • The Grapes of Wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck
  • Gravity's Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pynchon
  • The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • A Handful of Dust (1934), by Evelyn Waugh
  • The Heart is A Lonely Hunter (1940), by Carson McCullers
  • The Heart of the Matter (1948), by Graham Greene
  • Herzog (1964), by Saul Bellow
  • Housekeeping (1981), by Marilynne Robinson
  • A House for Mr. Biswas (1962), by V.S. Naipaul
  • I, Claudius (1934), by Robert Graves
  • Infinite Jest (1996), by David Foster Wallace
  • Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison
  • Light in August (1932), by William Faulkner
  • The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), by C.S. Lewis
  • Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov
  • Lord of the Flies (1955), by William Golding
  • The Lord of the Rings (1954), by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Loving (1945), by Henry Green
  • Lucky Jim (1954), by Kingsley Amis
  • The Man Who Loved Children (1940), by Christina Stead
  • Midnight's Children (1981), by Salman Rushdie
  • Money (1984), by Martin Amis
  • The Moviegoer (1961), by Walker Percy
  • Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
  • Naked Lunch (1959), by William Burroughs
  • Native Son (1940), by Richard Wright
  • Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson
  • Never Let Me Go (2005), by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • 1984 (1948), by George Orwell
  • On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), by Ken Kesey
  • The Painted Bird (1965), by Jerzy Kosinski
  • Pale Fire (1962), by Vladimir Nabokov
  • A Passage to India (1924), by E.M. Forster
  • Play It As It Lays (1970), by Joan Didion
  • Portnoy's Complaint (1969), by Philip Roth
  • Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt
  • The Power and the Glory (1939), by Graham Greene
  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), by Muriel Spark
  • Rabbit, Run (1960), by John Updike
  • Ragtime (1975), by E.L. Doctorow
  • The Recognitions (1955), by William Gaddis
  • Red Harvest (1929), by Dashiell Hammett
  • Revolutionary Road (1961), by Richard Yates
  • The Sheltering Sky (1949), by Paul Bowles
  • Slaughterhouse Five (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson
  • The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), by John Barth
  • The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner
  • The Sportswriter (1986), by Richard Ford
  • The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1964), by John le Carre
  • The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston
  • Things Fall Apart (1959), by Chinua Achebe
  • To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee
  • To the Lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf
  • Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller
  • Ubik (1969), by Philip K. Dick
  • Under the Net (1954), by Iris Murdoch
  • Under the Volcano (1947), by Malcolm Lowry
  • Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
  • White Noise (1985), by Don DeLillo
  • White Teeth (2000), by Zadie Smith
  • Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys

Graphic Novels

  • Berlin: City of Stones (2000), by Jason Lutes
  • Blankets (2003), by Craig Thompson
  • Bone (2004), by Jeff Smith
  • The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002), by Kim Deitch
  • The Dark Knight Returns (1986), by Frank Miller
  • David Boring (2000), by Daniel Clowes
  • Ed the Happy Clown (1989), by Chester Brown
  • Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), by Chris Ware
  • Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories (2003), by Gilbert Hernandez
  • Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

PATRON ALERT

Wednesday, August 3

We have been informed that the City of Poughkeepsie will be upgrading their electrical service on Wednesday, August 3. This means that the Mid-Hudson Library System will not have electricity for at least one or two days. Mid-Hudson will be closing during the upgrade. This is a system wide closing. We will not be closing but our services will be severely curtailed.

What this means for you

  • We will be able to check things out but we'll be using an "off-line" check out system so you will have to bring your Library Card.
  • The inter-library loan system will not be available to us during this outage. If you have "holds" waiting for you please pick them up on Monday or Tuesday.
  • The card catalog will not be available either at the Library or to you at home.
  • We will not be able to issue new Library Cards.

What is Available

  • You can browse and check out from our collection.
  • You can use the public access computers for everything except the card catalog.
  • Regular programming will take place as usual.

In Case of Rain

They will not do the work on Wednesday, but will move it to Thursday.

We apologize for the inconvenience. We will be running an amnesty from Wednesday through Saturday on materials due during the outage. No fines will be due from that time period.

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Matt Spireng
to Read his Poetry

Friday, August 12 at 6:00pm

Lomontville author and poet Matthew Spireng will read works from his new collection of poems, What Focus Is. The program is free and open to the public and books will be available for purchase and signing. A reception with light refreshments will follow the reading.

Poet R.H.W. Dillard praises What Focus Is: "This new collection of poems continues the project that Matthew Spireng has been pursuing for the past four decades—the making of well-crafted poems that reveal the poetry in the events of every day, those apparently ordinary moments when we do and see ourselves and the world around us with extraordinary clarity. Every page of this book contains such moments, crystallized into gems of recognition, surprise, laughter, deep feeling and true understanding, and each page compels the reader to turn to the next page eagerly to see what's next."

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Mango is the fast, easy, and most effective way to learn to speak a foreign language!

Mango is an online language learning system that teaches real conversation skills for practical communication. Through fun and engaging interactive lessons, Mango makes learning a new language fast, easy and incredibly effective. The system is completely web-based and remotely accessible, so you can learn anywhere you have an internet connection. As you listen to and repeat after native speakers, you'll learn more than just words and phrases. You'll learn how those pieces can be rearranged and combined to make new thoughts, new conversations, and even more practical communication! In no time at all, you'll be able to navigate all sorts of everyday situations — get directions, order a meal, make new friends — the possibilities are endless!

Available in 22 foreign languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Turkish, Hebrew, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog, Hindi, Irish, Dari). 14 courses in English as a Second Language are also available. Mango is FREE at the Library. more

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Summer Sale Table

Next time you are in the Library take a look at our Summer Sale located in the non-fiction room in front of the fireplace and in the glass case opposite the circulation desk. We have wonderful household items on sale from $1 and up.

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POETRY
with Rosemary Deen

Thursday,
August 18,
1-3pm in the Biography Room

Join us for another afternoon of poetry with Rosemary Deen.

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TEA TIME BOOK GROUP

Wednesday, August 10
4pm in the Biography Room

The selection this month is Northanger Abby by Jane Austen. The author's first novel is a cautionary tale full of youth and optimism. Catherine Morland leaves her quiet country life in Hampshire to enter the leisure society of Bath. She is invited into the Tilney family home, Northanger Abbey, where a house full of secrets and locked doors entangles Catherine in a web of intrigue.

Join us in the Biography Room for lively Discussion and light refreshments. We have copies of the book, audio book and movies at the Library.

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HOLMES & CO.
Mystery Lovers
Book Group

Wednesday, August 17,
4pm in the Biography Room

The selections for this meeting include: An Air that Kills by Andrew Taylor. A mystery dating back to the Victorian era when a group of laborers discovered the bones of an infant in a former cesspool. The Sherlock Holmes mystery is The Adventure of the Three Gables - by Arthur Conan Doyle.

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MEDIEVAL
Book Group

Wednesday, October 12,
7pm in the Biography Room

The next book for the Medieval Reading Group is Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009), a dazzling novel set in the reign of King Henry VIII of England. Wolf Hall won the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

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KNITTING GROUP

Every Saturday
10am-noon

The Stone Ridge Library Knitters meet every Saturday morning from 10am - 12noon. All ages and experience levels can join us and drop-in knitters are also welcome. We each bring our own supplies and do our own work, but one of the best things about us is that whatever obstacle or confusion you might encounter, you're likely to receive as much comment and advice as you need to get where you're going with a project. Some of us can help toward the repair of knitted or crocheted items too.

The group is sociable and lively, and our conversation and sharing is just as wide-ranging as our projects. We are especially interested in the UFOs (Un-Finished Objects) that members bring in and love the show and tell of projects under way and being finished, new or old, simple or complex. Though knitting is our love and mainstay, we graciously adapt ourselves to stray crocheters and those of us who simply must take to the hook when the spirit moves. We share articles, magazines and books on knitting. Donations of yarn to the Library get made up into items for sale at the Library Fair and during the winter holidays for the benefit of the Library. Some of us also knit things for local hospitals or for the U.S. troops.

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ON THE SHELVES

with Erica Freudenberger
Poughkeepsie Journal 7.2.11

Sit back and listen to some good stories

Not everyone is lucky enough to grow up surrounded by storytellers, but I was. There were three who shaped my life: my father, a sea captain; my childhood librarian, Isabel Wilner; and my fifth-grade teacher, Alice McGill.

I learned that life was not all that it appeared. It had twists and turns and spectacular surprise endings. But most of all I learned that there's nothing more marvelous than listening to someone tell a story.

Somewhere between getting my first job and qualifying for a mortgage, I forgot. Sure, I loved books, but it was all about the written word. When a co-worker suggested I listen to an audiobook, I declined.

Fortunately, she persisted. I still remember my first: Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (Random House Audio), the New York Times restaurant critic. I was hooked, transported back to my fifth-grade classroom, to the library, to my father's lap.

Now I won't get into my car with at least one audiobook. To paraphrase William Carlos Williams: So much depends upon the reader — whether or not they are glazed with rain water.

The reader is Irish for the riveting children's book Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy (HarperCollins). The protagonist is a 14-year-old girl who partners with a skeleton detective to solve mysteries and save the world. It's got spooky sound effects, trolls, sorcerers, vampires and lots of undead things — perfect for a car trip with the whole family.

How about a swashbuckling adventure aboard a dirigible told by a young cabin boy? Check out Airborn by Kenneth Oppel (Recorded Books). Listen as a poor, fatherless lad makes his way using only his brains and sweat with the help of an unlikely yet scrappy crew. It also has plenty of action, including pirates, strange air beasts, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and more.

Perhaps life is wearing you down. You don't get a vacation, only a grueling commute as others play. Cheer up! Listen to Bossypants by Tina Fey (Hachette Audio). Not only will you feel much better about your eyebrows and youthful fashion choices, you'll laugh yourself silly. Fey's self-effacing humor, expert delivery and star-studded memoir manages to resonate with anyone who's gone on a honeymoon cruise, had the ship catch on fire and placed their life in the hands of dancers more accustomed to Vogue-ing than performing CPR. And no, I'm not talking metaphorically.

There are some readers who have voices that are off-putting. I've found both Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris — who share the same 14-year-old girl's high-pitched nasal tone, fall into this category. I love both, because they're smart, funny writers.

I consider Vowell a "hip-storian." She writes about history in a way that makes it sound like all the cool kids are spending their free time in archives. Her most recent audiobook, Unfamiliar Fishes (Simon & Schuster Audio), explores the history of Hawaii. She opens her story while eating a plate lunch, a multicultural smattering of cuisine on a Styrofoam plate, using it as the point of departure for her vibrant history of a country that was far more civilized before the missionaries arrived — although they did mercifully lift the taboo on Hawaiian women eating pork, making luaus more delicious.

One of my all-time favorites — and not just because it's dedicated to librarians — is People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (Penguin Audio). Tracing the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah as it is being restored, the story jumps back and forth in time on the book's journey as it is saved from destruction at different points in history. Little things trigger a memory — a strand of hair, a wine stain — and provide the impetus for a complex web of stories to be woven. Read by Edwina Wren in a dulcet Australian accent, it's almost as good as being on a car trip with Isabel Wilner telling me a story. Almost.

Erica Freudenberger is Library Director at Red Hook Public Library. She still believes almost every story her father told her.

GREAT WEBSITES!

MIT OpenCourseWare

Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required. "MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity." It provides course materials (such as lecture notes, reading lists, and problem sets) for hundreds of MIT courses in dozens of academic disciplines, such as chemistry, engineering, physics, and urban planning. From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).* more

National Hunger Hotline

The National Hunger Hotline (1-866-3 HUNGRY or 1-866-348-6479), refers
people in need anywhere in the U.S. to food pantries, soup kitchens,
government programs, and model grassroots organizations. Live,
compassionate Hotline advocates inform individuals of resources in their communities Monday through Friday from 9am-6pm EST. Callers can leave a
message outside of those hours and an advocate will return their call. Help is available in English and Spanish and online. more

The Civil War Discovery Trail

Learn about over 600 Civil War sites in 31 states, the District of Columbia and even three international locations. Use this site to plan a visit to these historic sites as part of your next family vacation.* more

"My Precious
Loulie. . ."
Love Letters of the Civil War

These love letters from Civil War soldiers "show their sorrows of being apart, fears that the soldier would not return home, and hopes for the future after the war's end." In addition, "some of the letters are comical, as is the letter from an unknown soldier to a woman who evidently answered his 'lonely-hearts' advertisement." Includes images and transcriptions of this small collection of letters. From the University Libraries of Virginia Tech.* more

The Congo Cookbook


A collection of recipes from all over the African continent, with with observations about African food and cooking. Recipes are grouped by region and by ingredients. Info about other African cookbooks also provided.* more

*Reproduced with permission from copyright 2010 by the ipl2 Consortium (http://www.ipl.org). All rights reserved.

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