And the Winners are…..

I was pleased to be a selector for this year’s Colorado Book Awards in the Creative Nonfiction/Memoir category. We read 15 titles (5 of them as eBooks), narrowed our choices down to four, and passed them along to the judges for their final selection. The awards ceremony was held in at the Aspen Institute as a part of their Aspen Summer Words Literary Festival.

For the first time, there was a tie in one category.

Art/Pictorial
Landscapes on Glass: Lantern Slides for the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley Expedition, by Jack Turner, Durango Herald Small Press
Touchstones of Design: Redefining Public Architecture by Curtis Fentress, Images Publishing Group Pty Ltd

Biography/History
Rival Rails: The Race to Build America’s Greatest Transcontinental Railroad by Walter R. Borneman, Random House

Children’s Literature/Picture Books
Magnus Maximus, A Marvelous Measurer by Kathleen T. Pelley, pictures by S.D. Schindler, Farrar Straus Giroux

Creative Nonfiction/Memoir
Paradise General: Riding the Surge at a Combat Hospital in Iraq by Dr. Dave Hnida, Simon & Schuster

General Nonfiction
The Heroine’s Bookshelf: Life Lessons, From Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder by Erin Blakemore, Harper
I enjoyed the author’s reading of this one so much, I actually bought the book!

Genre/Popular Fiction
The Spider’s Web by Margaret Coel, Berkley Prime Crime

Juvenile Literature
Warriors: In the Crossfire by Nancy Bo Flood, Front Street Press

Literary Fiction
Postcards from a Dead Girl by Kirk Farber, Harper Perennial

Poetry
The Diminishing House by Nicky Beer, Carnegie Mellon University Press

Young Adult Literature
The Secret to Lying by Todd Mitchell, Candlewick Press

Are you at Tweeter?

If you like books and you tweet, check out this wonderful list of 33 Literary Tweets to follow. Do you have any favorites you’d add to this list?

Book Club Etiquette

As amazing as it seems, I’ve only been a book club member for the past 8 years or so. I was first invited into a “private” book club made up of an eclectic group of people from a variety of background and professions and now find myself the only one left from the original group I joined. New members have come and gone, and it’s still an eclectic, interesting, great group of people!

Sometime in the last 5 years, I became the discussion leader (now co-leader) of our central library’s book club. Another great group of people, some of whom have been coming for more than 10 years!

So I have lots of  questions about facilitating book clubs and would love some input.
1. How do you choose your titles and how often do you choose them?
2. Do you include snacks?
3. Is one person in charge or do members rotate facilitating?
4. Do your titles vary (mixture of fiction and nonfiction, genres)?
5. Are your readings centered around a theme each month and/or year?
6. Does everyone read the same title or a variety of titles somehow related?

I’d like to “shake up” our library’s club and see if we could interest more people in joining so send me your ideas!

Mysteries Galore!

Summertime reading-I LOVE it! Right now I’m finally getting to Charlaine Harris’ Vampire Series featuring Sookie Stackhouse. Yes, I’m a little slow getting started, but I usually like to read a series after it’s already been hyped for a while.

I’ve also discovered Kathleen Mallory in Mallory’s Oracle by Carol O’Connell and already have her next title on my growing stack.

Others I’ve breezed through lately include:
Unraveled Maggie Sefton’s latest
Bookmarked for Death by Lorna Barrett
Crunch Time, Diane Mott Davidson’s most recent (but not one of my favorites)
One Was a Soldier by Julia Spencer-Fleming A MUST READ SERIES
Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny ANOTHER MUST READ SERIES
NOTE: These are all the latest in the series, be sure to start with the first one in each!

Kindle “Plays Nice”

So Amazon is finally getting on board with libraries! Personally, I think it’s about time, but I still haven’t been able to find out EXACTLY when this will take place and whether or not my library will be one of the “11,000.” People come in daily asking about which devices are compatible with our OverDrive ebooks and many of them have changed their minds about purchasing a Kindle when we have told them they don’t “play well with libraries.”

Wonders of Science

I’ve just started The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and am already hooked. It’s about a woman in the 1950s whose cancerous cells were harvested without her knowledge and how the medical community continues to grow them today! They have been used to find cures and treatments for a variety of diseases, her cells are known by doctors all over the world, but her family didn’t know about it until 25 years later.

Mysterious Path

I admit my guilt: I am an unabashed lover of mystery titles. Whenever I feel the need for some “me” time, I find the latest installment in one of the many series I enjoy. Some are light and easy to figure (my “popcorn” reading), others more thought-provoking and some gruesome or sexy.

Recently I’ve read:

The Alpine Vengeance by Mary Daheim
Devil’s Food Cake Murder by Joanne Fluke
Buttons and Bones by Monica Ferris (not her best)
Treachery in Death by J.D. Robb
and, after waiting over a year for this one, I’m now deeply into:
One Was a Soldier by Julia Spencer-Fleming