Children's Room is Closed

The Children's Room will be closed today. We are renovating it so our wonderful, short patrons have an even cooler place of their own to hang out (with great lighting and computers).

The rest of the library remains open so come on down. We're sure we can find something to keep those growing minds busy!

Cool New Website for YAs

Are you smart with money? It can be hard to get a handle on the Benjamins when your after school job pays only a few Washingtons a week. Well fear not dear reader, I've found a way to raise your dollar IQ points without breaking the bank.

The Federal Trade Commission (or simply FTC to those hep cats out there in cyberspace) is the nation's consumer protection agency. This remarkable agency protects consumers like you and me from false advertising and unfair business practices. Basically these are the folks who keep a close eye on all those claims Billy Mays makes on 3am infomercials.

To prove that they aren't a bunch of unfun money geeks, the FTC just set up an experimental website called You Are Here. The site helps users become savvy consumers by demonstrating the benefits of competition, the influence of advertising on buying decisions, and the rules and regulations that many business people need to follow. Essentially this site makes you money smart and doesn't bore you to death in the process. (Why wasn't this available when I was in high school?!)

So what can you do on the site? (So glad you asked!) There's a ton of fun stuff: you can design and print advertisements, uncover suspicious claims in ads, and learn how prices are determined based on supply, demand and production costs.

So get money smart!

Library Hours for Memorial Day Weekend

In observance of Memorial Day, the library will be closed Sunday and Monday.

We will reopen Tuesday morning at 9:30am.

Just Arrived!

Watchmen by Alan Moore

In honor of the impending DVD release of the film, I would like to introduce all my graphic novel lovin' YA'ers to THE BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF ALL TIME*!

Amazon.com Review
Has any comic been as acclaimed as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen? Possibly only Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, but Watchmen remains the critics' favorite. Why? Because Moore is a better writer, and Watchmen a more complex and dark and literate creation than Miller's fantastic, subversive take on the Batman myth. Moore, renowned for many other of the genre's finest creations (Saga of the Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta, and From Hell, with Eddie Campbell) first put out Watchmen in 12 issues for DC in 1986-87. It won a comic award at the time (the 1987 Jack Kirby Comics Industry Awards for Best Writer/Artist combination) and has continued to gather praise since.

The story concerns a group called the Crimebusters and a plot to kill and discredit them. Moore's characterization is as sophisticated as any novel's. Importantly the costumes do not get in the way of the storytelling; rather they allow Moore to investigate issues of power and control--indeed it was Watchmen, and to a lesser extent Dark Knight, that propelled the comic genre forward, making "adult" comics a reality. The artwork of Gibbons (best known for 2000 AD's Rogue Trooper and DC's Green Lantern) is very fine too, echoing Moore's paranoid mood perfectly throughout. Packed with symbolism, some of the overlying themes (arms control, nuclear threat, vigilantes) have dated but the intelligent social and political commentary, the structure of the story itself, its intertextuality (chapters appended with excerpts from other "works" and "studies" on Moore's characters, or with excerpts from another comic book being read by a child within the story), the fine pace of the writing and its humanity mean that Watchmen more than stands up--it keeps its crown as the best the genre has yet produced. --Mark Thwaite


*Time magazine wrote "A work of ruthless psychological realism, it’s a landmark in the graphic novel medium. It would be a masterpiece in any."

For All You Cool Mamas Out There

Helping people effectively surf the Internet is a great way to find some really fantastically awesome websites. (Sigh...I love being a librarian!) Here's one I came across recently, and I know we have several moms who follow the blog thus I wanted to pass this along.

Simple Mom is a site that is designed to help "home managers" live simply and stay sane. It's written by moms and the articles are practical and short. Read about green and frugal living, money management, organization, making your home a heavenly haven and MORE!

You can also get the updates on your RSS feed. (Not sure what that is? Let my web guru Lee Lefever tell ya: click here.)

E-Zone Awesomeness Right in Your Home

You've heard of E-Zone, right? YOU HAVEN'T?! Well pull up a seat, dear reader, and lemme tell ya all about this fancy new technology! This is VERY cool and totally addicting! O! And you don't even need to leave your house to get it.

E-Zone is a digital media download site where you can browse, check out, and download best selling digital titles 24/7 to your PC and PDA at home, in the office or from anywhere in the world. And we are talking not only books (both audio and print), but music and movies too! Yay! Oh, did I mention...its FREE!

Using the Ocean State Libraries E-Zone is easy! If you need help, there's a quick guided tour. The guide walks you through the basics, from getting started to downloading to burning to a CD. In just a few minutes, even the newest user can be enjoying a downloaded title.

For more information about E-Zone click here or simply talk with to your nearest (and coolest) reference librarian.

COMING SOON! (On Order Now)

How to Sell by Clancy Martin

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A Canadian in 1987 goes to Texas and gets crushingly corrupted in Martin's sexy, funny and devastating debut. Bobby Clark is 16 when he leaves a dead-end setup with his single mother and grass-is-greener girlfriend, Wendy, and heads to Fort Worth to get into the fine jewelry business under the stewardship of his salesman brother, Jim. In no time, Bobby and Jim are snorting lines, Bobby's moving in on (and smoking crank with) Jim's mistress, Lisa, and getting a crash course in amazingly crooked business. Scams, bait-and-switch deals, bogus jewelry and startling treachery are day-to-day at the jewelry store, until the store's gregarious owner gets into trouble at the same time Bobby tries to save Lisa from a massive flame-out. Years later, Bobby's back in Fort Worth, married to Wendy (and with a child) and still in the jewelry business with Jim when Lisa reappears, engaged in an equally questionable if older profession. Bobby's helplessly honest narration is a sublime counterpoint to the crooked doings he's complicit in. Reading this is like watching one man's American dream turn into a soul-sucking nightmare. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Reviews
“Dirty, greatly original, and very hard to stop reading.”
—Jonathan Franzen

“How to Sell is outrageous, theatrical and slicker than oil. It tells the tale of Bobby Clark, a high-school dropout who joins his older brother at a jewelry emporium in Texas. It's a festival of drugs, diamonds and sex. Quality is nice, but any drugs, any sex and any diamonds will do, because anything can be spun into something better. Prostitution, a saleswoman turned hooker suggests at one point, is a more honest kind of living than the jewelry trade (at least in this book). ‘With what I do now,’ she tells Bobby, ‘I sleep well at night.’ . . . With How to Sell, Martin has written a gem of a story. Selling it probably won't be hard. The bigger challenge for Martin might be to learn how to stop selling.”
—Louisa Thomas, Newsweek

“How to Sell is, with memorably dark comedy, a virtual handbook on fraud. The world the Clark boys build for themselves and teeter precariously upon—one driven by wads of cash, adrenaline, an indiscriminate lust for sex and money, and a misunderstanding of what in life is really at stake—is a compelling setting for Martin’s propulsive storytelling. His narration feels cinematic, the sets and scenery popping off the page. With remarkable skill as the story spools out, Martin omits just enough exposition and interior insights to keep his characters shrouded in mystery, as if constantly reminding us that we’ll always be the customer, never the insider. Speaking of customers, prepare to be a much shrewder one after reading How to Sell.”
—Rachel Rosenblit, Elle

“A timely meditation on greed and the American Dream.”
—Men.style.com

“It’s a lean and mean book, perfect for those who distrust all this recent talk about change. The kind of novel—cool and dark—that goes with you to the beach and then keeps you thinking at night.”
—Benjamin Alsup, Esquire

“Clancy Martin writes with no-nonsense punch, detailing the schemes—fake certificates, ‘antiques’—shady jewelers have been running for centuries. If the sentences in How to Sell feel lived-in, well, that’s because the author himself is a former con man, borrowing liberally from the gem-scam life before going straight (He’s a philosophy professor now; go figure.) By the time you’re hooked on the book’s insidious plot twists, concerning sibling rivalry and a meth-addicted mistress who sleeps better hooking than she does selling Faux-lexes, you’re blissfully unaware you’re downing a metaphor: No commission can buy you a soul.”
—Adam Baer, GQ

“It's hard to imagine a more seductive blurb than that delivered by Jonathan Franzen for Martin's first novel. Here goes: ‘Dirty, greatly original, and very hard to stop reading.’ Sex, of course, may sell, but Martin's wicked take on money, the jewelry business and American passions could prove to have multiple pleasures. Oh, and by the by, Martin teaches philosophy at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and bases his book, at least in part, on an earlier life as a jewelry salesman in Texas.”
—Kansas City Star