The Reader’s Corner

This week I’d like to feature the site Fantastic Fiction. Its colors may be a bit harsh and gaudy, but the site is so full of information you’ll soon not even notice the atrocious design. The site claims to have information on 30,000 authors and 350,000 books and those numbers keep growing. The webmaster regularly updates the website with upcoming new releases, and there are also author profiles, lists of previously published books by a particular author, links to authors websites and much more. The site is also split up into different categories so if you have a favorite genre, you can head straight there and cut out all the other stuff. This is a great place to go if you’re looking to just browse books, see what new books are out or on the horizon, or look up a specific author’s titles. It’s FANTASTIC!

Last weekend, I was shocked to find out that right around the corner (in Burlington, MA) the Shirley Jackson Awards were being presented (as part of a larger conference, Readercon) and I hadn’t heard about it! I hopped right over and attended, and was glad I did. The presenter of the awards, Nalo Hopkinson, was a wonderful speaker and charming woman. and the winners who were present gave excellent speeches. Then I found out that several other speculative fiction awards were given out over the weekend as well. The winners of all are listed below.

Shirley Jackson Awards

• Novel - Big Machine by Victor LaValle
• Novella - Midnight Picnic, by Nick Antosca
• Novelette - “Morality” by Stephen King
• Short Story - “The Pelican Bar” by Karen Joy Fowler
• Collection - Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson and Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical by Robert Shearman (TIE)
• Anthology - Poe by Ellen Datlow

Rhysling Award

• Long Form - “In the Astronaut Asylum,” Kendall Evans and Samantha Henderson
• Short Form - “To Theia,” Ann K. Schwader Grand Master - Jane Yolen

Mythopoeic Award

• Adult Literature - Lifelode by Jo Walton
• Children’s Literature - Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

John W. Campbell Memorial Award

• The Windup Girl Paolo Bacigalupi

Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award

• Shambling Towards Hiroshim James Morrow

A special nod to Science Fiction Awards Watch for many of these listings.

Digging Up The Dead by Michael Kammen

I wanted to like this book, in fact I expected to like this book. I mean, who wouldn’t want to hear bizarre stories of people being dug up and reburied for various reasons? I love sort-of “weird history” books, and this one definitely fit that category. And the actual stories of reburial were brilliant - that of John Trumbull, who was reburied not once, but twice (making total burials 3), and his wife who was reburied once more than he, was quite interesting. Most of the stories were.

For me, however, the format and style of the book - the writing between the stories - detracted and made it hard to read. The author attempted to categorize and group the stories into sections based on some similar quality - those disinterred due to religious or political reasons versus those who were moved due to demands of surviving loved ones for example. This was a good idea, but somehow left me feeling like the stories were more jumbled rather than less. And there was too much “filler” material for me. I would have preferred to have each section of stories have an introduction, an overview of what the stories in that part had in common, or some background to the overarching idea behind those reburials, and then just have each story on its own. Instead, I felt like I was reading a never-ending term paper where the author attempted to integrate all his research into one flowing work.

The amount of research Kammen did for this book is astounding, and it must have been a very interesting journey for him to take. I found most of the accounts fascinating, amusing, sad, entertaining, and educational all at once. If it was just a bit lighter on in-between verbiage and broken up differently, it would have been the perfect book.

The New Dead - a Zombie Anthology edited by Christopher Golden.

Like with many anthologies, this collection had some that hit it out of the park and some that were less successful. There were definitely enough good ones to make it worth reading, though I did find myself a bit “zombie’d-out” after a while (I know - how can a person possibly get too much zombie action?! and yet, I did.) So I broke it up a bit by reading other things in between stories.

Some of my favorites were Lazarus by John Connolly, Second Wind by Mike Carey, Family Business by Jonathan Maberry, and The Zombie Who Fell From The Sky by M.B. Homler. They were all pretty good, interesting, and entertaining reads.

I was disappointed by Joe Hill’s entry, Twittering From The Circus of the Dead, which I expected to love. I think it was the end that failed for me. Among Us by Aimee Bender also fell short for me - I felt it just missed making the point it was trying to make. The Wind Cries Mary by Brian Keene was very lyrical and beautiful, but was missing something as well.

Overall, definitely worth a read-through, even if you skip some stories or certain ones aren’t for you. The great thing is there’s enough diversity that most people (maybe even people who don’t usually read zombie literature) will find at least one story they truly like.

Page Turners is a book blog by Becky in Sydney, Australia. (It seemed appropriate with the heat we’ve been having lately to feature a blog from “down under”).

I was brought to this site by a link for Book Beginnings on Friday, a meme I might actually join and start doing here. I have liked the idea of Teaser Tuesdays for a while now, but I have trouble deciding which sentences to post. With Book Beginning Fridays, that is taken away because you post the first sentence.

Anyways, on to the feature - Becky uses a star rating system in her reviews (explained in the right-hand column of her site), which is something I’ve been trying to integrate here but just have a hard time with. I think it’s helpful to have a star rating so you can tell quickly the overall impression of the book. I just have trouble pinning down exactly how many “stars” to give a book, it feels too much like grading an author’s work which I am in no position to do and I often want to go back and change the number of stars I gave a book several times. So I love that she has managed to implement this star-rating system.

She also has just really fun, interesting posts, participates in many reading challenges, and has a great blogroll. She reviews books from all over, but because of where she lives and a personal pledge to try and support her home country, she reads a lot of Australian fiction so it gives us up here a good look at some books we might otherwise not see highlighted as often.

Thanks, Becky, for a great book blog!

With summer fully underway, lists of best beach reads and summer reading suggestions are cropping up all over. One of the best I’ve found is from a site that, while I have mentioned it before, I haven’t actually featured. So this is a perfect opportunity for me to highlight The Daily Beast and its book section.

What sets the Beast’s summer reading list apart from others (besides the cool way in which it is displayed as a slide show making the covers look extra sexy) is that it features some very different titles I haven’t seen on many other lists. Right off the bat, it gives you Walks With Men by Ann Beattie and then follows it up with Beautiful Maria of My Soul by Oscar Hijuelos. While both of these books have received some good, low-key press, the buzz has been a minimum and as I said, I haven’t seen them on many other lists of summer reads. The list of 12 titles includes many of those we have all heard great hype about (Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Swimming Pool, etc.) as well, but I give it extra bonus points for those titles that make this list stand out from the crowd.

In general, the Daily Beast’s book site, BookBeast, is a great site and I’m glad I have this opportunity to encourage you all to go check it out. It’s got a clean, fresh look with some great content, a combination every website wishes it had. (And, of course, it’s got the really cool name going for it – The Beast. Yeah!)

The library’s closed today for our staff development day - a day where we will hopefully learn something new and exciting about how to better serve you, our patrons. In honor of that, I have decided to present something a little fun AND educational for you this Friday - sites filled with book-related trivia! School may be out for the summer, but that’s no reason to stop learning.

First off, we have Fact Monster. It has a list of some straight-forward book facts for you to read, remember, and use to impress people at your next party. There’s also a whole slew of book information on their site.

Last week’s featured site, book spot, also has a small collection of book trivia that is pretty interesting.

Goodreads has the never-ending book quiz which can be quite entertaining and educational.

The Useful Trivia web site has literary trivia, as well as comic book trivia, and more.

And finally, Fun Trivia has a ton of literature quizzes to test your knowledge and learn with.

So there you are, several sites to get your brain expanding with yummy, yummy book facts and literary tidbits. Knowledge is power!

Summer’s officially here and the new books are heating up! This week’s releases include (click on an image to learn more about a title or to request a book):

I came across this Library Journal article and thought I’d share it to let you know of these great new memoirs:

Down with Summer Reading!: 19 Memoirs for the Recovery Crowd.