You asked–you answered! We crowdsourced a Killam Library suggestion box question about our favorite books of the year, and here’s what we got (click the image to enlarge it). See your own personal fave on the list? Care to add to it? Post your comments, Santa’s watching this blog!
One Book One Province
Libraries Nova Scotia is planning a province-wide reading event for adults to promote a love of reading and “unity reading,” with many people reading and discussing the same book. The One Book One Province project will take place next fall in October 2012, just in time for Canadian Library Month.
Many places have successfully carried out “One Book One City” programs in various sized communities throughout the world. CBC’s Canada Reads program is a broad example of a community reading program for adults. The One Book One Province project actively involves public, university, and community college libraries, as well as the Nova Scotia Provincial Library, the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, and booksellers.
What book should we all read? The chosen book must be:
- written by a living Canadian author
- able to generate discussion and the exchange of ideas
- appealing to a broad range of adult readers of varying ages, literacy levels, and life experience
- in print and available for purchase
- strongly written with compelling story, characters, and setting that will generate excitement among readers
Libraries Nova Scotia needs your help! If you have a suggestion for One Book One Province please submit it using this form.
The survey will be open until December 1st, 2011. May the best book win!
Author Norman Ravvin To Read at Killam
Norman Ravvin, author of the critically acclaimed The Joyful Child (Gaspereau Press, 2011), will be giving a reading from his novel at the Killam Library on October 20. All are welcome!
Norman Ravvin is a fiction writer, critic and journalist. His previous books include the novel Lola by Night (2003), which is also out in Serbian translation; Hidden Canada: An Intimate Travelogue (2001); the novel Café des Westens (1991); and his story collection Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish (1997). 
Norman is the editor of Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories (2001) and Great Stories of the Sea (1999). He is currently working on a novel set in Poland called The Typewriter Girl. Norman has won the Alberta Culture and Multiculturalism New Fiction Award the Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Award, as well as the Toronto Jewish Book Award and Montreal’s J.I. Segal Prize for Literature.
Thursday October 20, 7:30 pm
DUASC Reading Room
5th floor, Killam Library
Dalhousie University
494-3615 for more info
Essay Contest for Book Collectors
We’re sure there are young book collectors among us who will be interested in Canada’s Third National Book Collecting Contest. The National Book Collecting Contest was created by the Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) in 2008 to encourage young Canadians to collect books and study the discipline of researching and writing bibliographies. The contest is open to all Canadian residents under thirty years of age as of the deadline date for submissions. According to the contest page:
The contest requires participants to write a 1,500 to 2,000-word essay on their collection, including where appropriate, the description of the books: binding, cover decoration, illustrations, and bibliographical features such as format, printing, and publication data. Example collections include children’s books, illustrated books, artists books, flip books, Arthurian legend, Generation X, eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, serial fiction, graphic novels, a single author, cookbooks, modern authors, travel, experimental poetry, little magazines, etc. The essay may be written in French or English.
The collection must be owned and collected by the contestant. Entries must be postmarked no later than 5 March 2012. Check the contest page for more details or download this poster [PDF].
Is a Bookless Library Still a Library?
With libraries (including us) increasingly going digital, the whole definition of “library” is up for grabs.
Read this article in today’s Time and tell us how YOU feel about “life beyond the book!”
Book of the Week: A History of Modern Libya
Dirk J. Vandewalle, A History of Modern Libya. Cambridge University Press, 2006
“…For most of the three decades following Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi’s self-styled revolution in 1969, Libya was politically isolated and labelled a pariah state. Dirk Vandewalle, one of only a handful of Western scholars to visit the country during this time, is intimately acquainted with Libya. He offers a lucid and comprehensive account of Libya’s past, and corrects some of the misunderstandings about its present … As the first comprehensive history of Libya over the last two decades, this book will be welcomed by scholars and students of North Africa, the Middle East, and by those who are visiting and doing business in the region. “ Excerpted from the publisher description
Ebooks. Print Books. What’s Your Preference?
The latest issue of the Dal Gazette features a lead article on the Dal Libraries quarter-of-a-million-and-growing electronic book collection. Reading books online is becoming increasingly the norm–it’s great to be able to access what you want when you want it, no matter where you are. But there are issues with ebooks. The vendors from whom we buy them often place restrictions on how many people can access an ebook at one time, or on how much of the ebook can be printed off.
How do you you feel about electronic versus print books?
Book of the Week: The Night Shift
The Night Shift : Real Life in the Heart of the ER
Dr. Brian Goldman is both an emergency room physician at Mount Sinai and a prominent medical journalist. Never one to shy away from controversy, Goldman specializes in kicking open the doors to the medical establishment, revealing what really goes on behind the scenes — and in the minds of doctors and nurses.
In The Night Shift, Goldman shares his experiences in the witching hours at Mount Sinai Hospital in downtown Toronto. We meet the kinds of patients who walk into an ER after midnight: late-night revellers injured on their way home after last call, teens assaulted in the streets by other teens and a woman who punches another woman out of jealousy over a man. But Goldman also reveals the emotional, heartbreaking side of everyday ER visits: adult children forced to make life and death decisions about critically ill parents, victims of sexual assault, and mentally ill and homeless patients looking for understanding and a quick fix in the twenty-four-hour waiting room.
Written with Goldman’s trademark honesty and with surprising humour, The Night Shift is also a frank look at many issues facing the medical profession today, and offers a highly compelling inside view into an often shrouded world.
Book of the Week: Ape House
When a family of bonobo apes who know American Sign Language are kidnapped from a language lab, their mysterious appearance on a reality TV show propels scientist Isabel Duncan, together with reporter John Thigpen, on a personal mission to rescue them. An entertaining book that calls into question our assumptions about these animals who share 99.4% of our DNA.
Sara Gruen, Ape House: A Novel. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010
Book of the Week: Gifts From the Heart
Subtitled “Simple Ways To Make Your Family’s Christmas More Meaningful, “ this book by Virginia Brucker offers a myriad of down-to earth ways to enjoy Christmas as it’s meant to be enjoyed. Chapter titles include “Handmade With Love,’ “Gifts from the Kitchen,” “An Animal Lover’s Christmas” and “The Gift of Imagination”—you get the picture. Happy holidays everyone!