New York Times Notable Books of 2013: Fiction & Poetry

Notable fiction and poetry selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

Notable fiction and poetry selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates (audio download, eBook)
Oates’s extravagantly horrifying, funny and prolix postmodern Gothic novel purports to be the definitive account of a curse that infected bucolic Princeton, N.J., in 1905 and 1906.

All That Is by James Salter
Salter’s first novel in more than 30 years, which follows the loves and losses of a World War II veteran, is an ambitious departure from his previous work and, at a stroke, demolishes any talk of twilight.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (eBook)
This witheringly trenchant novel scrutinizes blackness in America, Nigeria and Britain.

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
Airliners crash not only into the twin towers but into a shaggy-dog tale involving a fraud investigator and a white-collar outlaw in this vital, audacious novel.

Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse by Edward Hoagland
The adventure-seeking protagonist of Hoagland’s novel is swept up in the chaos of southern Sudan.

The Circle by Dave Eggers
In a disturbing not-too-distant future, human existence flows through the portal of a company that gives Eggers’s novel its title.

Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat
Danticat’s novel is less about a Haitian girl who disappears on her birthday than about the heart of a magical seaside village.

The Color Master: Stories by Aimee Bender
Physical objects help Bender’s characters grasp an overwhelming world.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (eBook)
Odds against survival are high for the characters of Marra’s extraordinary first novel, set in war-torn Chechnya.

The Dinner by Herman Koch (audio download, CD book, large print book)
In this clever, dark Dutch novel, two couples dine out under the cloud of a terrible crime committed by their teenage sons.

Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III
Four linked stories expose their characters’ bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses.

Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem
Spanning 80 years and three generations, Lethem’s novel realistically portrays an enchanted — or disenchanted — garden of American leftists in Queens.

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (CD book)
Now grown up, Danny, the boy with psycho-intuitive powers in “The Shining,” helps another threatened magic child in a novel that shares the virtues of King’s best work.

Duplex by Kathryn Davis
A schoolteacher takes an unusual lover in this astonishing, double-hinged novel set in a fantastical suburbia.

The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver (eBook)
A summer house on the Massachusetts coast both shelters and isolates the wealthy family in Graver’s eloquent multigenerational novel.

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
In Kushner’s frequently dazzling second novel, an impressionable artist navigates the volatile worlds of New York and Rome in the 1970s.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (CD book)
The “Goldfinch” of the title of Tartt’s smartly written Dickensian novel is a painting smuggled through the early years of a boy’s life — his prize, his guilt and his burden.

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
McBride’s romp of a novel, the 2013 National Book Award winner, is narrated by a freed slave boy who passes as a girl. It’s a risky portrait of the radical abolitionist John Brown in which irreverence becomes a new form of ­homage.

A Guide to Being Born: Stories by Ramona Ausubel
Ausubel’s fantastical collection traces a cycle of transformation: from love to conception to gestation to birth.

Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal
In Segal’s darkly comic novel, dementia becomes contagious at a Manhattan hospital.

I Want to Show You More: Stories by Jamie Quatro
Quatro’s strange, thrilling and disarmingly honest first collection draws from a pool of resonant themes (Christianity, marital infidelity, cancer, running) in agile ­recombinations.

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer (eBook)
A distraught woman inhabits different selves across the 20th century in Greer’s elegiac novel.

The Infatuations by Javier Marías
Amid a proliferation of alternative perspectives, Marías’s novel explores its female narrator’s relationship with the widow and the best friend of a murdered man.

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer (audio download, CD book, eBook, large print book)
Wolitzer’s enveloping novel offers a fresh take on the theme of self-invention, with a heroine who asks herself whether the ambitious men and women in her circle have inaccurately defined success.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (audio download, CD book, large print book)
Atkinson’s heroine, born in 1910, keeps dying and dying again, as she experiences the alternate courses her destiny might have taken.

Local Souls: Novellas by Allan Gurganus
This triptych, set in Gurganus’s familiar Falls, N.C., showcases the increasing universality of his imaginative powers.

Longbourn by Jo Baker (CD book, large print book)
Baker’s charming novel offers an affecting look at the world of “Pride and Prejudice” from the point of view of the Bennets’ servants’ hall.

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff
Rakoff completed his novel-in-couplets, whose characters live the title’s verbs, just before his death in 2012.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (CD book, large print book)
After his radical brother is killed, an Indian scientist brings his widow to join him in America in Lahiri’s efficiently written novel.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
In her Booker Prize winner, a love story and mystery set in New Zealand, Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, while creating something utterly new for the 21st.

Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood
The survivors of “Oryx and Crake” and “The Year of the Flood” await a final showdown, in a trilogy’s concluding entry.

A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik (audio download)
Maksik’s forceful novel illuminates the life of a Liberian woman who flees her troubled past to seek refuge on an Aegean island.

Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart
To immerse oneself in these poems is to enter a crowd of unusual characters: artistic geniuses, violent misfits, dramatic self-accusers (including the poet himself).

Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy
In these emotionally charged and gorgeously constructed poems, Shaughnessy imagines a world without a child’s pain.

Schroder by Amity Gaige
In Gaige’s scenic novel, a man with a long-established false identity goes on the run with his 6-year-old daughter.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (CD book, large print book)
In this winning novel by the author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” a botanist’s hunger for explanations carries her through the better part of Darwin’s century, and to Tahiti.

Someone by Alice McDermott (CD book)
Through scattered recollections, this novel sifts the significance of an ordinary life.

The Son by Philipp Meyer (audio download, eBook)
Members of a Texas clan grope their way from the ordeals of the frontier to celebrity culture’s absurdities in this masterly multigenerational saga.

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
This gripping Colombian novel, built on the country’s tragic history with the drug trade, meditates on love, fate and death.

Submergence by J.M. Ledgard
This hard-edged, well-written novel involves a terrorist hostage-taking and a perilous deep-sea dive.

Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush
Amid dark humor both mournful and absurd, former classmates converge on the hilltop estate of a friend who has died in a freak accident.

Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders (audio download, CD book, eBook)
Saunders’s relentless humor and beatific generosity of spirit keep his highly moral tales from succumbing to life’s darker aspects.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis (audio download, CD book, eBook,)
Mathis’s deeply felt first novel works at the rough edges of history, within a brutal and poetic allegory of a black family beset by tribulations after the Great Migration to the North.

The Two Hotel Francforts by David Leavitt
In Leavitt’s atmospheric novel of 1940 Lisbon, as two couples await passage to New York, the husbands embark on an affair.

The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan (CD book, large print book)
This wrenching novel by the author of “The Joy Luck Club” follows mother and daughter courtesans over four decades.

Want Not by Jonathan Miles
Linking disparate characters and story threads, Miles’s novel explores varieties of waste and decay in a consumer world.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (audio download)
This surreptitiously smart novel’s big reveal slyly recalls a tabloid headline: “Girl and Chimp Twinned at Birth in Psychological ­Experiment.”

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (audio download)
A Zimbabwean moves to Detroit in Bulawayo’s striking first novel.

Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel
Maazel’s restlessly antic novel examines the concurrent urges for solitude and intimacy.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud (audio download, CD book, eBook)
Messud’s ingenious, disquieting novel of outsize conflicts tells the story of a thwarted artist who finds herself bewitched by a boy and his parents.

 

Letter from the Director

Dear Residents,
The trend is clear: our lifestyles have shifted from stationary to mobile; from home and hearth to wheels and web. Your librarians see this change as a terrific opportunity to extend our programs and resources in new ways. On November 1, we launched our first Apple and Android-compatible app. From your phone, tablet, or other mobile device you will have easy access to collections, downloads, program registration, room bookings, and so much more.

Dear Residents,
The trend is clear: our lifestyles have shifted from stationary to mobile; from home and hearth to wheels and web. Your librarians see this change as a terrific opportunity to extend our programs and resources in new ways. On November 1, we launched our first Apple and Android-compatible app. From your phone, tablet, or other mobile device you will have easy access to collections, downloads, program registration, room bookings, and so much more.

Meanwhile, traditional services remain. In September, we introduced Bouncing Babies for the little ones and new library cards with a key tag for your convenience. Every day the librarians teach community members how to use new gadgets and online resources. Look for a new detailed list of Instructional Services, and call for an appointment or stop by when you have a few minutes. We will be happy to assist. For those planning a trip this holiday season, bring your tablets and we will fill them up with free eBooks for the whole family.

If your plans this holiday include a visit to a museum, then reserve a museum pass by calling an Information Services Librarian at (631) 692-6820.

Our downloadable products just got much bigger. Countywide, we have once again increased the eBook budget and added the 3M eBook product, in addition to our Live-brary and RBdigital collections. From our homepage at www.cshlibrary.org, select “Download eBooks, Video, Music & Audiobooks,” download the app to your device, and enter your barcode or username to access the collection. To date, over 850 community members are using this free service. Join today!

This holiday season, we are pleased to be a U.S. Marine Corps Toys for Tots drop-off location. When you visit the library, please bring a new, unwrapped toy for a needy child on Long Island. This act of generosity will bring joy to both the giver and receiver.

Best wishes for a happy and healthy New Year!

Remembering John F. Kennedy

November 22 is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

November 22 is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy Gravesite

ONLINE RESOURCES

PBS: Remembering President John F. Kennedy, 50 years after assassination

C-SPAN: Coverage of the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum: November 22, 1963: Death of the President

National Archives: The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

NONFICTION

Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek (large print)

Capturing Camelot: Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the Kennedys by Kitty Kelley

Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio & Steven L. Davis

Five Days in November by Clint Hill

If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History by Jeff Greenfield

Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero by Chris Matthews

JFK in the Senate: Pathway to the Presidency by John T. Shaw

JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President by Thurston Clarke

The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy by Larry J. Sabato

The Letters of John F. Kennedy edited by Martin W. Sandler

Mrs. Paine’s Garage: And the Murder of John F. Kennedy by Thomas Mallon

November 22, 1963: Ordinary and Extraordinary People Recall Their Reactions When They Heard the News compiled by Jodie Elliott Hansen & edited by Laura Hansen

Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy

Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi

These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie by Christopher Andersen

FICTION

11/22/63 by Stephen King (CD book, large print book, MP3 CD book)
High-school English teacher Jake Epping is enlisted by a friend to travel back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a mission for which he must reacclimate to 1960s culture and befriend troubled loner Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Importance of Being Kennedy by Laurie Graham
Becoming a servant for the Kennedys shortly after arriving in America from Ireland, young Nora Brennan is given charge of the family’s nine children, whom she offers solace from their harsh mother, their distant father, and the prying public.

Jack 1939 by Francine Mathews
Tapped by President Franklin Roosevelt to travel to Europe and learn what the Nazis are planning, 22-year-old John F. Kennedy, son of the U.S. ambassador to Britain, joins the president’s efforts to stop the flow of German money that is influencing the 1940 U.S. election.

Shift by Tim Kring & Dale Peck
Chandler Forrestal is drawn into a CIA experiment where a dose of LSD heightens his mental abilities, allowing him to uncover the plot to assassinate President Kennedy and resulting in a cross-country chase to change history.

The Third Bullet: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel by Stephen Hunter
A reimagining of the events surrounding the 1963 assassination of Kennedy finds Bob Lee Swagger drawing on old records, intelligence archives, and observations at the infamous site to investigate a new clue about a third bullet that mysteriously exploded.

Top Down: A Novel of the Kennedy Assassination by Jim Lehrer
A Secret Service agent who made the fateful decision to remove the security bubble from John F. Kennedy’s parade car struggles with suicidal feelings of guilt until a young reporter endeavors to determine the day’s outcome if the bubbletop had been in place.

Happy Halloween!

Celebrate Halloween with a scary movie!

Celebrate Halloween with a scary movie!

The Amityville Horror (1979)

The Amityville Horror (2005)

The Birds

The Blair Witch Project

The Cabin in the Woods

Carrie

Cloverfield

The Conjuring

The Crazies

Dark Water

Darkness

Dawn of the Dead

Dead Silence

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

The Exorcism of Emily Rose

The Exorcist

Eyes Without a Face

1408

Friday the 13th (1980)

Friday the 13th (2009)

Fright Night

The Grudge

Halloween

The Haunting in Connecticut

The Hills Have Eyes

House of Wax (1953)

House of Wax (2005)

The Innkeepers

Insidious

The Invisible Man

Jaws

The Last Exorcism

The Last House on the Left

Let Me In

Let the Right One In

Magic

Mama

The Messengers

Mirrors

The Mist

My Bloody Valentine

The New Daughter

Night of the Living Dead

A Nightmare on Elm Street

The Omen

Orphan

The Orphanage

The Others

P2

Paranormal Activity

Poltergeist

The Possession

Quarantine

The Ring

Ringu

The Rite

Rosemary’s Baby

The Ruins

Shutter

Silent Hill

Sinister

The Skeleton Key

Sorority Row

Stay Alive

The Strangers

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The Thing

30 Days of Night

The Uninvited

Vacancy

Vampyr

White Noise

Wolf Creek

The Wolfman

The Woman in Black

Skulls

Or, enjoy a book about the paranormal and supernatural!

National Book Award Finalists 2013

The mission of the National Book Foundation and the National Book Awards is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America. The 2013 Finalists are:

The mission of the National Book Foundation and the National Book Awards is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America. The 2013 Finalists are:

FICTION

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (CD book)

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Tenth of December by George Saunders (audio download, CD book, eBook)

The FlamethrowersThe LowlandThe Good Lord BirdBleeding Egde Tenth of December

NONFICTION

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore

Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields by Wendy Lower

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer (audio download)

The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 by Alan Taylor

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright (eBook)

Book of Ages Hitler's FuriesThe UnwindingThe Internal EnemyGoing Clear

Banned Books Week 2013

September 22-28 is Banned Books Week! Celebrate the Freedom to Read with one of the banned and/or challenged books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century:

Banned Books Week 2013

September 22-28 is Banned Books Week! Celebrate the Freedom to Read with one of the banned and/or challenged books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century:

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (audio download, CD book, large print book)

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (CD book)

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (CD book)

The Color Purple by Alice Walker (audio download, eBook)

Ulysses by James Joyce (audio download, eBook)

Beloved by Toni Morrison (eBook)

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding (CD book, Playaway)

1984 by George Orwell (CD book, eBook)

Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov (audio download, CD book, eBook)

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (audio download)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (Playaway)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (audio download, eBook, CD book)

Animal Farm by George Orwell (audio download, eBook, Playaway)

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (CD book)

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (eBook)

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (CD book, eBook)

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (eBook)

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (eBook)

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (CD book)

Native Son by Richard Wright

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (CD book)

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (CD book, eBook)

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (Playaway)

The Call of the Wild by Jack London (audio download, CD book)

Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (CD book)

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (audio download, eBook)

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (audio download, Playaway)

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

The Awakening by Kate Chopin (audio download, CD book)

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (CD book)

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (audio download, eBook)

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron (eBook)

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence (audio download)

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (CD book, eBook)

A Separate Peace by John Knowles (Playaway)

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs (audio download)

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (audio download, CD book)

Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence (audio download)

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (audio download, CD book)

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

Rabbit, Run by John Updike (audio download)

 

Man Booker Prize Shortlist 2013

The Man Booker Prize 2013 shortlist has been announced! The six books shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize are:

The Man Booker Prize 2013 shortlist has been announced! The six books shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize are:

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (downloadable audiobook)

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Harvest by Jim Crace

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

The Man Booker Prize aims to promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The winner will be announced on October 15.

Letter from the Director

Dear Residents,
The weathermen sure can predict a heat wave, and this summer has been a record breaker.

Fortunately, it’s also been a record breaker in your library’s Children’s Room. The librarians predicted the “Dig Into Reading” program would be a success, and they were right. This summer, hundreds of children read thousands of pages; plus, they learned about our natural world of wonder found all around us in the air, land, and water.

Dear Residents,
The weathermen sure can predict a heat wave, and this summer has been a record breaker.

Fortunately, it’s also been a record breaker in your library’s Children’s Room. The librarians predicted the “Dig Into Reading” program would be a success, and they were right. This summer, hundreds of children read thousands of pages; plus, they learned about our natural world of wonder found all around us in the air, land, and water.

Adults joined the fun this summer too, with a virtual book review program and meet-up to share stories. If you like writing brief reviews, please let the Information Services librarians show you how we can all share our favorite authors, characters, and stories all year long.

Please plan to attend an extra-special event on October 20, when we’ll meet our friends and neighbors to learn about their outreach efforts in Haiti. See page 5 of the September/October newsletter for more details.

We are introducing a couple of new programs this fall. Teens’ Night Out begins on October 11. This new event on Friday nights will allow our teens a chance to gather in a social setting and participate in really cool projects. For details, call Miss Kate. Our little ones enjoy the blocks, puzzles, and other toys in the Children’s Room, and we have now added a Bouncing Babies Storytime for children ages birth-13 months that will be led by Miss Diane on Mondays.

During the school year, parents and students juggle schedules filled with study time and extracurricular activities. Your library has 24/7 access to many resources to help you earn an A+. Visit www.cshlibrary.org and click on “Online Resources” or download our mobile app, which will launch later this year.

Meanwhile, the next time you stop by, pick up your new digital library card, and let our helpful Circulation Staff show you how to update your account, add a username, receive text alerts, or even keep track of your reading history.

2013 PEN Literary Award Winners

PEN America announced the winners of the 2013 PEN Literary Awards, the most comprehensive literary awards program in the country.

PEN America announced the winners of the 2013 PEN Literary Awards, the most comprehensive literary awards program in the country.

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize: To an author whose debut work — a first novel or collection of short stories published in 2012 — represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.
Winner: A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava

PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction: To an author of a distinguished book of general nonfiction possessing notable literary merit and critical perspective and illuminating important contemporary issues which has been published in the United States during 2011 or 2012.
Winner: Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (downloadable audiobook, eBook)

PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay: For a book of essays published in 2012 that exemplifies the dignity and esteem that the essay form imparts to literature.
Winner: What Light Can Do by Robert Hass

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award: For a book of literary nonfiction on the subject of the physical or biological sciences published in 2012.
Winner: Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow

PEN Open Book Award: For an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color published in 2012.
Winners: Gun Dealers’ Daughter by Gina Apostol & The Grey Album by Kevin Young

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography: For a distinguished biography published in 2012.
Winner: The Black Count by Tom Reiss (downloadable audiobook, eBook)

PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing: To honor a nonfiction book on the subject of sports published in 2012.
Winner: Over Time by Frank Deford

PEN Translation Prize: For a book-length translation of prose into English published in 2012.
Winner: The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen, translated from the German by Donald O. White

Letter from the Director

Dear Residents,
Your public library is the one place with something for everyone. From toddler time to yoga, best sellers to eBooks, tax forms to homework help, rooms for group meetings to rooms for art, music, films, and lectures, your free library card is the key.

Dear Residents,
Your public library is the one place with something for everyone. From toddler time to yoga, best sellers to eBooks, tax forms to homework help, rooms for group meetings to rooms for art, music, films, and lectures, your free library card is the key.

Getting a library card has never been easier; just visit our website and click on “Apply Online” to complete a brief application. You will instantly be assigned a library card and immediately have access to free eBooks for your iPad, Kindle, or other eReader. If you need assistance, all the librarians are ready to offer one-on-one guidance, either in-person or over the phone. They have also produced step-by-step directions that are available on our website.

Every day, your Children’s Librarians introduce little ones to the wonder of words, stories, crafts, games, and group play. Add our daily children’s activities to your “to-do” list. Visit the Community Events Calendar on our website or see our newsletter for details.

For adults, we offer daytime and evening book discussions, cooking classes, special guest lectures, and concerts. All of our programs may be found on the Community Events Calendar on our website.

There will be a few changes at the library. Coming soon will be key tag library cards featuring our new logo. We know how popular key tags are, and we hope you will attach this new card to your key chain and carry it with pride. There will also be a free mobile phone app available from iTunes. It will be compatible with all mobile devices and will make accessing our programs and services very convenient. Over the last six months, over 1,000 iPads or other portable devices connected to the WiFi network at the library each month, and soon you will be able to print from your wireless device to a central printer in the Reference Room.

Your school district and public library continue to develop a strong partnership. During the 2012-13 school year, our librarians led several workshops for teachers and students to demonstrate the depth and value of traditional and online resources. We hosted student artwork and science posters, welcomed elementary school visits, and answered thousands of questions about homework assignments asked by both parents and students.

Look for the annual CSH Lions Club Fishing Derby on Saturday, September 21. Take a chance on a kayak. A portion of the proceeds from the Fishing Derby enables Children’s Department programs. We are very grateful for this ongoing support.